June 29th, 2010 / 7:32 pm
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Justin Taylor
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Meta
david berman yall
I compiled a handful of his post-Actual Air poems a few weeks back: http://mattstangel.tumblr.com/post/609805243/david-bermans-post-actual-air-poems-that-i-can-find
Great! Another reminder you just need to be the son of an uber-wealthy corporate conspirator, have a cool indie band, and snare the attention of a heroin abusing zillionaire dilletante in order to get your poems published and read. Made my day.
Cool.
There’s a collection of Berman poems and stories that were published in magazines and things here: http://www.stephenmalkmus.com/punbb/upload/viewtopic.php?id=1174
I’ve read Actual Air a few times. I like it. “Self-Portrait At 28” is one of my favorites.
I wrote DB a fan letter in January of 2009, after he disbanded the Silver Jews. He sent me a postcard a few months later. He said that he was working on a “volume for the general reader.” Seems like it might be a while before anyone gets to read this.
“This” should be “that,” maybe.
Oh, nice! Thanks Marshall.
I wrote DCB a letter back in ’96 asking for an interview. He kindly replied and answered a few of my inane questions. He is by far one of the best interviewees in history. You can read my interview with him here:
http://www.weeblackskelf.co.uk/cordsuit/writing/articles/chapter57.php
I am trying to get at something so simple that I have to talk plainly so the words don’t disfigure it
i would not have started writing poetry if i had not read this poem. i would not have gotten interested in poetry if i had not read this poem.
who’s the heroin abusing dilletante??
what i meant was thanks justin for posting this.
i liked that a lot, it made me laugh.
“I have no skills. I am currently unemployed.”
david berman yall
@bambie a:
Robert Bingham, the trustafundian behind Open City. Massive Silver Jews/Pavement fan. Had Pavement play his wedding(!), published Berman’s book, and even one of Stephen Malkmus’s girlfiend’s stories in Open City.
Not that I don’t love Berman’s poetry or anything.
I compiled a handful of his post-Actual Air poems a few weeks back: http://mattstangel.tumblr.com/post/609805243/david-bermans-post-actual-air-poems-that-i-can-find
i agree with sasha.
Great! Another reminder you just need to be the son of an uber-wealthy corporate conspirator, have a cool indie band, and snare the attention of a heroin abusing zillionaire dilletante in order to get your poems published and read. Made my day.
Cool.
There’s a collection of Berman poems and stories that were published in magazines and things here: http://www.stephenmalkmus.com/punbb/upload/viewtopic.php?id=1174
I’ve read Actual Air a few times. I like it. “Self-Portrait At 28” is one of my favorites.
I wrote DB a fan letter in January of 2009, after he disbanded the Silver Jews. He sent me a postcard a few months later. He said that he was working on a “volume for the general reader.” Seems like it might be a while before anyone gets to read this.
“This” should be “that,” maybe.
Oh, nice! Thanks Marshall.
I wrote DCB a letter back in ’96 asking for an interview. He kindly replied and answered a few of my inane questions. He is by far one of the best interviewees in history. You can read my interview with him here:
http://www.weeblackskelf.co.uk/cordsuit/writing/articles/chapter57.php
I often wonder, even though i love Berman, what his footing was amongst “serious writers”. I knew he studied under Tate, but never sure if anyone actually took him serious. I think this kinda answers that?
I am trying to get at something so simple that I have to talk plainly so the words don’t disfigure it
i would not have started writing poetry if i had not read this poem. i would not have gotten interested in poetry if i had not read this poem.
who’s the heroin abusing dilletante??
what i meant was thanks justin for posting this.
i liked that a lot, it made me laugh.
“I have no skills. I am currently unemployed.”
@bambie a:
Robert Bingham, the trustafundian behind Open City. Massive Silver Jews/Pavement fan. Had Pavement play his wedding(!), published Berman’s book, and even one of Stephen Malkmus’s girlfiend’s stories in Open City.
Not that I don’t love Berman’s poetry or anything.
i agree with sasha.
I often wonder, even though i love Berman, what his footing was amongst “serious writers”. I knew he studied under Tate, but never sure if anyone actually took him serious. I think this kinda answers that?
this poem made me think of that Woody Allen joke: “The one thing I would like. I would like to learn how to spell Connecticut.”
There seems to be some similarities in the comic timing, no?
way to link up poemhunter bro
PoemHunter.com reminds me of MilfHunter.com.
this poem made me think of that Woody Allen joke: “The one thing I would like. I would like to learn how to spell Connecticut.”
There seems to be some similarities in the comic timing, no?
A lot of life can be spent wishing this were that.
anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship
way to link up poemhunter bro
PoemHunter.com reminds me of MilfHunter.com.
I shouldn’t be bothering, but I just can’t resist.
You know what, dude? You, right now, are the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the internet.
Also, here’s some friendly advice: the degree of craven yearning that wafts, stinking, from your comment is the exact measure of the distance between you and what you’re after.
A lot of life can be spent wishing this were that.
