Under Albany

by Silliman, Ron

• ISBN13: 9781844710515
• ISBN10: 1844710513
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-11-15
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Summary

Small Press Traffic "Book of the Year 2004". This memoir provides an exquisitely rich exploration of the relation of context to reference, subtext to meaning, back story to presented experience, and composition to poetics. All of Silliman's work unravels and reforms in this exemplary and exhilarating act of attention, recollection, and reflection.

Table of Contents

Occupations; Questions in Philosophy; French with Tears

Raison d'Otre

Je-ne-sais-quoi

Noblesse oblige

Une blessure

Plus ta change, plus c'est la mOme chose

+ propos de rien

DTja vu

DTja vu

Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Evening

On Something

Circus Oz

The Developed World

Seen from a Train

Distance

Melbourne Cup Day

Late Summer : Sydney

Home Beautiful

Sunday Night

Grief

Garlands

What Light Is

Autobiographical

Metaphor

The Same River

The Story's End

His Hands

Left Hand

Right Hand

After a Line Abandoned by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Boarding School

Part II Domestic Elegies

What to do with the Evenings

God; What to do with the Evenings

'We are dark water' 'Thinned out by age'

You decided that

'Their green desires' Succedaneum

If the message on the piece of paper

Delight

Argument

Our Arguments

You were always

Bitch

Once I came home

Love & Anger; Last Chances

She scans her torch

Love Poem

Diurnal

We catch our flights

A Few Questions; Hours; A Perfect Heart; The Art of Happiness

Pointillism

Abstract Expressionism

Late Minimalism; Brief Lives; Singles; Covers; Manifest; Mid Life; Autobiology; Rubber Bullets; Ghostly; One moment please; Distance; The Last Summer; Facts of Life; The Field; Bird and Fox; Morning; Days; Hours; Night Fragments

For Maria; For Maria; 'It has no edges'

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

The event was nothing like their report of it. Working all day as a shipping clerk for PG&E in Emeryville, I was unable to get to the UC administrative building in which the students were holding their sit-in before the campus police locked the building at 5 p.m. For hours, I and several thousand other people milled around the building, singing songs from the civil rights movement along with the several hundred students indoors. People brought newly purchased plastic garbage cans filled with hot coffee, plus small buckets filled with birth control pills for the women now locked in. These were sent up ropes to the second floor balconies while film crews in the building's lobby turned their kliegs on us. The entire plaza had the air of a festival about it, with the very serious undertext of the presence of the police. I stayed until midnight, then headed home as I had another long day at work the following morning, so was not around when, at 4:00 a.m., Governor Pat Brown (at the urging of local officials who claimed that the offices were being trashed by demonstrators, which was not true) sent in the cops and over 450 students were arrested. The next evening, Brown was quoted by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News as declaring that students had been misled by outside agitators. To illustrate the concept, the screen showed the images of us on the building's steps outside, carefully raising buckets and cans up the ladders. I was on screen for all of five seconds. The following morning, when I reported for work, I was told that my position as stock clerk was "no longer needed."