In Which We Winnow Our Toes To Tapered Points

Swan Maiden

by ALICE BOLIN

The eponymous schoolteacher of Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has for her students in 1930s Edinburgh an eccentric panoply of heroes: Giotto, Charlotte Brontë, Mussolini. Not the least of these idols is the imminent ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, at the time one of the world’s biggest celebrities. “The term was filled with legends of Pavlova and her dedicated habits,” writes Spark, “her wild fits of temperament and her intolerance of the second-rate. ‘She screams at the chorus,’ said Miss Brodie, ‘which is permissible in a great artist.’”

Spark expresses in her novel the defining contradiction in popular thinking about Pavlova: she embodied both the dogged and the sublime. Miss Brodie emphasizes Pavlova’s “dedication,” a drive that ultimately led her to die of pneumonia at the age of forty-nine after twenty years of continual world tours. But she was also the definition of the dancer-as-artist, subordinating technique to delicacy and lyricism. “A dedicated woman,” Miss Brodie deems her, “who, when she appears on stage, makes the other women look like elephants.” It is this combination of elements, effort and magic, doing and being, that made Anna Pavlova the greatest ballerina of the twentieth century.

Pavlova distinguished herself quickly after her debut in the Russian Imperial Ballet in 1899 at the age of eighteen. Her slender body wasn’t typical of ballerinas of her day, who were known more for their power than their emotion, and her long limbs proved to be extraordinarily expressive. She became a prima ballerina in the Imperial Ballet in 1906, and the next year she began her life of touring, first dancing with Sergei Diaghilev and his legendary Ballets Russes in Paris, then touring New York and London with her partner Mikhail Mordkin, then forming her own company and visiting India, China, and South America.

There is no doubt that Pavlova was a workhorse, a tireless emissary for dance around the world. With her trips to India, Pavlova not only opened ballet to new audiences but also broke important stylistic ground with the piece Oriental Impressions, a suite of short dances that borrowed Indian dancing styles and the stories of Hinduism; her company collaborated on the piece with a young Uday Shankar, one of the fathers of modern Indian dance. But for the most part, her aesthetic was conservatively classical and her work, for someone whose reputation was so grand, surprisingly modest.

Her career was built on performing the same short solos over and over; she was not known primarily for performing in full ballets or choreographing dances of her own. Her reputation for artistry did not come from creative ambition, necessarily, but from the depth and nuance of her soul. Her one major piece of choreography, Autumn Leaves, expresses this sensitivity: it tells the story of a chrysanthemum that is tended by a poet until it is killed by the autumn wind. She called it a “choreographic poem.”

But when seeking the true source of Pavlova’s gift, we find it somewhere beyond the poetic. Watching her perform her signature solo, The Dying Swan, she is irresistible. Her legs, arms, and hands flutter with an alien grace that is otherworldly, inhuman — the audience is transfixed, and she is transfigured. Pavlova loved birds, and photographs show her entwined with one of her pet swans, his neck circling hers like a garland. She studied her swans, and she imitated them completely; this was her true talent, as a shape shifter. Watching The Dying Swan, it is hard to believe there isn’t something avian in her. How else, we ask, could she move like that?

Of course, “How can they move like that?” is the question that ballet aims to elicit. It makes the human form unfamiliar—the body in ballet is harder and sharper, while also quicker and more pliant, than we have ever known it in life. It follows, then, that of the many strange things we ask ballerinas to be, birds are a constant. They are graceful and severe, beautiful and frightening. It is vaguely creepy when a woman is described appreciatively as “birdlike” — it implies she is small, dainty, frail. But ask Natalie Portman in Black Swan: a woman as a bird has a terrible power, and it is not a sexual power. For Pavlova in The Dying Swan, it seems her bird body can be a conduit for true emotion.

Pavlova’s skill in transformation is related to a tight control of her image, an aspect of her celebrity that feels eerily contemporary. She is immortalized in hundreds of carefully posed studio photographs depicting her many dramatic incarnations: as a fairy, a swan, a flower. She insisted that the photographs were retouched, hiding any physical imperfections and, particularly, winnowing her toes to tapered points. For the same reason that she didn’t allow photographers in the theatre when she danced, she was secretive about her marriage to her manager, Victor Dandré. The public would see what she wanted them to see.