3/4 of serious writers age 40 & over don’t think he’s hot stuff, but 3/4 of serious writers under age 30 love him
lol
anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship
i don’t take him seriously & i am under 30, but if you are not french or ariana reines and you are writing poetry i will probably not like you (there are exceptions, of course, but david berman is definitely not one of them)
i couldn’t take myself seriously if i called myself a “serious” writer though so my opinion is, in all likelihood, moot.
@ Justin Taylor:
Name one thing I wrote that isn’t true. I dare you!
“What I’m after” is great poetry. To read. Not publish.
We all have our King Wenclas moments…even you!
It’s not about true or not true–it’s about what it says about you that you felt compelled to bring it up at all. David Berman is one of the strongest artists of our generation, in both of his chosen mediums. A handful of non sequitur biographical factoids (including, for no particular reason, a heap of derision cast on a man who’s been dead for ten years) and the implication of some sort of insider trading–as if we wouldn’t all leap at the chance to promote our local genius–aren’t going to change that. It’s the apotheosis of “internet logic”– you have an axe to grind (oh so that’s what it takes to get published) and a chip on your shoulder, so the rest of us have to take time out from enjoying this poem to argue about nonsense. And the sad part is that you’re probably a pretty decent person, in real life. At a bar, this might have been a civilized conversation. Anyway, I’ve made my point and am over it. If my opinion means anything to you, maybe think twice next time. If not then not. Either way, I’m sure I’ll see you round.
can we make out?
The Religion gene is powerful. Don’t fuck with believers.
‘so the rest of us have to take time out from enjoying this poem to argue about nonsense’
haha. yes! you have to!
I’m with justin on this one. pemulis just comes across as a vapid cunt. Berman is a writer, and you have to look at his work, nothing else. Who are the great cultural heroes of your age pemulis?
There *is* some fascinating anecdotal color to the allusions in the comments above. From wikipedia:
“On the same day, he made another post on the message board revealing that he is the son of lobbyist Richard Berman.[5] The two have been estranged since about 2006, when David demanded that his father halt his work supporting guns, alcohol, union-busting and other industries of the like, or else he would sever their relationship. Richard refused, and the two have not spoken since. In the messageboard entry, he called his father “evil”, a “human molestor”, an “exploiter”, a “scoundrel” and “a world historical motherfucking son of a bitch.”[5] Berman ended his post by saying, “I am the son of a demon come to make good the damage.”[5]”
Maynard, Taylor, et al.:
Right. I post a mildly disheartening observation, it is the truth, the undisputed truth, and you all respond with — ad hominems. For Taylor, it’s a matter of tact. Don’t bring that up, it’s rude and uncomfortable!
Imagine my confusion. This is the place that invited readers to heap snark on the New Yorker’s 20 under 40. And sorry, but what kind of treatment does the poetry of Billy Corgan or Jewel get around here? Their Circumstances are remarkably similar. The only difference I can tell between those pesky Foer-esque trustafundians and Jewel and Berman is that…you like Berman.
I mean, i’m sure you guys are pretty swell, too. I like this blog and I like posting here. It’s just that your standards seem to have radically shifted. Obviously, my earlier remarks were not out of place.
(wish I could post more coherently, but am on a tiny phone, in public at the moment)
I just finished the grouting on the kitchen floor!!!! wow. What’s your take on korine?
Is heroin always bad?
1. David Berman has an MFA from “University of Massachusetts Amherst.”
2. David Berman used to smoke crack.
3. I don’t know.
It’s not a question of policy at the site in general- there is no general governing policy of or on this site. You touched a nerve, and I responded as I saw fit. I can’t speak for anything else that you may have read that was authored by anyone other than me. As for me, yes, I attack things that I think are bad, praise things that I think are good, and when something I think is good is being attacked I will defend it. That’s just the way I was raised.
I saw a pineapple in Ray-Bans smoking crack earlier today
I feel that I’m pretty ‘swell’
I shouldn’t be bothering, but I just can’t resist.
You know what, dude? You, right now, are the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the internet.
Also, here’s some friendly advice: the degree of craven yearning that wafts, stinking, from your comment is the exact measure of the distance between you and what you’re after.
3/4 of serious writers age 40 & over don’t think he’s hot stuff, but 3/4 of serious writers under age 30 love him
lol
I agree with Nick. I did some internet looking around after that comment and thought “huh”… some interesting backstory. I imagine the “whole truth” is a complex story indeed. It doesn’t detract from his poetry, for me.
Berman has had a small following at Berkeley High School, by the way, the “under eighteen” crowd. The way I see it, it’s great they (the students) are reading poetry!
Wow, this seems so much more awful than the intitial focus of this thread: “I’m with justin on this one. pemulis just comes across as a vapid cunt”; how can a cunt be vapid? Why even bother with the word cunt? I think a good general rule when it comes to gendered language is if you imagine you’d get upset at someone calling your mom–or girlfriend, or grandma, or daughter or boyfriend etc–the word, then find another word.
i don’t take him seriously & i am under 30, but if you are not french or ariana reines and you are writing poetry i will probably not like you (there are exceptions, of course, but david berman is definitely not one of them)
i couldn’t take myself seriously if i called myself a “serious” writer though so my opinion is, in all likelihood, moot.
