Andrew Schelling

review of
Bombay Gin 37.1
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 14, 2011

One of the things that I still respect about Naropa University, despite its being, to a certain extent, a 'religious' institution, is the creative diversity potential that it nurtures - perhaps esp thru "Bombay Gin", its literary (etc..) journal. This issue, one of my favorites of the many that I've read so far, exemplifies what I'm referring to. Despite certain key absences in its scholarliness re the 'man-of-the-issue', Harry Smith, its overall quality is far from uneven - it's generally, IMO, excellent.

Aside from the obvious thing of my ongoing liking of the work of my girlfriend Amy Catanzano - as represented here by her poem "Sparticles . . ." - some highlights in this issue, for me, are the interview w/ Steven Taylor, Janna Plant's poetry, the interview w/ Julia Seko, & a transcription of a Naropa speech by Anne Tardos - but there's so much more.

Steven Taylor once again impresses me as someone w/ a sharp mind: well-informed & capable of presenting what he's well-informed about in an exceptionally clear-headed manner. He's also the one who discusses Harry Smith's films - a subject that's largely lacking from the rest of the issue. For me, it's an editorial shortcoming to so heavily structure this issue around the Anthology of American Folk Music that Smith edited for Folkways Records while largely ignoring his filmmaking. After all, his filmmaking was his original work, while the curating was something that he was very good at but not necessarily what he was most original at.

Taylor also adds some realism that I think is quite important for a well-rounded impression of Smith. EG: on p70, Taylor reminisces: "He had finished building his headdress, and I went in and his beard was covered with gold and silver spray paint. He had an inflated paper bag in his hand, and he said, "Don't let anyone tell you this shit rots your brains!" He was stoned out of his mind on solvents." Right. It's important for people to understand that Smith's substantial brilliance also might've come w/ substantial irresponsibility. As a person who grew up in an era where huffing "dope" (model airplane glue) was common, as a person who's seen the extremely damaging & permanent effects of huffing lighter fluid, & as a person who's seen the destructive effects of many ways of 'getting high' on many, many people, Smith's use of solvents to get high is a very, VERY bad example for the naive.

Smith brings us to a conundrum of the 'underground': In a society where dominant institutions often only support myopic & mind-contracting culture b/c it serves the economic interests of ruling elites an alternative economy is called for in order to support a reprioritizing of cultural purpose. The 'underground', wch I certainly consider myself to be a part of, has had the drug economy, the food economy, the publishing economy, the music economy, the alternative energy economy - all of them justifiable in relation to central philosophical concerns. Nonetheless, this society can only support people like Harry Smith in a haphazard way.

Smith was an important musicologist, an important filmmaker, perhaps an important occult scholar - but he was too 'lunatic fringe' to be protected from having his archive thrown out by an unsympathetic landlord. While, to me, the landlord is despicable, I have to assign some responsibility to Smith too. Smith, like Franz Kamin (who I just made a documentary about) doesn't seem to've ever come to terms w/ the need to be more practical more often. His reliance on the support of the people who understood the significance of his talents & interests seems to've been insufficiently counterbalanced by an ability to interface w/ the world that did not understand. As I was so fond of saying, back in the day when I was a renter: "I hate money but my landlady loves it." In other words, whether we like it or not, we don't only live in a world where expanding one's consciousness is the highest priority for everyone who's going to have an impact on our lives. I think an essay on this subject, perhaps bringing up Jack Smith too (no immediate relation to Harry Smith that I know of), might've been an important addition to this Bombay Gin.

But enuf of this criticality on my part. THIS ISSUE OF Bombay Gin IS NOT TO BE MISSED by any reader even remotely interested in what Naropa has to offer: a pluralistic & open-minded sampling of grassroots alternative culture, some experimental, some not. Whether Daniel Staniforth's "Wolf Song Transcriptions" are accurate or not I wdn't know - but I'm happy just to see them in print as a potential knowledge base that goes beyond human-centrism. The quantity of musical notation in the issue is marvelous. Just having the score to Ed Sanders' use of Charles Olson's poetry in the Fugs song "I Want to Know" is enuf to make me happy.

& then there's Anne Tardos. I was on friendly terms w/ Jackson Mac Low, her partner of many yrs, & had the opportunity to briefly meet Tardos thru Jackson at a huge John Cage event in 1989. I've been curious about her work ever since but haven't run across it very much. FINALLY, I get the chance to learn more about it. This was another treat. Her polylingual writing particularly intrigues me.