“Pavlova the artist, and Pavlova the wife, they are two very different persons,” she said. For her audience to have all of the artist, they could have none of the wife. She engineered the illusion there was no Pavlova offstage. Outside of airbrushed pictures, she did not exist beyond her art; for that she was a true artist. How else could she become a bird before the audience’s eyes, die nightly and then live again? As Miss Jean Brodie says to her students, “Pavlova doing the death of the swan, it is a moment in eternity.”

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about The Bachelor.

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In Which We Address The Skaters

My Own Invention

by ALICE BOLIN

The usual anagrams of moonlight — a story
That subsides quietly into plain historical fact.

– John Ashbery, “The Skaters”

Late last August I crossed a bridge over the Clark Fork River in Missoula, Montana, and, looking east, saw a dense cloud swelling behind the mountain. I couldn’t tell whether it was a thunderhead or a plume from the huge forest fire that was growing through the nearby Blackfoot Valley. There had been rain and there had been fires in the mountains to both the east and west of town so the air just sort of hung there, heavy with water and smoke.

A lot of things were ending. The short Montana summer — properly spent drinking in public and idling down majestic rivers in an inner tube — was ending and along with it, more or less, my life. In spring I had finished a graduate program in creative writing, and I managed for the summer to postpone my departure from writer-land. But fall in Missoula was closing in on me, and I wandered from coffee shop to burrito shop to bar feeling uniquely unsure what to do with myself. Post-graduation ennui is not original — it afflicts everyone with nothing better to worry about. But to go from happily aimless to unhappily aimless, following an experience that in retrospect was both profound and pointless, to stand alone on the cusp of a cold gray season, it can seem quite convincingly poetic.

It was around that time that I found a recording of John Ashbery giving a reading at the Washington Square Art Gallery in New York in 1964 of his long poem “The Skaters,” which became an object of minor obsession for me. Poetry at its heart is a game of endurance, and through his sixty-year career Ashbery has become the unlikely patriarch of the American poetry establishment, winning every major literary award, including most recently the National Medal of Arts — all in spite of his work’s utter bizarreness. Influenced by the Surrealists and the Symbolists, his poetry evades traditional demands for subject and narrative, moving liberally from image to image and speaker to mysterious speaker.

Ashbery was far from his future eminence at the time of the recording, one of a vanguard of strange young poets that would come to be known as the New York School, along with Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch. He had published his second book, The Tennis Court Oath, two years before, and it is maybe still the most difficult of all of his twenty-five collections, containing poetic experiments that are, in Ashbery’s words, “so fragmentary as to defeat most readers.” The time following the release of The Tennis Court Oath was a pivotal one in his career. In his speech upon receiving the Robert Frost Medal, Ashbery said that the poems of The Tennis Court Oath were “a stage on the way to something else, which I knew nothing of then, when I would be able to reassemble language into something that would satisfy me in the way my early poems had once done but no longer did.”

That “The Skaters” was written in a period of artistic in-between-ness does something to explain my attachment to it in the fall. The recording is forty-seven minutes long, meandering in the poem’s four sections through a strange repertory of places and voices, wondering about the weather, travel, and the use of narrative. The original setting of the reading is very present in the recording, which is one of its pleasures — cars honk their horns, trains rumble by, and his lively audience laughs at lines as tame as “Mild effects are the result.”

I listened to “The Skaters” so many times that it took on a kind of Ouija-board mysticism for me. I felt I was one of the characters materializing and dissolving in the kaleidoscope eye of the poem — Helga in Jersey City, maybe, or the apartment-dweller who feels “cut off from the life in the streets,” or a figure in the sad old-fashioned vision of poverty, with its geranium in a rusting tomato can. “All this, wedged in a pyramidal ray of light, is my own invention,” writes Ashbery; it was invented, but it couldn’t have been a false vision, because I was living in it. My studio apartment in a converted motel in downtown Missoula, with hotplate and mini-fridge for a kitchen, heavy brown curtains and olive shag carpeting, was the poem’s adopted home, as much the true setting of the reading as the Washington Square Art Gallery in 1964.

“The Skaters” is a beacon when I try to reconstruct my memories of this fall. I remember mostly the weird and sad things — I got pneumonia right before Halloween and didn’t feel better until Thanksgiving. I had a job selling coffee in an outdoor outfitting store and once one of my co-workers detailed to me the circumstances of all of the boating deaths in the state that year. I used to listen to the poem while I was making dinner and one time I broke down in tears, crying into my cutting board. “You look like you’re in a movie written by a man,” I said to my reflection in the mirror on the wall in front of me, a woman crying while chopping vegetables.