How about:
Hey, happy belated birthday, Justin!
Why even bother with words at all. Let’s just grunt at each other.
@ Justin Taylor:
Name one thing I wrote that isn’t true. I dare you!
“What I’m after” is great poetry. To read. Not publish.
We all have our King Wenclas moments…even you!
no.
It’s not about true or not true–it’s about what it says about you that you felt compelled to bring it up at all. David Berman is one of the strongest artists of our generation, in both of his chosen mediums. A handful of non sequitur biographical factoids (including, for no particular reason, a heap of derision cast on a man who’s been dead for ten years) and the implication of some sort of insider trading–as if we wouldn’t all leap at the chance to promote our local genius–aren’t going to change that. It’s the apotheosis of “internet logic”– you have an axe to grind (oh so that’s what it takes to get published) and a chip on your shoulder, so the rest of us have to take time out from enjoying this poem to argue about nonsense. And the sad part is that you’re probably a pretty decent person, in real life. At a bar, this might have been a civilized conversation. Anyway, I’ve made my point and am over it. If my opinion means anything to you, maybe think twice next time. If not then not. Either way, I’m sure I’ll see you round.
can we make out?
The Religion gene is powerful. Don’t fuck with believers.
yeah
‘so the rest of us have to take time out from enjoying this poem to argue about nonsense’
haha. yes! you have to!
I’m with justin on this one. pemulis just comes across as a vapid cunt. Berman is a writer, and you have to look at his work, nothing else. Who are the great cultural heroes of your age pemulis?
There *is* some fascinating anecdotal color to the allusions in the comments above. From wikipedia:
“On the same day, he made another post on the message board revealing that he is the son of lobbyist Richard Berman.[5] The two have been estranged since about 2006, when David demanded that his father halt his work supporting guns, alcohol, union-busting and other industries of the like, or else he would sever their relationship. Richard refused, and the two have not spoken since. In the messageboard entry, he called his father “evil”, a “human molestor”, an “exploiter”, a “scoundrel” and “a world historical motherfucking son of a bitch.”[5] Berman ended his post by saying, “I am the son of a demon come to make good the damage.”[5]”
thanks, Matthew!
Maynard, Taylor, et al.:
Right. I post a mildly disheartening observation, it is the truth, the undisputed truth, and you all respond with — ad hominems. For Taylor, it’s a matter of tact. Don’t bring that up, it’s rude and uncomfortable!
Imagine my confusion. This is the place that invited readers to heap snark on the New Yorker’s 20 under 40. And sorry, but what kind of treatment does the poetry of Billy Corgan or Jewel get around here? Their Circumstances are remarkably similar. The only difference I can tell between those pesky Foer-esque trustafundians and Jewel and Berman is that…you like Berman.
I mean, i’m sure you guys are pretty swell, too. I like this blog and I like posting here. It’s just that your standards seem to have radically shifted. Obviously, my earlier remarks were not out of place.
(wish I could post more coherently, but am on a tiny phone, in public at the moment)
I just finished the grouting on the kitchen floor!!!! wow. What’s your take on korine?
Is heroin always bad?
An ex-girlfriend of mine wrote a piece about me breaking up with her after moving to Europe, and that used Actual Air as a hinge/device. I reproduce it here for your pleasure / comments. Her and I are not really in contact anymore. There are footnotes but I have deleted them because that’d be clumsy in a forum like this.
WHAT ONE does with the goods of an ex-lover, loaned in expectation of the
return that never eventuates is a question requiring vexatious energy. The slow
attrition of electronic letters down email’s ladder, the discovery of a single, shucked
sock pinned between the fitted sheet and the mattress, an abandoned raincoat now
slick with milk-mould; these objects retain a greedy voltage. Vexatious energy, and
a dealer in construction-grade explosives can also be helpful.
One is tempted to thumb the weave, to slip the trinket into the pillowcase
and sleep its impression into your morning cheek like a stigmata. Nothing says I
still love you like the imprint of an absent lover’s wristwatch on the forehead. Time
of day; the noontime of my heart. The only healthy riposte would be to release the
objects into the wild with some befitting exit-scene flourish, but deciding on the
most poetic method of abandonment is difficult in an age when left luggage
instigates a bomb-scare and bonfires contribute haze. Besides, burning books feels
like such a public act – complicit in a long history of historical book-pyres, rather
than an expression of private brio. And binding glue emits a foul smoke.
Perhaps like Sloane Crosley, you find appeal in dropping the Hansel &
Gretel crumbs of a dehydrated romance along the train-line, to be discovered (with
all the punctuality of an omen) by evening commuters. Egads! What portent is this? A
stuffed pony? It all ends with stuffed ponies?! Or maybe you gather your mementos and
turn them into installation art. Build them into a wall cavity. Scan and fax them to
the Heritage Foundation.
