Daily Blague

Have you ever seen anyone dance the mazurka? I wonder what it's like. Although mazurkas are set in three-quarter time, they are neither stately compositions, like minuets, nor perpetual-motion machines, like waltzes. There's something tripping about them, as if a step were being missed here and there. I'm speaking, particularly, of Chopin's mazurkas, of which there are more than fifty. When I was young, I had an LP of mazurkas, played by one of those keyboard Titans who went only by his last, Slavic, name, which I can no longer recall. (I have to keep saying "no" to "Alexander Brailowsky," which comes up every time I try to remember.) Now, I have Vladimir Ashkenazy's two-CD set. That's what I listened to this morning as I read the paper and then some other things.

I'm in the mood for mazurkas today. A few of Chopin's mazurkas are cheerful, and none of them is bleak, but most carry a melancholy strain that suits our depressive weather. I'd probably feel depressed anyway, because I'm deep into Martha McPhee's seriously intoxicating novel, L'America. At times more myth than fiction, L'America is most engaging when it plumbs the inability of Cesare, the scion of an old Lombard banking family, to pull himself free of his roots and settle with Beth, the love of his life, in America. Cesare is crazy about all things American, but the entitlement and privilege with which he has been brought up have made not only made him lazy - something that he knows - but clouded his ability to imagine - which is obviously not something that he cannot know. By telling the story of Cesare and Beth in a highly recursive manner, Ms McPhee gradually drains the reader's desire to make their minds up for them. Italy or America - my place or yours? In the end (which we know from the start), neither lover is willing to make the sacrifice of emigration, and we can certainly see why. It is not tragic, but it is very sorrowful, and only mazurkas will do.

Then a chance encounter - also somewhat imaginary - perked me up. Waiting for the delivery man to bring up the movies that I've ordered from the Video Room, in order to reduce the number of films on Mr Emerson's list that I haven't seen - I opened John Ashbery's collection, Your Name Here, to a poem called "Full Tilt." It was quite at random, just to have something brief to read. And the oddest thing happened - it has never, in any case, happened to me before. I was in the middle of the second stanza, "Let's leave things as they are," when I heard (in my mind) my friend Tony reading the poem. Tony has a way with clichés, an impatient irony, that dusts them off without any pretense of making them look new.

Now, why not investigate the way
all this can end up being pretty? Not just the whore
who waits on the corner till the last sliver of taxi is gone,
to be repackaged next night in a department store window
so you can pretend you bought it? I'm up here, Louise,
we're all up here, waiting for you to step up to home plate
and bat us a cool one. Oh, but
I was supposed to be in the station an hour ago
That's the way it gets illustrated:
the four of you in Cincinnati, waving across the plain
to us, the lemon in hot pursuit, leading to student unrest.

No, it still doesn't mean anything, even if you, too, can imagine Tony reading it. But in Tony's voice it is very entertaining, funny, even. I can't imagine that Tony would have any patience for Ashbery's dry nonsense, but he ought to be made to read it anyway, because he would light up all the banalities from which the poet composes his verse. "...the lemon in hot pursuit..." - I tell you, it cracks me up. But maybe this had better stay imaginary.