Something came up over the mountain and I couldn’t tell if it was rain or smoke and this is all I remember about it. “Nature is still liable to pull a few fast ones,” Ashbery writes in “The Skaters,” and this is one main idea — the activities of nature, particularly storms and fires, are figures for impermanence in the poem. Rain and snowstorms appear in every section, always threatening forces that impede action. In the second section an oracular fire fountain is created, displaying a detailed spring scene. The action of fire is to consume, and the fountain devours its own images, leaving the outline of a landscape in ashes, until “this vision, too, fades slowly away.”

Fire, weather, sex, and everyday experience: these are the models of a kind of movement which has no beginning or end point, which erases itself with repetition, whose rhythms are its meaning. Opposing this is movement with a reasonable trajectory — progress toward a destination or the single consequential gesture, as exemplified by travel, romance, or history. The second section of “The Skaters” discusses travel, associating it with the projections of fantasy. “This cruise can never last long enough for me,” Ashbery writes. “But once more, office desks, radiators — No! That is behind me./No more dullness, only movies and love and laughter, sex and fun.”

With increasing self-consciousness, travel becomes a metaphor for the idealized course of life — “Here I am, continuing but ever beginning/My perennial voyage, into new memories” — and modes of travel elide as the symbolic meaning inflates. “The train we are getting onto is a boat train,” declares the speaker. “And the boats are really boats this time.” It is clear in the poem that travel as a notion is inconsistent with reality: the more elusive fluctuations of nature, the humdrum grief of modern life.

Nor in fact is this movement consistent with the ever-turning mechanism of poetry. This is where “The Skaters” functions as a covert poetics, as good a statement as I have found on how Ashbery’s famously enigmatic poems work. The central image, a group of ice skaters on a winter day, illustrates the kind of spontaneous coordination that he is replicating, with each skater “elaborat[ing] their distances” and then returning to the mass of other bodies, indistinguishable from the next. This alternating motion speaks to a poem like a snowstorm, a poet whose genius is to recreate this effect. “Neither the importance of the individual flake,” he writes, “nor the importance of the whole impression of the storm, if it has any, is what it is,/But the rhythm of the series of repeated jumps, from abstract into positive and back to a slightly less diluted abstract.”

The mission, it seems, is to create a poem that is closer to the true experience of perception. “The carnivorous way/Of these lines is to devour their own nature,” the poem says of itself. “Leaving/Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still.” This is why Ashbery’s poems are often so difficult to decipher; the lines seem to evaporate the moment they are read, like a dream or a season leaving the mind with a determined impression but few specifics. The contours of a cloud, a one-room apartment tracing its angles, a feeling weary as a white sky.

I spent much of the fall trying to write a poem called “Hard Feelings,” collecting unusable phrases like “I’m as sad as I can” and “You just want to have someone else around.” Then as now, I wanted to create a testament to that indeterminate time, to feeling dissatisfied and confused, to not much happening. But to do this requires a return to the kind of travel-movement. Sentiments are monumentalized; certain details are exaggerated and others are left out. What speaks more to this romanticism than my effort not only to know “The Skaters” but actually to be in it?

“The Skaters” is preoccupied by the idea of “leaving out” and of which details survive — that narrative requires the intentional selecting of what will evoke feeling, and history, the “natural” erosion of what is unimportant. Both create inaccurate accounts, not because they are incomplete, but because their emphasis on particulars distracts from the anonymous repetitions that carry life’s true meaning. As Ashbery writes, “There is error in so much precision.” It sure is cozy, though, the cloak of memories and fantasies and possessions — “Through the years/You have approached an inventory/And it is now that tomorrow/Is going to be the climax of your casual/Statement about yourself,” he says in the last section of the poem. To make and remake ourselves. It’s only human.