But when it is books, books left in a promise-high pile (nights of reading
erotica aloud, mornings with coffee and swapped Penguin Classics, sigh), what to
do when it’s books? Books simper like orphans on the bottom shelf, their pages
damp with the inky tears of the jilted. Their master may be resting his new novel
on the nipples of a Swedish girl who fits her jeans, but the books couldn’t possibly
have predicted that caddishness. Like you, they take people at their word. Indeed it
is worse for them because unlike you, words is all they have. Books are gullible.
They are useless totems for the misdeeds of passion.
This is how I discovered Actual Air by David Berman. The thinnest volume
in a shin-tall stack of Richard Powers, Chris Ware, Philip Gourevitch and David
Mitchell left behind as the promise of an errant lover. Almost overlookable.
What follows is the account of how I sought to dispose of this volume of
poetry and how, like the fetid alley kitten you let in ‘just once’ to lick butter off
your fingertips, it now occupies the best armchair in my house. Shedding fleas to
the disgust of visitors.
Actual Air was published in 1999 by Open City Books – a small, not for profit
publishing house based in New York and the home of Open City Magazine. A
hardcover edition is in circulation, 500 copies of which were released by the
independent record label Drag City in 2003. If you’ve got a hardcover or if you see
one through the drifting, sunlit motes at your local secondhand bookstore, swaddle
it in a waterproof dust-jacket and keep it in your freezer. You don’t want to risk
that sucker going up in a house fire.
Author David Berman is perhaps better known for his musical rather than his
literary projects. As the frontman for American band The Silver Jews he is the
songwriter of such fantastically titled sonic works as ‘Sometimes a Pony Gets
Depressed’, ‘How Can I Love You (If You Won’t Lie Down)’ and ‘Like Like The
The The Death’.
The music of The Silver Jews belongs to an upper canon of American alt-
country lit-rock which developed over the mid-90s; a detailed knowledge of which
is within the purview of the indie-ocracy of every major city. Find a man thin
enough to have a noticeable pelvis, self-cut hair and winklepicker shoes, and ask
him. The cultural capital of The Silver Jews is augmented by their relationship to
another well-known ensemble in the canon – Pavement – because Stephen
Malkmus (who is the mercurial lead singer of that band) is also the guitarist in The
Silver Jews. Thus Actual Air has become the kind of paperback which, when
casually flung on the table still rounded from carriage in the reader’s back-pocket,
conveys specific pretensions. You like beards and Tennessee and cigarettes? I like
beards and Tennessee and cigarettes!
I have never been a street-press journalist, but I confess that in the past I
have been known to scissor myself a fringe and mix in circles where not knowing
who Pavement are is a social crime just shy of working for a major soft drink
company, or cleaning out your ears in public. With a drinking straw. So much so
that a musician friend who knew my pinch-deep Malkmus knowledge suggested I
learn the line “Oh Pavement, yes, I really like that Blue Hawaiian song off the Brighten the
Corners Album” and slowly back out of the room if the band ever came up in
conversation. When the situation did arise and I confused Stephen Malkmus with
Magnetic Fields singer-songwriter Stephin Meritt the repercussions weren’t quite
so dire. Instead the faux pas became shorthand for describing what kind of writer I
was: “So, what do you write exactly?” “Well, I don’t listen to Pavement”.
Later, realising I had perpetuated the impression that I was writing Science
Fiction on an ear-binge of The Flaming Lips and Pink Floyd, I redressed the
Pavement omission in my musical education. With a borrowed ipod and three
weeks on public transport, I also built a sturdy opinion of and relationship with
The Silver Jews.
But I flag to you here: that article – the one that works to compare Actual Air
with the musical meditations of Berman, the article that identifies you, reader, and
I both as lovers of rare sneakers, radical craft and alt. country – is not within these
pages. The poetry of David Berman is not somehow more credentialed because
the poet has other artistic practices that dog-whistle to a specific set of people with
recreational haircutting habits.
Like any book that soaks through you, for me what’s going on inside Actual
Air cannot be severed from what was going on outside the book. Outside of the
book I hadn’t heard of The Silver Jews yet. I was 25 years old, disillusioned with
the landscape-theory I was writing for my postgraduate studies, living in Western
Australia and falling for a lover who wanted to be W.T. Vollmann with better
glasses and a Government job.
Sometimes you find the right book at the right time not because there is a
propitious lesson in it, but because there’s something already in you that wants to
be called out. Reading Actual Air, trying to get rid of Actual Air and eventually
acquiring two copies Actual Air turned out to be less about what the book said to
me, as it said about me. And in particular, how it articulated my peculiar
relationship not to air, but to water.
I was already living in a major thoroughfare for the detritus of trysts when I was
gifted Actual Air. With three other housemates I rented a yellow house overlooking
the Glendower and Throssell streets corner of Hyde Park, a place where the illicit
recreations of Perth are many and varied. When conversation lulled on the porch
attention would drift to the playground across the road where some bizarre sexual
act, a major meth deal or the delivery of un-quarantined reptiles could be
witnessed. From my bedroom I’d hear one housemate trail off mid-sentence ‘what
exactly is she going to do, oh…,’.
