I am pretty hopeless at transcribing drum solos, although I should be able to learn to do so since I can both read music and count. They go by too fast! I am happy enough to be able to count through them without losing the beat. A blue note record of Bud Powell ("Time Waits") playing his own compositions with Philly Joe Jones (and Sam Jones bass), that I have loaded unto my computer in the office. Each tune is between four and six minutes: I listen to each one four or five times, listening to the drum solos each time. I have the talent of being able to listen to the same music over and over again with little sense of tedium or fatigue. I can also set my "i-tunes" to play my entire music library in random order. Mediocre jazz played as background all the time is fatiguing, it is true.

***

Jordan Davis mentioned my mention of David Shapiro in my last post, reminding me to resume my reading of Poems from Deal. What did I mean when I said that Shapiro had not been impressive to me in the past? Certainly no disrespect. I find some typical New York school techniques there, and I obviously adore most of the poets in this group. What I want to get at is what distinguishes him from the others. I am challenged by a certain "inscrutable" quality.

I just got my copy of Ashbery's latest book, "Chinese Whispers." I've enjoyed his last three or four books more than I did his mid-80s work, which I continued to buy and read. He is increasingly charming in crepuscular modern fashion. He is no longer stereotypically difficult.

***

Reading some essays by Spanish novelist Juan Benet, I was struck by one on the author of the "Gulag Archipelago," in which Benet states, outrageously enough, that the existence of people like that (Solshenitzen, whose name I cannot spell correctly) justifies the Gulag, and that they should have never left him out of the camps. Benet also says that he tends to agree with the Soviet government in his assessment of dissident writers (this in an article written in the mid-1970s). There is absolutely no hint of irony in this essay, by the way. It seems to be motivated by pure bile at the thought of a Nobel prize being awarded a writer for purely political motives to a writer whom Benet does not respect. I dislike Joseph Brodsky's poetry (although it may be great in Russian for all I know), but I would never say that he should have been thrown in a labor camp for it. Suppose Augusto Pinochet happened to dislike Robert Bly's poetry (as I do). I would not then conclude that I shared Pinochet's literary tastes in many respects. How does Benet jump to such an obviously wrong-headed confusion of categories?