Madison Morrison

2007-03-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

Sumalee and Friends, Jomtien, Thailand

2007-01-16T12:39:00.000-08:00

"MM lecturing at the Southeast Asian Graduate
Institute of Peking University"

2006-12-03T11:55:00.000-08:00

Thai boxing poster (detail)

MM's web (update)

2006-09-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

There are now introductions by Richard Beck to each of the books of The Sentence of the Gods at MM's web:

http://www.madisonmorrison.com/

2006-09-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

http://bentspoon.blogspot.com/2006/09/madison-morrison-68-pages.html

2006-05-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

notebook (from POPOPEINT)

http://groups.msn.com/POPOPEINT/

2006-05-26T09:19:00.000-07:00

(from POPOPEINT)

A Visit to Vietnam (Translated into Vietnamese)

2006-05-25T09:42:00.000-07:00

http://www.tienve.org/home/authors/viewAuthors.do?action=show&authorId=905

Trinh Thanh Thuy's translation (3 excerpts only) of A Visit to Vietnam (see here for the English:

http://madisonmorrison.blogspot.com/2006/01/cover-by-la-toan-vinh-httpwww.html )

Madison Morrison's REAL blog

2006-05-20T19:38:00.000-07:00

http://madisonmorrison.com/blog/

2006-05-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

EVERY SECOND

2006-05-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

Particolare e Universale (148 pages (in Italian))

published by Anterem Edizioni (Verona):

http://www.anteremedizioni.it/

2006-05-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

SOLUNA

SOLUNA: Collected Earlier Poems (Sterling Publishers Private Limited, New Delhi, 1989) 287 pages.

here's the blurb on the back:

"We want double vision from our poets, but Madison Morrison -- the first six volumes of whose lofty and unprecedented life's work are here collected -- is not about to leave it at that. He must persist until as many of the world's "appearances" as humanly possible, along with its multiple faiths and literary modes, have been called into play. In this ongoing binocular museum what we know is distanced, what we do not know is brought near, always with skill, erudition, and great good humor." -- James Merrill

2006-05-18T09:26:00.000-07:00

OR

Or, published by Tiger Moon Productions (Bellows Falls, VT), 1999 (46 pages) ISBN 81-86847-02-2

"With the movie camera's impersonality--at every angle undercut by the poet's heart--Morrison conducts our tour of Siam, recording glimpses of its ancient culture but focusing on its present-day life. Everything changes, he seems to say. We all seek something!-- a classic temple. Anything--a Coca Cola. From within her ever-unfolding lotus, sound the siren chants of Asia's modern mantras. Morrison blesses us with his innuendo yet passes no judgement." - Terry Kennedy

2006-05-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

MM'S REVOLUTION

MM's Revolution: a Menippean satire, published by East & West, 1998, 93 pages of English text plus another 100 or so pages of Chinese translation (ISBN: 957982842-3)

2006-05-18T09:24:00.000-07:00

HAPPENING

Happening, published by Sterling Publishers Private Limited (New Delhi, 1997) ISBN: 81 207 1989 1 (352 pages, hardcover) Rs. 500

"A compendious study of India, Happening belongs to a nineteenth-century tradition that embraces Champollion's Description de l'Egypte and Walter Hamilton's Description of Hindostan. Unlike their encyclopedic and interpretive methods, however, Morrison's technique is modern: cinematic registration, personal reminiscence, the interweaving of text with intertext, all to evoke ancient, medieval, colonial and present day India. With access to the University of Madras' collection of English language materials, the author spent a year transcribing sources that include classical text and commentary, social and political history, anthropological and cultural analysis. To this he adds his own experience of a great civilization." (from the inside front jacket flap)

2006-05-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

Scenes From The Planet (jacket by Giorgio Gaetano Adami)

Scenes From The Planet: In All Excelling Or Divine
published by Sterling Publishers Private Limited: http://www.sterlingpublishers.com (New Delhi, 2001) (414 pages, hardcover) ISBN 81-207-2404-6 (Rs. 600)

2006-05-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

"PATTAYA" (photo by Daniel Leon Dandoy)

2006-05-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

"Particular and Universal..." (in Korean)

2006-05-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

"Postmodern Trends in Art..." (in Vietnamese)

2006-05-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

I-35, Emporia, Kansas, 6:00 p.m., November 21. (from REALIZATION)

Das reale Abenteur (an e-mail to Peter Carravetta from Aug. 31/05)

2006-04-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

Peter,

Earlier I had copied you on a note about Michael Nerlich's study called Abenteur. At the time I was half way through. Now I have reached p.275 of this 400-page monograph, the first German book that I have read in its entirety for 40 years. So you will understand one reason why it is taking me some time to get through it.