Indeed, for all his proclaiming in “The Skaters,” Ashbery seems ambivalent about any attempt to escape the bounds of narrative, though he does want to rework it. “I am fascinated,” he writes, “with the urge to get out of it all, by going/Further in and correcting the whole mismanaged mess.” The poem resembles Ashbery’s description of Giorgio de Chirico’s surrealist novel Hebdomeros, with its central character, “a kind of ‘metaphysician’ who evolves through various landscapes and situations.” “In this fluid medium,” Ashbery wrote in his 1966 review of the novel, “trivial images can suddenly congeal and take on a greater specific gravity, much as a banal object in a de Chirico painting — a rubber glove or an artichoke — can rivet our attention merely through being present.” In the same way, the people and objects that occupy “The Skaters” don’t dictate the meaning of the poem, instead acting as momentary resting places for the reader’s attention.

Recently I found tucked under my mattress a page of lists I made in September: “Goals for This Week,” “What I Want To Happen This Week,” “This Week I Will….” I’d begun writing a lot of these letters, lists, and reminders to myself to allay existential panic. My favorite of that week’s lists is at the bottom of the page: “Uncertainty I’ll Allow For,” with its three items, “employment, friendship, love.” In post-grad school life as in poetry we must allow for some ambiguity; there is more than one right answer, if there’s an answer at all. The angst just doesn’t end.

It is lucky, then, that memory is as unsound as history or narrative — it helps provide the impression that things eventually get resolved. Even if I’m still living with the same unknowns, still crossing the same bridges and bumming in and out of the same coffee shops, looking back now, the fall’s uncertainty only says a cryptic but profound certainty. My memories point, if not at something, at least in the same direction. “Scarcely we know where to turn to avoid suffering,” writes Ashbery. “I mean,/There are so many places.”

Considering the geography of Missoula it is a lovely coincidence that “The Skaters” is in a collection titled Rivers and Mountains. The title refers to Chinese landscape scrolls; in an essay about space in poetry, Ashbery wrote of the perspective in these scrolls, “The incorrectly rendered space [turns] out to be something far more enchanting than space in the world could ever be.” This is something close to my purpose in stockpiling memories of this fall: to say something more precisely but less accurately, to see the whole expanse from one vantage. Hard feelings and uncertainty I’ll allow for. Something about a whiskey sky turning through the valley. A bench by the river in the sand-colored grasses.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about The Bachelor.

Photographs by Zoey Farber.

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In Which The Bachelor Is A Sight For Sore Eyes

Love Fool

by ALICE BOLIN

The contestants on this season of The Bachelor would like to emphasize that they’re not used to being around this many women. “I’ve always had more boy friends,” says one bachelorette in an interview. “I’m not a girl, if that makes any sense,” says another to the current Bachelor, Ben Flajnik. “I appreciate that,” he says.

We recognize this as the female misogynist’s standard line. They complain of “drama,” of women being cruel and catty, when of course they are the ones who have abandoned the communal duty of women to be kind to one another. Reality television is rife with these self-hating women — since the goal is often to portray them as petty and irrational, it helps to cast those who already see their fellow women that way.

This is part of what sometimes makes The Bachelor such a sorry display. This season the contestants target one woman, Blakeley Shea, 34, as being a slut — even though she has done nothing more than kiss Ben, who makes out with nearly all of them every episode. They make fun of her large breasts and her job as a cocktail waitress. “She’s the kind of girl your boyfriend cheats on you with,” says one contestant. When Blakeley, a former college softball player, excels in the latest episode’s baseball game, one of them says, “Who knew strippers could play baseball?” This is the first problem. These women have no respect for women.

But of course, the contestants tearing each other apart is only one attraction in the circus that is The Bachelor, in which women make lovesick idiots of themselves for our entertainment. The first episode features a parade of gimmicks, as the twenty-five contestants try to gain the attention of the singularly not-all-that Ben Flajnik, 28, who is like a goofier-looking Josh Groban with Paul Rudd’s voice.

One woman rides in on a horse. One comes wearing a massive hat, another a beauty queen’s sash. One contestant actually brings her grandmother, and Ben worries he’ll have to make out with her too. Emily O'Brien, 27, a PhD student in epidemiology, writes Ben an amazing rap — "Love is like disease, always spreading," she flows. "You can get it from a friend, you can get it at a wedding." One contestant whose name is Amber Bacon makes Ben lick her hand. "Did you know that was actually Canadian bacon?” she says.