Once, jogging in the park at twilight, I became so overwhelmed by a
sudden rolling fog that I couldn’t breathe and had to get down on my hands and
knees in the duck-mud. A film crew shooting an amateur werewolf movie had
blanketed the park in synthetic-mist, into which I crawled coughing and flailing,
appropriately covered in filth. They sat me down with a juice-box and pamphlets
from the drug and alcohol service – my joggers and running clothes no diversion
from what could be the only reasonable explanation for why I was at the corners of
Glendower and Throssell at sundown.
This is the sort of park you know also, from your own neighbourhood. That
green-space where you move more quickly at dusk. Where the frequency of
toothless men and women in gauze shirts goes up as the sun goes down. Often the
daytime crowd is picnics, kite-fliers and boules-players. But as the light gets silty it
becomes the kind of place that inspires the thought ‘if I were to, say, shoot a
werewolf movie, here’s where the moonlight might strike our hero.’ Urban
planners may try to engineer a cityscape without it, but the horror-film park will
not be repressed.
Aside from the commercial vices, there was also a fairly solid quota of the softer
sins going on across the road from our house. As the weather got warmer the
extra-marital set came out in amorous, suspicious pairs. Two cars would pull up
and a grubby clinch would ensue in the cretaceous undergrowth. Or one party
(usually the scarlet woman it must be said), would leap across the macadam into
the other vehicle, which then humidified in a suitably filmic fashion. A specific
bounder, a Thai man in his mid-30s, always arrived ten minutes early for his hook-
up to spray himself with enough gallons of Lynx to make him a serious candidate
for spontaneous combustion.
Later the occasional birdcry of sex in the park mingled with the noise of
video games and domestic violence.
These debauched encounters that accounted for the majority of the
romantic remains we found in the park. The haste. The passion. The short-term
memory loss procured by Rohypnol. All perfect conditions for forgetting things in
the flower beds. Used condoms like a swarm of translucent, aquatic slugs glistening
in the morning lawn. Torn underwear on the picnic tables. Even the occasional
flattened tube of Vaseline we could get used to. But there was stranger debris to
discover.
Like the official Receiver of Wreck, I’d wake in the morning to see what the
tide had bought in. Any day might bring flotsam; we longed to find diamonds from
a failed heist, bottled poisons meant for assassins and dumped cages of bright
macaws. Instead we discovered a pair of high heels as large as boats that could
only have belonged to a basketball-playing transvestite. Handcuffs dangling from
the lower branches of a Morton Bay Fig tree. And once, a bicycle seat that had
been modified to accommodate a dildo. Sans-bicycle.
I took my laptop over to the park during the day to work on my thesis. Landscape.
That compulsion of all Australian writers, tongued raw like a scald on the roof of
the mouth. White’s Voss. Chatwin’s The Songlines. Stowe’s Tourmaline. The poems of
Les Murray. Here in Perth we have the International Centre for Landscape and
Language as if words only actually exist on the ground, the possessions of
topography.
My hands hovered motionless over the keyboard, the alphabet a hotplate
set to burn off my fingerprints. All inspiration melted in the smithy of landscape;
another young writer lost in the work of the desert and defined by geography.
Winton and Drewe held the beaches. When (or if) I became an adult author I
reasoned, this was the work that the critics would dig up to define my ‘early career-
stage preoccupations’. I thought of David Foster Wallace’s daunting thesis Fatalism
and the Semantics of Physical Modality. I thought of the first novels of Jonathan Safran
Foer and Aleksandar Hemon. And I stared uselessly into the lake.
The summer of 2007-08 was a bad season for the park. The local council made a
decision to stop pumping the lakes, allowing them to eutrophicate and then turn to
vapor in the sun. While the birds flew to Lake Monger or the Herdsman Wetlands,
for many of us our major concern for the Hyde Park lakes took the form of a koi
called Einstein.
Einstein was about a meter long and had a head the size of a softball. The
whiskers (whiskers? tentacles?) on the side of his jowls were the thickness of your
little finger. Once I saw a Chinese man genuflecting towards the water, apparently
praying to the fish. At night we imagined that Einstein dragged himself up onto the
lawn and set about hunting stray dogs for sport. Less koi, more creature from a
Jules Verne novel, he was the only animal in inner Perth that might appropriately
be titled ‘rogue’; the same moniker as one would give a man-eating Tiger or a
fourth-floor apartment Alligator. Einstein kept out of sight in the central island of
the smaller lake for weeks at a time, only to suddenly appear chewing on a dead
duck or a severed hand. He was a fish of legend.