Another reason, however (and the author may have sent me the book for precisely this reason), is that so much of his argument bears upon Sentence of the Gods. Now I have no idea of course what you intend to do in the final chapter of your book on postmodernism or why exactly you have chosen to include my work.

But I thought that I would at least share a paragraph of Nerlich's study with you, on the chance that it might be of interest to you as well. It certainly bears upon your earlier characterization of me as "scripting nomad." In Part X, his Section 1 is titled "Krise und Untergang des Ritterideals als Lebensnorm."

It begins with the following paragraph:

Es kann keinen Zweifel daran geben: seit Chrétien dem Wort aventure eine philosophisch-ästhetische Bedeutung verlieh, also seit dem 12. Jahrhundert, hat dieser Begriff samt der mit ihm verbundenen Begrifflichkeit wie Zufall, experiment, Neuheit/Innovation, Reise, Entdecken von Unbekanntem, Wandel, Mobilität, Überraschung, Neugierde (uns.) nicht aufgehört, das literarisch-künstlerische Nachdenken über die condition humaine im allgemeinem, über das künstlerisch- literarische Schaffen im besonderen zu bestimmen. Dies kann man - ansichts der Tatsache, daß diese Kunst - bzw. Dichtungs aventure immer wieder Partikular- Neues hervorgebracht hat - durchaus als movement de longue dureé, Bewebung langer Dauer, ja - falls es zu keiner Katastrophe kommt - perpetuum mobile bezeichnen.

There is a lot more where this came from, if you would like me to send a few pages.*

It has all got me thinking that I may have been a good deal more influenced by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which I lectured on at age 22 from the podium in Emerson Hall where Emerson had lectured, and which I subsequently taught in Oklahoma to little Huck Finns for twenty years) than I was aware of, or by all the adventure stories that precede it in the body of English literature that I had taken three degrees in at Yale and Harvard, or by El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, which I have lately been dipping into in the original, a book that I taught for 40 years in translation, and so on.

I am now trying to grasp exactly what Nerlich means by "das reale Abenteuer" in his chapter on Chrétien de Troyes. If I understand him correctly, he is connecting this lively medieval figure, along with many others, to the current phenomenon that we call "globalisation," in other words connecting the secularization of literature that begins in the late European middle ages with the commercial modern world. It is quite a breathtaking thesis and eerily related to my having read The International Herald Tribune from cover to cover for the past fifteen years, having guided my son's business career for the past dozen, and having traveled all over the world for the past forty.

I have taught in seven countries, lectured in fourteen, visited 64 and, as you know, now have 4800 recipients of my books in 108.

Would that the last of these was also a commercial relationship!

All best,

MM

*I offer one more example, from Part XII in which Nerlich draws upon a book by Benjamin Nelson called The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. Section 7 of this Part of Michael's argument is titled "Von der Ritterplage und dem Abenteur des Fernhandels":

Diese Form des Handels hat einem Namen, le commerce d'aventure, der Aventüre - oder Abenteuerhandel, der in Guillaume d'Angleterre [a medieval romance] - in der ersten Handelsreise in die Champagne - zunächst als klassiches commanda- Geschäft auftritt: der Kapitalgeber verleiht auf eigenes Risiko Geld an einen Händler, der Waren kauft und umschlägt und daraus seinen eigenen Gewinn, meist ein Viertel des Gesamtprofits abzieht, während der Rest an den Anleger bzw. Kapital- geber geht . . .

a link

2006-04-23T17:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.inst.at/trans/14Nr/severin14.htm

MM's Web

2006-02-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

The complete text of MM: The Sentence Commuted is now available at:

http://www.madisonmorrison.com

2006-02-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

Madison Morrison (photo by Jake Morrison)

for information on obtaining any of these works contact Madison by e-mail at:

madison_morrison@attglobal.net

or by postal mail at:

Madison Morrison
P.O. Box 22-106
Taipei, Taiwan

2006-02-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

REALIZATION (Anterem Edizioni, Verona, 1996) (originally published 1986, 1988) [156 pages]