Thus begins the season-long spectacle of indignities the women endure for the chance to date Ben, apparently the last man on earth. Ben takes upwards of twelve of them at a time on absurd "group dates," like downhill skiing in bikinis through the streets of San Francisco — because he’s looking for someone who’s up for anything, obviously. The contestants are made to perform a play written by children who may actually have promising futures in the entertainment biz. “Do a sexy dance!” they bark at the women during their "auditions." "Run in slow motion!"

It’s not only that the dates are ludicrous; it’s the glow of positivity all the traumatizing activities on the show are washed in. On a one-on-one date, Ben and a woman propel into a deep ravine. "Relationships are all about trust," says Ben; "I'm 'falling' for Ben," says the obviously terrified woman. Later she says it was the best day of her life. Most harrowing, though, is when Ben makes Emily the epidemiologist climb to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. "I'd rather do anything than climb up a bridge," Emily says before the date. After having a panic attack while teetering on a cable several hundred feet above the ocean, she is reflective. "A bridge takes two things that are separate and brings them together," she says. "And here Ben and I are, two different people from two different places, different backgrounds, and we’re coming together. On this bridge.”

The contestants have to constantly chatter about how lucky they are, how perfect Ben is, and how magical the experience on The Bachelor is. It’s necessary for addressing the show’s major problem: its desperate need for filler. The episodes contain not even close to the action needed to accommodate their two-hour timeslot — instead they rely on several redundant "Coming up on…" preview segments, the rose ceremonies that drag on and on, and useless host Chris Harrison who appears at the beginning and ending of every episode to reiterate the format of the show. They also linger for endless uncomfortable minutes on the sobbing faces of the rejected contestants who hiccup and wipe snot from their noses, wondering aloud what they did wrong, as their cycle of humiliation is complete.

But the women’s effusions don’t just help to fill out the eighty-five-minute episodes; it goes deeper than that. "I think Ben and I have a really special connection," the contestants all gush, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are filler. It is clear from the very beginning that a majority of them have zero chance of winning Ben’s heart — they must appear so invested in him in order to rescue the show from pointlessness. In fact, nine minutes into the first episode, when a woman appears and says, "Hi, I’m Courtney, and I’ve been modeling for the past ten years," it is clear the way the season will end.

"Courtney is like a statue made of marble,” Emily says. “It’s really beautiful, but it’s cold and hard on the inside." Courtney Robertson, 28, is this season’s frontrunner and its villain, which makes for a compelling combination. She is weird and easy to hate, scrunching her mouth, sipping her signature glass of read wine, and borrowing Charlie Sheen’s catchphrase "Winning!" to sinister effect. She is also the season’s most gifted shit talker. "I hope I’m a sight for sore eyes. Because after the date with Elyse his eyes are probably pretty sore,” she says in a creepy deadpan. The other frontrunner is Kacie Boguskie, 24, a sweet baton twirler from Tennessee. She and Courtney are predictably contrasting female archetypes — fawning and innocent versus beautiful and manipulative, Snow White versus the evil queen.

These two are bound to be the last women standing. Ben was dumped by Ashley Hebert on the last season of The Bachelorette after proposing to her, and there has been some pretty clear foreshadowing that he could walk away empty handed again. He will choose the evil Courtney over Kacie B. in the finale, and Courtney will refuse his proposal; Kacie B. has a lock on being the focus of the show's sister series The Bachelorette. Make no mistake: only the promise of this sad end, not some desire to take part in Ben’s “journey,” will keep us watching.

Of all The Bachelor’s offenses, I think the worst is its self-seriousness. The greatest sin in the world of she show is to be guarded — Ben talks constantly about being "open" and "available," always asks the women about their past romantic lives and rewards the ones who seem to reveal the most. What’s cruel about this is that it is a good idea to take your guard down when looking for love in the real world, but it is almost certainly a recipe for embarrassment and heartbreak on The Bachelor, where there is such a small chance of finding lasting romance, and such a large chance of looking really stupid.

At least Flavor of Love and the show’s other trashy cable cousins didn’t act as if they were helping their contestants to do anything other than be on TV; The Bachelor actually portrays itself as a beneficial, therapeutic, or even spiritual experience, which makes it the most cynical of them all. Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields once said that love songs were "very far away from anything to do with love," and that goes double for love TV shows. The Bachelor was never about love — it was created with the knowledge that heartbreak is hypnotic.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Agnes Varda.

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"My Boy" - Anneke van Giersbergen (mp3)