& Janna Plant? I don't recall being previously familiar w/ her but I'll definitely read a bk by her if I ever find one. Her "Language is a Living and Dying Organism", by virtue of having so many of the phrases in quotes, seems like a hypertext of links that're deliberately ambiguously implied rather than actually linked - an excellent evocativeness most often found in poetry.

& Julia Seko? Having had the pleasure of meeting her at Naropa last yr I can honestly say that she's an exemplar of positive enthusiasm. Julia's called a "Printer's Devil and Shop Rat" in the title to the interview w/ her & those words alone both reveal the lingo & the humor that metaphorically imbue her personality. As long as Naropa has people like Julia on the staff, Naropa will continue to be supportive of a variety of intelligences that other universities might feel discomfort w/. Seko is intimately tied in w/ mail art & small press - 2 things mostly overlooked by less sensitive academias - 2 things essential to experience w/ a repurposing of culture away from capitalism.

Hurrah!
… (más)

Ok, this is the 5th issue of Bombay Gin that I've read & reviewed. Jump cut ahead from 2000 (the time of the last issue I wrote about) to 2010: the most recent issue as of this writing. This is the "Twenty Years of Eco-Lit" issue.

I've been feeling this tension between being a critic of BG & a champion of it (&, by extension both the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics & the Naropa Institute that houses it). I've had a long-standing respect for Naropa & its Disembodied Poetics.. &, yet, I've found the literary journal a bit lacking in innovative thinking. Then it struck me: what's also lacking is a sense of humor. Having sd that, I'll be happily contradicting it later in this review.

The 'last straw' was reading this in the "Editor's Note":

"In 1989, back before most international universities or North American colleges had figured out anything like a recycling program, Jack Collom taught his first Eco-Lit course at Naropa [..:]".

This immediately roused my suspicions of its being somewhat unscrupulous posing. Given that I was born in 1953 & was therefore in my mid 30s in 1989, I'm well aware that '89 was hardly a time when doing ANYTHING ecologically-midful cd be considered precocious! By 1980, eg, the 1st issue of "Energy Comics" was out &, by December 22, 1987, Vol. III, No. II of Earth First!'s substantial newspaper was out. Consider this entry re 19 yrs before 1989 from an online "History of Recycling" {]:

1970

* The enactment of the Clean Air Act leads to the closing of many incinerators.
* The first Earth Day focuses attention on environmental concerns. Recycling’s chasing arrows logo is introduced on that day.
* The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is created.
* Congress passes the Resource Recovery Act. It shifts the emphasis of federal involvement from disposal to recycling, resource recovery, and waste-to-energy.
* There are an estimated 15,000 authorized land disposal sites, but as many as 10 times that number of unauthorized dumps. A study in the mid-1970s states that 94 percent of the landfills surveyed did not meet the minimum requirement for a sanitary landfill.

SO the claim for Naropa's being somehow a leading force here via Collom seems a little strained. Furthermore, on the subject of Universities & recycling programs, consider this:

"In 1971, Western Washington University became one of the first universities in the United States to have a campus recycling program. The A.S. Recycle Center continues to be unique among its kind: it's student - run!"

[]

In other words, I was getting irritated by what seemed like shameless, & inaccurate, self-promotion for Naropa & Collom IN ADDITION to a lack of innovation & humor in Bombay Gin. THEN I read the interview w/ Jack Collom &, Lo & Behold!, not only was I impressed by his erudtion, his sense of fair-play & history, but also by his SENSE OF HUMOR &, later - while reading some of his texts - somewhat by his innovativeness. What a fucking relief!

Collom saved my positive perception of Bombay Gin AND Naropa for me not only in his interview but also in his "Address to the Boulder City Council" re reducing pollution in a local reservoir, & in his "1989 Preface to the First Installment of Jack Collom's Eco-Lit Course".

But here comes the rub, again: For me, eco-activism centers around a concern for counteracting the degradation of a complex ecosystem by simple-minded & insensitive humanocentric greed & exploitation - to put it, perhaps, too simply. As such, the type of eco-lit that I find most useful is the type that I expect to be most effective toward that goal - exposés of abuses, practical plans for non-polluting biodiversity, detailed observations of environments increasingly ignored by the eco-alienated. So where does poetry fit in? For me, for eco-activism, NOWHERE.