2006-02-17T10:39:00.000-08:00

Bangalore Esightings (India Internet Ink, Bangalore, 2003) [ca. 40 pages]

2006-02-17T10:37:00.000-08:00

A Warfilm Is a Peacefilm (poems) (Thamarai Selvi Pathippagam, Chennai, 1999) (with Tamil translation) [22 pages]

2006-02-17T10:35:00.000-08:00

MAGIC (back cover) (The Working Week Press, Memphis, 2000) [140 pages]

2006-02-17T10:32:00.000-08:00

PARTICULAR AND UNIVERSAL (The Crane Publishing Co. (Taipei, 1999) [166 pages] [ISBN 957-0377-07-0]

2006-02-17T10:26:00.000-08:00

ENGENDERING (Cosmos Culture, Taipei, 2002) [originally published 1990] [180 pages]

2006-01-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

in re: "DIVINE"

2006-01-17T09:35:00.000-08:00

in re: "DIVINE"

LIFE

2006-01-11T15:57:00.000-08:00

cover photomontage by Laurance Emory

http://www.chanhtinhcuong.netfirms.com/newpage18.htm

2006-01-11T15:55:00.001-08:00

cover by La Toan Vinh

http://www.chanhtinhcuong.netfirms.com/

http://www.chanhtinhcuong.netfirms.com/vietnamtour.htm

http://www.chanhtinhcuong.netfirms.com/madisonweb.htm

2006-01-11T15:55:00.000-08:00

cover by Kim, Sang-Oon

2006-01-11T15:54:00.000-08:00

cover by Madison Morrison

http://www.chanhtinhcuong.netfirms.com/madisoninmacau.htm

2006-01-11T15:51:00.000-08:00

cover by Sandra L. Agens

2006-01-11T15:50:00.000-08:00

cover by Sandra L. Agens

http://www.chanhtinhcuong.netfirms.com/onpage.htm

Forwards and backwards to the center

2005-12-15T10:35:00.000-08:00

The aventure rubric for interpreting the Sentence I find very illuminating.
All its books in a sense express the special dynamic of "adventure."
Each of the 26 books, however, is also unique and therefore
different from the remaining 25. One way to emphasize
this variety is to read the Sentence simultaneously
from both ends toward its central point, which
occurs between the books of the diptych
Engendering Her
(reading forwards)
or
Her Engendering
(reading backwards).
Thirteen pairs result by reading simultaneously
forwards, from Sleep to Engendering,
and backwards, from Life to Her:
Sleep and Life
O and Excelling
Light and This
U and In
Need and Divine
A and Or
Revolution and Renewed
Each and Happening
Second and Possibly
Every and All
Magic and Regarding
Realization and Exists
Engendering and Her

Forwards and backwards to the center (cont.)

2005-12-15T10:19:00.000-08:00

The first two books, Sleep and Life, are at once correlative and opposed. Sleep (as Donne says) is a “little death,” but it also represents that greater life of the unconscious, wherein lies poetry’s source. In the forward reading, Life, the twenty-sixth book in the sequence, is the last in Sentence of the Gods, but in the retrograde reading it is the first. Life is the principle that the Sentence celebrates. In representing Life MM has chosen to emphasize those vital Northeast and Southeast Asian cultures that rival and may eventually supersede the European cultures. Life also includes interviews conducted in the USA and in Europe: in England, Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy). Its pieces about Oklahoma look back to the central sequence of books about the state (Engendering, the first half of Her and Exists). In Sleep the author is a mental traveler. Its surreal method predicts many other techniques in the Sentence.

In the second pair, O and Excelling, the former is based upon photography, the latter, upon cinematography. O is solar, its circle an emblem of the sun itself (or of the Helios within Apollo). It is sunny in disposition and presents for the most part daytime scenes. Insofar as its major sequences represent Chicago, Boston and New York, O is essentially American, as Excelling is essentially Chinese. Both titles are ambiguous. Does the “O” stand for a fullness, or for an emptiness? Is China excelling the world, or is MM excelling China? O journeys through time as well as space, its 60 poems corresponding to the 60 minutes in an hour, the 60 seconds in a minute. Excelling takes the reader by boat from Hong Kong to Shanghai, thence by plane to Congqing, up the Yangzi by boat, on to Chengdu and Kungming by train and from there to Guangzhou by plane. The two books’ geographies, Chinese and American, are limited to single regions.