When things went sour in my life I would retire to the park to talk it over
with Einstein. Careful not to drag my toes in the water, I’d sit on the edge and
proffer all the casual brutishness of ex-boyfriends, employers, friends and my own
self-sabotage as a cohesive narrative of the world on a mission against me. My
thesis figured in these unilateral conversations regularly. Einstein lulled on the
bottom of the lake with Confucian demeanour, evolving fingers or a higher self.
He learnt Emerson, Thoreau, Leopold and Carson that summer.
As the lake dried up the baked flat first stunk, bubbled and finally cracked.
Things thrown into the water revealed themselves: a suitcase5, sports equipment
from known codes and at least three wedding rings. Every day more abandoned
scrap appeared out of the retreating lakes. New object lessons, we examined the
junk from a distance, not daring the karmic repercussions of collecting anything
(especially not the rings). This was the elephant graveyard of lovers’ gifts. Where
Valentines goes to die.
Upon receiving the letter from my (now overseas) lover that confessed to the
seductions of European women I took Actual Air down to the lakes with the
intention of pitching it in. It was the lightest book in the pile and seemed to lend
itself to a satisfying Frisbee action. Here begins the falter because there, desiccating
on the flat, was Einstein. Dead. Picked over by pelicans and turtles.
Probably every living thing has a fear heavier than death and that fear is the
fear of being half eaten. Worse, the fear of being half eaten, not the head end. Einstein
had died in full realisation of that fear. I’d always hoped he would become able-
bodied enough to lollop like a seal across the road and into our drains, although
part of me had been reconciled to his inevitable demise since the lakes began to
disappear. But this was not the samurai death I had imagined for him. He did not
impale himself on a bulrush or leap with a war-cry into the council lawnmowers. I
sat down with half a fish, unexpectedly moved, and lacking in words of my own I
started to read aloud from the book.
There were no new ways to understand the world,
Only new days to set our understandings against.
Through the lanes came virgins in tennis shoes,
their hair shining like videotape.
singing us into a kind of sleep we hadn’t tried yet.
Each page was a new chance to understand the last.
And somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid.
And somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid. I repeated it. The
line sung like a struck tuning fork. Did the sea make me feel stupid, I wondered.
Not stupid maybe, but certainly anxious. Looking out over the scud and dazzle of
the ocean my thoughts always turn to feebleness and impermanence, a rising sense
of our collective stupidity to be so inwardly turned in the face of the colossal world.
It’s an unstable medium the sea off the West Coast. The ‘accomplice of human
restlessness’ Conrad wrote. You don’t live in Perth and not develop a complicated
relationship with the edge of the country and what lies beyond it.
The flies made a maze of Einstein’s body. With the empty lake curdling in
front of me and a head full of ocean I read on, planning to toss the book into the
mud once I’d finished it. Evening rose and the local Indigenous police car began
laps of the park’s paths. With a shallow bow to Einstein I left still carrying Actual Air
under one arm, telling myself that when it was light again I’d come back and
jettison the book.
Hark back to this same lake when I am a child. I am about six or seven I think,
and should be playing nicely with my sister on the swings. The trees are the same,
jacarandas dropping their syrupy-smelling purple. The same song of cicadas rasps
away at the day. It is hot and instead of doing as normal children do and squashing
insects, I am running in circles making faces like an epileptic fit.
My mother names this game ‘Telling Yourself a Story’. She knows that
when I am around any kind of active water – sprinklers, running hoses, gutters
filled with rain, bathwater down the plughole – it is useless to try and stop me from
playing this game. Like Ralph in Richard E. Grant’s movie Wah-Wah I contort my
mouth and eyes uncontrollably as my mind goes elsewhere. Sometimes it lasts only
a few seconds (a scene, an idea), sometimes near to half an hour (when a full story
plays out). From a distance I appear to be suffering either sudden-onset
anaphylaxis or a tickling bout with a ghost. I talk out loud to myself and shake my
hands as if to dry them. I walk in concentric circles. Where I am in my imagination
is anyone’s guess, but I’m certainly not seeing what is in front of me. At this age it
is probably something to do with mermaids or polar bears.
At home I am allowed to Tell Myself a Story once a day while I water the
herb garden. Mum explains to her friends that I’ve been told talking to plants helps
them to grow, but she can’t explain the strange, Boschian faces. Soon I’m only
allowed to do it if we don’t have guests visiting. The basil grows to tower above
me, the thyme is dense enough to fall into comfortably. I flood the patio and
swamp the flowerbeds. My socks are always wet. In winter, when I cannot justify
watering, I collect the rain in containers (‘to give to Africa’ I tell my sister), so that I
can pour it out again over the lawn when I am allowed outside. The water would
have fallen on the garden anyway I reason with my parents. I get numerous colds
narrating in the backyard, slowly tipping out ice-cream containers of rainwater
and contorting obsessively.
When is the first time I am caught doing it by someone outside the family?
When is the first time I am embarrassed? There is a vague memory of a friend’s
party and a paddling pool, but I can’t be certain. I know that by ten I have found
other ways of generating the effects of running water; mixing cake batter for
instance, or finger-painting. I am never actively discouraged from the habit, but I
am taught to make it into a private gesture. I let the water stream off my hands in
pleasing cascades when I shower, stamping my feet in short bursts for as long as
the fists on the door will allow me. Much of my childhood is spent with skin
wrinkled from saturation.