The works of Collom that I like the most are all practical & direct. The interview informs, the letter addresses those in political power, the preface spells out history & intentions. Then we get to the eco-poetry: I enjoyed Bataan Faigao's "DEM BONES" poem re harmful man-made things that get into the bones, eg - but I wd've preferred just straight-forward info about these things to the poetic playing w/ reference to them. & then some of the poems, while they made reference to nature, hardly seem THAT distinguished in an ecological way to be designated as eco-lit. But back to this matter later.

I like the way the newer issues of BG are divided into "NEW WRITING: PROSE", & ending w/ a transcription from the Naropa Audio Archives followed by bk reviews followed by CONTRIBUTOR bios.

The prose? I'm starting to get familiar w/ Bobbie Louise Hawkins' work thru BG. In this issue, I started to absolutely dislike it. In "The Virtues of Gossip"? Hawkins claims that:

"Gossip straightens the social fabric. It bypasses the modified speech we've learned by being "social."

"Like everything, gossip has degrees of talent. A talented gossiper leaves us "informed" [..:]"

& then later:

"What's good about gossip is exactly what's bad about it, it's where the walls fade, where propriety means less, and its where truths get told [..:]"

Oh, really? I take issue w/ this. I think gossip is often where the envious back-stab the envied in completely unscrupulous ways. 'Truth', as is so often the case, is mixed w/ fiction & rumor & viciousness to create a hateful & ridiculing atmosphere the origin of wch is hidden from public view - so that the offended party is ill-equipped to fight a fair battle against it.

Aside from this, I find Hawkins' prose to be competently lacklustre & uninspired. Her complaining about her ex-husband just seems petty - if he was such a shit, why'd you marry him?

FORTUNATELY, Bhanu Kapil's excerpts from a forthcoming bk entitled Schizophrene are a completely different ball'o'wax. From her "PASSIVE NOTES": "the high incidence of schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities" is something that I'd like to read more about. It INTERESTS me & Kapil's claim that ""Reverse migration...." Is psychotic" interests me. I look forward to reading more.

But then the prose veers back to a weird whining misery slumming: Dominique Aurilla Vargas' "Woman's Work" where we get unredeemed wallowing. Might I suggest reading Cormac McCarthy's GREAT "Suttree" instead? I don't know McCarthy's personal history but "Suttree" seems to describe poverty from an insider's perspective & HE HAS A SENSE OF HUMOR that radiates: ALL IS NOT LOST even when death & despair seem to prevail. Vargas's "Woman's Work" seems written by someone who tries to create a realistic look at human decay but only degrades it thru fictional stereotypes DISGUISED as 'realism' instead. But maybe I'm being too harsh.

Hoa Nguyen's eco-lit strikes me as another example of poetry that's not likely to do anything but (not-exactly-)'preach' to the converted. Take this beginning of "PRAIRIE NOTES":

"Post Oak Savannah
Endangered Blackland
Prairie---4th most
threatened region
Tall grass continuum
Past tense sentences"

Ok, we have a minimal statement re a threatened environment that only a poet cd love. What possible advantage to THE ENVIRONMENT ITSELF cd such a poem be?! Another poet, or a non-poet reader of poetry, reads this & thinks, what? - something like: "the savannah, the blackland, the prairie is endangered, is threatened w/ becoming something only referred to in past-tense sentences." So what? Does the reader then DO something about the problem b/c they're so moved by the poem?! I doubt it. Either the reader of the poetry is already aware of the situation & already inclined to do something about it or they'll most likely just find the minimalism (or conciseness or elegance) of the poem pleasing.. - &, then, go back to whatever they're doing. In other words: I find such poetry completely ineffectual as a device for catalyzing change. Sorry. I know I'm not making any friends here.

Regardless of my criticisms, such eco-lit is STILL better than anything I'm doing ecologically b/c I do close to nothing other than recycle & what-not.

Then we come to Eleni Sikelianos' "A talk from CONTEMPLATIVE POETHICS: Endangered Species and Imagination" from the Naropa Audio Archives. 1st, a plug: these archives consist of thousands of hrs of audio recordings of people talking & reading at Naropa. THESE ARCHIVES ARE IMPORTANT & ARE NOT BEING SAVED QUICKLY ENUF. At least some of them are on the Internet Archive: Thank the holy ceiling light (or fireflies) for that!