In the third pair Light and This are both amalgamations. The first amalgamates day and night, as SOL and LUNA unite in a mythic, oneiric, alchemical synthesis. More artificially the second fuses ancient Rome and medieval Japan: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lady Murasaki’s Diary. Japanese and Roman history are here for the first time synthesized. Ovid is taken as solar, Murasaki as lunar. Ovid expresses the exuberantly naked sunlit dance of the Mediterranean; Murasaki, the perfumed pussy of East Asia. This occurs within the APHRODITE sequence; its solar, masculine “this” implies a lunar, feminine “that.” Life is greater than This, as the title of the trilogy, Life Excelling This suggests. But read the opposite way (This Excelling Life), This modifies Life (as does Excelling). Light culminates two sequences (Sleep O Light and A Need U Light). The two L’s, Light and Life are related, but so are Light and This, This and Light.

The fourth pair, U and In, is realistic, the first book satirical, the second deadpan. U is an urban idyll (as in Theocritus), In, a modern pastoral (as in Vergil). Scandinavia is no less exotic than Arcadia. U is a work of imagination, its 1000 lines composed one a day for as many days. In is a work of realistic in situ registration, one of two books with virtually no intertext. Both methods are severe and uncompromising, but both books are also joyously adventuresome. U was composed at night; In, during the day. U is set in a single country; In is set in four. U represents diversity within unity; In, unity within diversity. The Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Danes are alike but are also irreconcilably different. U describes a provincial town; In, national capitals: Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen, though the book also includes many provincial towns. U depicts five members of a nuclear family; In, four of the five Scandinavian countries.

The fifth pair, Need and Divine, is archetypal. Need imagines a myth, whereas Divine recapitulates an existing myth. Alexander and “she,” the two protagonists of Need (this second 1000-line poem composed one line a day for 1000 days) are deliberate archetypes. “Alexander” represents man, “she,” woman, as Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost or in the book of Genesis. Dante’s Commedia counters with Dante himself and the virgin Beatrice, to which in Divine MM counters with himself and Qian-hui. Need is an adventure, its plot, like that of U, unforeseen at the outset of composition. Divine follows an itinerary, beginning in Rome; traveling to Siena, Bologna and Ferrara; Venice, Verona and Florence; returning to Rome. And it refers to a larger myth: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Its seven cities are allegories. Divine is a book of daytime consciousness, Need, a book of dream, of dream within dream within dream.

The sixth pair, A and Or, is unusually dry. A represents the darkness of the moon. Or, alterity, both yokes Renewed and Divine and separates them. Semantically Or and A are incomplete. This siccity (dryness/thusness) contrasts with the haecceity of This and the opulence of Divine. The dance of seven veils that constitutes A (like the seven-day week in Chapter 6 of Revolution) echoes the numerology of the Sentence at large, with its seven stages. A’s number is nine (81, its number of pages in manuscript, served to complete the 365 required for SOLUNA’s magnus annum). Nine times nine is also three to the fourth power. Or’s three principal sorties echo the three sorties of Don Quixote (and of Possibly); like the Comedy (and like Divine) it is tripartite. Unlike Divine, however, Or is secular. To its three major sorties are added three minor outings in Bangkok, Thailand’s modern capital, and one to Ayutthaya, its ancient capital.

The seventh pair, Revolution and Renewed, includes two studies in comparative cultural anthropology that take as their objects of investigation mature civilizations. Revolution, in its first four chapters establishes four settings: America Today, Ancient China, Revolutionary France and France Today. Progressively these are combined, two each in the next four chapters, three each in the final four. Renewed studies three loci of Egyptian history: Alexandria, the Nile and Cairo. The Hellenistic revival, the Roman appropriation of ancient Egypt and the rise of Islam provide its themes. Revolution is political but it also embeds Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist, along with Democratic, doctrine. Renewed is contemporary in its observation but comparative in its study of past and present. Revolution is a Menippean satire that includes many genres: diary, conte orientale, postmodern novel. Renewed elaborates its material into a new genre.

The eighth pair, Each and Happening, as befits epic, is concerned with history, but otherwise the two books are antithetical. Whereas the latter is a modern epic of India, the former bears a zany relationship to history. Happening interlards its primary text with early historical accounts of India. Each, though it includes transposed versions of World Wars I and II (along with other European history), is based in the main on an avant-garde text of Raymond Roussel’s: the Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique, a poem concerned neither with Africa nor with his earlier novel, Impressions d’Afrique. MM relies not on its text, which he refrained from reading, but on illustrations for the text commissioned by Roussel to fill out the pages of a private edition. Happening provides a realistic counterpart to this imaginative strategy, tracking in great detail the itineraries of the author and his supplementary reading in search Indian reality.