As a teenager I learn to keep the faces mostly under control by swimming
almost every day. I become quite a good swimmer and compete until study
prevents me. During the Tertiary Entrance Exams I break my note-taking with
watering again, but because we have no garden by this point I walk to the
abandoned block behind our house and hose the bare earth into a quagmire.
Someone else is growing pot down by the fence so it seems the quintessential,
trashed suburban open-space, apt for misbehaviour. If I’m caught by a neighbour
using the right-of-way I pretend I am practicing a speech out loud for school. It’s
the TEE for christsakes, I tell myself. If stress-relief is a choice between watering or
recreational drugs, I’ll have the former. I permit myself this little bit of crazy. And I
also start to write down the stories.
The day after the death of Einstein was the day that the council finally decided to
re-pump the lakes. I arrived early, carrying Actual Air and sporting the red-eyed,
brittle look of a woman scorned. The night had been populated by acidic words
and the breaking of two plates in an act of uncharacteristic brio. No one was there
to see me smash the crockery, but it still made me feel marginally better and a bit,
well, Spanish. I did it in my best shoes and a black negligee. If it was European
femineity he wanted… But then I couldn’t bring myself to throw the plates out the
window, only to drop them on an old sheet laid out on the kitchen floor.
I felt oddly calm standing on the brink of the lake. The water coursed
around in a slow whirlpool, washing over the other lovers’ discards. Hunks of foam
fermented in the wake and the whole scene smelt pleasantly like brewer’s yeast. I
watched the muscular eddies kick and swill for near to an hour, before once more I
opened Actual Air. I read ‘Classic Water’, ‘Of Things Found Where They Are Not
Supposed To Be’ and ‘Community College in the Rain’. I laughed a little. I made
a few unstoppered noises of admiration in the back of my throat.
and if you wake up thinking “feeling is a skill now”
or “even this glass of water seems complicated now” …
then let the consequent misunderstandings
(let the changer love the changed)
wobble on heartbreakingly nu legs
into this street-legal nonfiction,
Gosh that took away my breath. Berman’s poems are whip-clever not through
algebraic sensibility or the use of linguistic pyrotechnics (although there are plenty),
but by the way his wry insight scatters. Each image disperses spoors, as if language
were a field after the rain which he walks through, kicking at puffball mushrooms.
Lines stay with you, emerging in the rinse of an early morning hangover or late
night insomnia. In interviews he has described his approach to lyric-writing as
striving for the ‘google-pure’ image – the lyric that seems prima facie trite and
obvious, but which has not been said in the world before now. The lyric that beds
down in your subconscious. It is elemental poetry, finding purchase in the air, the
snow, the rain and bringing it back into your interior spaces.
I got to the end of the book. And somehow the sea was always there to
make you feel stupid. I made a face at the lake. Then suddenly, with all the clarity
of lost love and 48 hours awake I knew that writing about landscape was never
going to be my gig. What I needed to write about was the water fixation. Where I
needed to be was knee-deep in the current, looking out from the edge not back at
the shore. The temptation to anchor needed to give way to the desire for
shipwreck.
Writing about The Silver Jews often paints Berman as the creatively-jilted partner
of Malkmus, as if Berman’s music is the bridesmaid to Pavement’s success.
Interviewers pursue the question of which band was formed first, whether Berman
was ever offered a place in the Pavement line-up and if the fame of either band
provokes jealousy. Such questioning is quickly diverted by the interviewee, but still
builds the impression that The Silver Jews are the girl-in-port while Pavement
moves in more mercantile, international society. But I adore The Silver Jews’
music all the same. That the writing of David Berman should end up being left to
me by a truant lover, that it should come to signify more than an ending has, in my
mind, excellent symmetry.
Now, a year later, I have embraced my strange watery compulsions. My
thesis has become an analysis of seascape and ecological catastrophe in the ocean.
And I can tell you where to go at night to watch the best sprinklers in Western
Australia. I take the long way home from work in the evening and time it so that I
drive past all the watered verges. My favourites are at the top of Green Street,
where it turns into Scarborough Beach Road. Close second are down by the
Boulevard in Floreat. If you get a red light, you can sit for nearly thirty seconds
and watch the first finger of water, slick and polished like oil in the dark, start
down the hill with the streetlights moving in it. The sprinklers at Lake Monger still
have above-ground piping that hums and bangs in the heat. If I can’t find
inspiration, or solve a sticky problem in my writing I find night-time sprinkler: the
larger the system, the more industrial the operation, the better. At least five times
during the writing of this article, I’ve gone in search of running water.
