Alan--
I am really touched by some of your writing -- and this piece especially.
What feels selfish to me is to feel so privileged to read a text that so
clearly comes from deep pain.
I am not a person who believes in the nobility of suffering. If I hadn't
rejected that idea before, living with Millie would have disabused me of
it. She could have done so much more, lay in bed with new ideas that never
came to fruition, because her body and her pain would not allow for it.
Here you are, Alan, creative, innovative, determined to do what you can.
Sometimes I read and wish you had wiser doctors -- and wonder if there isn't
something physical that could, at least, be alleviated enough to give you a
better quality of life. Sometimes I read and think about Brooklyn and the
horror of what has happened in your neighborhood. Sometimes it's the
hospital executives who think they can close if they feel like it -- without
due consideration for the community that depends upon them.
In the case of hospital closings anyway, it looks as if the state health
department is finally stepping in. . .
Certainly, I understand the pain of moving from Brooklyn. It was similar
for me when I moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan 30 years ago. I
knew I was giving up a lot in the way of neighborhood culture as well as
access to museums.
All I can say is that while Millie always missed NYC and returned there as
often as she could, Providence was very good for her, and once she left
Providence, she missed it and her life there almost as much as she missed
NYC.
I hope for better days ahead for you, Alan. I hope for some lifting of
those shadows -- and that Providence will work out well despite the loss of
your Brooklyn surroundings (some of which you have already lost, thanks to
Barclay).
Best,
Martha
Alan Sondheim wrote:
Lousy
My recent work has been lousy, repetitive, mediocre.
I go over the same grounds again and again as I attempt
to hold onto my sanity in a world of ultra-violence.
Any response I might have to this world is lost in the
symbolic, nothing is left, nothing left behind.
I see our move to Providence as exile from the edginess
of Brooklyn, for me the last locus of alternative
negation. I see myself going over the same musical
grounds, playing alone or with Azure, without the dark
energy of the dominant saxophone. And I see my own good
ideas already on the block and lost. I'm lousy with a
mind corrosive with self-pity, drive, obsession, and an
easy way out. I watch the body close down: carpal-
tunnel, stretched muscles, tinnitus, insomnia, sweat,
difficult breathing, clumsiness, stress, confusion:
what's left forms the few notes of the shakuhachi. I
take note of everything; I'm drowning in my own
mediocrity. My end-blow flute-playing is lousy, my
theory drags out thinkers from before the wars, my
virtual world work imitates itself and I'm lazy in
terms of new programming, my writing's pretty much
ignored for good reason, and I still write from the
outmoded positionings of the murmur and the scream. I'm
exhausted with theory, I haven't read nearly enough, I
take shortcuts, my lousy thinking infects everything,
turning to paranoia at the slightest provocation.
There - you see - "slightest provocation" - a lousy
trite phrase, because my thinking short-circuits
itself, comes up with nothing new but a fabricated
lousy honest that's close to unhinged. I wish for
something new, some catalyst - students perhaps or a
Festschrift (I dare dream!) - to bring me out of this
study in gray, but I've wished for such all my life,
and this kind of wish is never granted, or granted
at best in retrospect - and certainly not for the
kind of lousy work I do. I type and think through the
autonomous nervous system, as if my circuits were
jolted by some sort of external machinery from the
gods, content be damned. I write but it writes itself
and in this case, this writing, this thinking, these
virtual worlds, these video, these images, this music,
is lousy, lousy, lousy, lousy, lousy. An epitaph -
stupidly, in spite of himself, he kept trying. The
rest of us knew enough to ignore the results. He was
his own worst result. He was lousy.
He was lousy because he took the easy way out, as if
there were laurels to collect, choices made for him.
He went with whatever fell the fastest. He kept
waiting for his life and work to turn around, for
something to turn them around, for him. He thought
practice, not insight, makes perfect. His thought was
lousy too.
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--
The Last Collaboration
http://www.amazon.com
Read online
http://www.furtherfield.org/friendsofspork/
Intro by Edward Picot
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/last-collaboration
City Bird: Selected Poems (1991-2009) by Millie Niss, edited by Martha Deed
http://blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/
