ESSAYS by Susan Howe and John Matthias

& REVIEWS of Robert Cree­ley, Devin John­ston, Kent John­son,
African Amer­i­can poetry antholo­gies, and Alis­tair McCartney.

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Wednes­day evening I was for­tu­nate enough to find myself at one of the more enjoy­able and inter­est­ing Chicago Sym­phony per­for­mances I’ve attended in years. The con­cert in ques­tion, along with most of the upcom­ing fortnight’s sched­ule, is part of the CSO’s season-​ending Antonin Dvorak fes­ti­val, a climax to some loosely the­ma­tized “music of nations” year-​long series. This fes­ti­val has a for­mi­da­ble lineup, in the sense that each pro­gram is long with pieces and most of the inter­est­ing offer­ings appear in mul­ti­ple programs.

Machines of the 20th Cen­tury E. Muslin (Trans­lated from the Russ­ian by V. Vopyan).  Mir Pub­lish­ers, Moscow. $1, used.  (269p)  [First pub­lished 1974 / Revised from the 1971 Russ­ian edition.]

Strolling east on Atlantic Avenue just less than an hour ago, headed for the subway to Man­hat­tan, I stopped by the metal cart of dollar books out­side of the Atlantic Book Shop.  First, my atten­tion was caught by a book explain­ing ocean waves, pub­lished by Anchor some­time in the ’60s.  Scan­ning to the left on the middle shelf, I saw a few more Nat­ural Sci­ence books about the sea.  Per­haps a lay-​oceanographer recently died; why I should think him an ama­teur I don’t know.  What mat­ters is that wedged among these water-​related books was one of the most curi­ous books I have ever found—and my entire after­noon has been rede­ter­mined because of it.  I’ve pur­chased the book, and rushed straight home to com­mu­ni­cate my excite­ment to you, and to make the formal report.  For now, that is pretty much all I have to say, and I will leave you with this excerpt from Chap­ter 2 (“Meaningful Noises: Flaw Detec­tion and Control”), from the sec­tion on

“PIGEONS AS ASSEM­BLY LINE INSPEC­TORS

Nex­dorea: an arch­duchy in cen­tral Europe, famous because it sup­plies the neigh­bour­ing coun­tries with queens. All the female chil­dren of the arch­duke are turned loose in an old palace and park belong­ing to the ruling family. Here they are allowed to grow up with­out even being taught their own lan­guage. On reach­ing a mar­riage­able age, they are duly cat­a­logued and a descrip­tion of their beauty is sent to all single poten­tates in the sur­round­ing area. As soon as one of them is selected for mar­riage by one of the princes, she is trans­ferred to the Royal Nurs­ery Palace, where qual­i­fied mas­ters and gov­ernesses speed­ily teach her the lan­guage of her future coun­try and the accom­plish­ments and man­ners in vogue there.

The arms of Nex­dorea are gules, on a bend or, a goose and six goose­lets wadd­lant in their pride proper; crest, a blue-​nose baboon sno­rant proper in an arm­chair argent; sup­port­ers, two hen’s eggs proper, cracked sable; Motto, Poached or Pick­led. The chief prod­uct of Nex­dorea is hen’s eggs, hence the allu­sions to poulty in the arms. The Nex­dorean cur­rency is brass and German silver, which is not accepted in the neigh­bour­ing countries.

(Tom Hood, Petsetilla’s Posy, London, 1870)