The ninth pair, Second and Possibly, is concerned, in the one instance, with the past, in the other, with the future. Second imitates Homer’s epics (and, in a coda, the person of Vergil), Possibly imitates the person of Cervantes, who is the hypertext of Possibly, as Dante is of Divine and Ovid, of Renewed. To the hypertext of Homer Second adds the intertexts of Iliad and Odyssey, the subtext of Vergil, Homer’s greatest imitator, and the pretext of Milton, who serves as a bridge between Homer’s epics and the Bible, the subject of Every, the other book in the diptych. Every Second traces a route from Israel to Turkey, through the Aegean islands to the Peliponnisos and thence on to Naples. Possibly traces a transatlantic route from Miami to the Amazon, thence to four other South American countries, and on to Spain and Portugal. Possibly is concerned with the fictive and the possible; Second, with how to follow great precedents.

The tenth pair, Every and All, occurs within a non-consecutive sequence: A, Each, Every, Engendering, Exists and All, thus leading us philosophically from Quine’s “existential quantification,” the positing of A, to everything, das All, the Cosmos. Every occurs at the midpoint of this process. The book studies an unsympathetic pair of historically related religions, monotheistic Judaism and Christianity. All embodies, and so expresses, the highest reach of the polytheistic trimuthi, which begins with Brahma, the Creator, continues with Vishnu, the Sustainer, and concludes with Shiva, the Destroyer. Every is part of the HERMES sequence, in which classic religious texts are interwoven with in situ description. All, which also initiates APHRODITE, culminates the three books of HERA concerned with the American landscape, texts that lack intertexts but take as their subtexts dynastic modes of Chinese landscape painting.

The eleventh pair, Magic and Regarding, is likewise drawn from the HERMES and HERA sequences, though Regarding, like All (which also expresses Aphrodite), embodies not only Hera but one of her brothers, Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, and shadows Vishnu. Regarding and Magic are related in their concern with the Self, which Magic defines by a process of autobiography, whereby MM traces his life backwards from age 14 to conception, then forwards from age 15 to 28, its narrative interweaving, in Part 1, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in Part 2, the Poimandres, a text drawn from the neoplatonic Corpus Hermeticum. Regarding has no intertext, but it depends distantly on the subtext of Southern Sung landscape painting to limn the mighty landscapes of New Mexico (as All had depended on Ming, and Exists on Yuan, subtexts to represent the landscapes of Arizona and Oklahoma). Regarding embodies the Self in Nature.

The twelfth pair, Realization and Exists, represents Becoming and Being. Both books are tripartite. Realization takes us from Norman, Oklahoma to Houston and back, to Boston and back, and to San Francisco and back, interweaving three Indic texts: the Upanishads, the Dhammapada and the Bhagavad Gita. Exists is set in Oklahoma but excludes Norman (see Engendering) and Oklahoma City (see the first half of Her). It includes Oklahoma landscapes, along with glimpses of Tulsa and Lawton. Is realization a three-fold process? The Upanishads define the principles of Brahman and Atman, the Pali Dhammapada, Buddhist morality, whereas the Gita gloriously combines both spirituality and morality. Is existence three-fold? The city, town and countryside of Exists suggest as much. Realization, with its vast geography, represents an extensive treatment of the USA; Exists, limited to one state, an intensive treatment of Oklahoma.

The thirteenth pair consists of Engendering and Her, which form the diptych that joins the halves of the Sentence. Reading forwards, Her is engendered by Realization. Reading backwards, Her and Engendering modify Realization. This triptych is part of a triptych of triptychs that begins at the juncture of APHRODITE and HERA and concludes at the end of HERMES: All Regarding Exists, Her Engendering Realization, Magic Every Second. In Her MM engenders an archetype of the feminine. In the diptych Khmer, along with Greek and Chinese, traditions are juxtaposed. Formally, the study of Norman, Oklahoma is cast in prose, the study of Oklahoma City, in verse. The second part of Her returns us to prose but retains the sonnet’s template of octave and sestet, here reversed. As Engendering reconciles Confucius and Lao-zi, so Her marries myth and science. In various ways the book epitomizes Sentence of the Gods.