In Sikelianos' highly erudite talk [rendered here in a suspiciously non-transcriptive literary manner:] she asks the very interesting question:

"What is my poem's carbon footprint?"

& makes the somewhat poetically traditional but still articulate & facinating claim that:

"In the economy of the poem, a cardinal is a flying tulip."

She says that:

"According to Canadian anthropologist Hugh Brody, most hunter-gatherer languages don't have categorical words, like fish or tree; they have specific words, like trout, salmon, perch, elm, maple, aspen"

I find this, & most of Sikelianos' talk, to be extremely thought-provoking - & it's this sort of thing plus Jack Collom & Bhanu Kapil & the bk reviews, etc, that MAKE BOMBAY GIN so worth reading! BUT, as always, I find BG a mixed bag of a weird 'conservatism' that seems to actually conserve little other than narrow-mindedness COUPLED W/ an extreme alertness of mind & sensitivity. Speaking of the bk reviews: those reviewed seem so damn amazing that I WANT TO READ THEM - thusly indicating that BG gets work for review that I might not run across otherwise - such as Laird Hunt's Ray of the Star, Brenda Hillman's Practical Water, Cesar Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, & Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary.



… (más)

Merdre! I am such a problem child! Here I am giving this a 4 star rating instead of a 5 star one (unlike the previous 2 raters) even though I quite possibly like this MORE than the other people who've rated it. Why? B/C I WANT IT TO GO FURTHER!

BUT, don't misunderstand! I like this issue alot (it's the only issue I've read of Bombay Gin so far but I intend to read a whole lot more in the very near future).

I've been contributing to small press magazines since the 1970s: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, RAWZ, Hard Crabs, DOC(K)S, HOMEX, etc (see a very outdated bibliography @: ) & I have a deep & enduring love for such publications: THESE ARE THE PLACES WHERE THE MOST ORIGINAL, THE MOST IMAGINATIVE, THE NEWEST, THE MOST LOVINGLY CREATED WORK IS. By the time it gets to more mainstream collections like the Norton ones the work is no longer fresh - it's still good - but not 'hot off the presses'.

STILL, even w/ this longstanding & enduring love of mine, I tend to get sidetracked into other types of publications such as larger edition bks & to neglect the small presses for awhile. BOMBAY GIN brought me back to 'reality'. This issue in particular was very exciting for me & reminded me that I shd spend WAY MORE TIME on reading small press (a)periodicals than I have for awhile. THIS ISSUE IS GREAT!!

There's a "Translation Portfolio" here & I'm very interested in translation - not b/c I'm a translator in the conventional sense of someone who speaks multiple languages & translates from one to the other - but b/c I'm interested in reading in general as 'translating' & b/c I've conducted alotof experiments w/ translating.

Very importantly for me in this issue of Bombay Gin is the Jerome Rothenberg section. I'm told by the managing editor, Amy Catanzano (who was kind enuf to give me this issue & many others), that Rothenberg's translations of the HORSE SONGS OF FRANK MITCHELL & Rothenberg's "Total Translation" article are collected here together for the 1st time. AND A VERY POTENT COMBINATION IT IS!! I've 'known' about Rothenberg for decades but this BG is the publication that firmly told me just how important JR's work is. It's amazing.

In his total translations of the Horse Songs, things that wd ordinarily be left out take center stage & the reader is reminded that from one language to another there's much that can be lost if things are ignored or downplayed that aren't important or understood in the 2nd language. IMO, NO language directly translates into another. Even something as simple as the word "anything" in English doesn't exactly directly translate into German, eg (Thanks to my friend Florian Cramer for the heads-up on that one). Is the Malay "mata hari" ("eye in the sky" or "eye of the dawn") really so easily translated into "sun" in English? There's a BIG cultural difference there.

But Rothenberg's contribution is hardly the only thing of interest here: There's so much I won't be referring to at all.. but Scott Alexander Jones' "from Elsewhere", Shy Mukerjee's translation of "Computer Language", the visual poetry translations of Basho by Kade Alexander Jensen, the excellent reviews, etc, etc.. Shucks! There's even mention of anarchist Voltarine de Cleyre on p18!!

All in all, an excellent issue - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! I just wish all journal type publications wd step outside of paperback-style form & be more adventurous in binding & such-like - hence the 4 stars instead of 5..… (más)