In the end I put that copy of Actual Air in a backpack with all of my ex-
lover’s other books and left it on the porch of a mutual friend’s house. I had made
plans to bury it in the garden amongst the pumpkin plants and water it into
oblivion, but then I had a dream that when I went to cut open the pumpkins to
make a soup I found them full of Berman poems. I bought a second copy of the
book weeks afterwards, certain that I needed it to be near me or risk worse
nightmares. Later a travelling copy joined the bookshelf: one to be shook
vigorously at friends, thrust into hands leaving dinner parties and slid under doors
because I also, feel the need to give objects to people important to me. In
particular this book, with all of its unstable valences.
The compulsion to gift latent and confusing goods to lovers is undoubtedly wide-
spread. Somewhere out there is a man who hates the hat that I ‘accidentally’ left
on his bedside table, a man who would burn the scarf if he wasn’t so uncertain
about its chemical composition, and a man who curses me every time the camera
fails. These tokens evidence more than the fact that I have loved and have been
loved (which after all, needs no evidence). They are more than a trade in
apotropes, intended to ward off the bad luck, bad timing and curse of expectation
that stalks any romance. I do not pretend to forget these trinkets because I think
that they represent something about me. The keepsakes we leave for each other
are a barter in doubts. They stand in for the words ‘stay with me’, or ‘come back to
me’, or ‘remember me’ – ‘because I don’t need these objects if I have your belief’.
They are a form of whistling past the graveyard. Perhaps the only test of when one
is truly in head-over-heels is when there is no urge to ‘unintentionally’ drop a
single stocking into the dryer. When you know you won’t be doubted in absence.
1. David Berman has an MFA from “University of Massachusetts Amherst.”
2. David Berman used to smoke crack.
3. I don’t know.
It’s not a question of policy at the site in general- there is no general governing policy of or on this site. You touched a nerve, and I responded as I saw fit. I can’t speak for anything else that you may have read that was authored by anyone other than me. As for me, yes, I attack things that I think are bad, praise things that I think are good, and when something I think is good is being attacked I will defend it. That’s just the way I was raised.
I saw a pineapple in Ray-Bans smoking crack earlier today
I feel that I’m pretty ‘swell’
I agree with Nick. I did some internet looking around after that comment and thought “huh”… some interesting backstory. I imagine the “whole truth” is a complex story indeed. It doesn’t detract from his poetry, for me.
Berman has had a small following at Berkeley High School, by the way, the “under eighteen” crowd. The way I see it, it’s great they (the students) are reading poetry!
Wow, this seems so much more awful than the intitial focus of this thread: “I’m with justin on this one. pemulis just comes across as a vapid cunt”; how can a cunt be vapid? Why even bother with the word cunt? I think a good general rule when it comes to gendered language is if you imagine you’d get upset at someone calling your mom–or girlfriend, or grandma, or daughter or boyfriend etc–the word, then find another word.
How about:
Hey, happy belated birthday, Justin!
Why even bother with words at all. Let’s just grunt at each other.
no.
yeah
thanks, Matthew!
Unrelated, but I should note that Albrecht Durer, about whom I wrote an awesome poem but will not link because I am not an asshole, is an awesome person and did some of the best damn woodcuts of the late 15th and early 16th century.
Unrelated, but I should note that Albrecht Durer, about whom I wrote an awesome poem but will not link because I am not an asshole, is an awesome person and did some of the best damn woodcuts of the late 15th and early 16th century.
i vote for actual air
totes.
i vote for actual air
totes.
You know, a byline on that would have been a basic decency Chris. I’m all for creative commons, but attribution would be the ordinary, baseline courtesy when you take over nine thousand words off someone, where it is not otherwise available online. Perhaps, I don’t know, a quick email even – it’s not like we’re estranged. The piece was first published in the Australian Journal “Cutwater” in early 2009, eds. Sam Twyford-Moore and Dan Collins, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.
“WHAT ONE does with the goods of an ex-lover, loaned in expectation of the
return that never eventuates is a question requiring vexatious energy.”
9,000 words! Hard to get past that first sentence.
“The compulsion to gift latent and confusing goods to lovers is undoubtedly wide-
spread.”
So it doesn’t improve much by the end, then.
To be fair, it seems he’s posted a far earlier draft than the final piece that appears in print.
You know, a byline on that would have been a basic decency Chris. I’m all for creative commons, but attribution would be the ordinary, baseline courtesy when you take over nine thousand words off someone, where it is not otherwise available online. Perhaps, I don’t know, a quick email even – it’s not like we’re estranged. The piece was first published in the Australian Journal “Cutwater” in early 2009, eds. Sam Twyford-Moore and Dan Collins, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.
“WHAT ONE does with the goods of an ex-lover, loaned in expectation of the
return that never eventuates is a question requiring vexatious energy.”
9,000 words! Hard to get past that first sentence.
“The compulsion to gift latent and confusing goods to lovers is undoubtedly wide-
spread.”
So it doesn’t improve much by the end, then.
To be fair, it seems he’s posted a far earlier draft than the final piece that appears in print.
I think this is the 4,702-word edit
I think this is the 4,702-word edit
I tortured my appetite a lot by viewing the photos! Great site! Thanks a lot for sharing these!
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