Inferno by Eileen Myles

Author:Eileen Myles
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-935928-04-1
Publisher: OR Books LLC
Published: 2010-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

My joke about the room I wrote in was that it looked like Goethe’s studio. In college I wanted to study Spanish but the line was long so I wound up studying German. By the second year we were already reading entire books. Werther was our first. To read The Sorrows of Young Werther in the original German when you’re young–if you were young like I was young. Well, I was just fucked. My incessant longing was now validated by the genius of the past. Even later when Frank O’Hara took pot shots at yearning in his famous essay Personism I felt like well he’s just being old-fashioned.

The summer I lived in the house I was actually part of a reading tour organized by Semiotext(e) that brought us to Goethe’s home, in Weimar.

Our host, Sasha Anderson, was a small dirty guy in leather jeans and sandals with an illustrious girlfriend–Rheinheld–long flowing blonde hair and her family had a barbecue for us in their vineyard. Millions of sausages were smoking away on a vast outdoor grille. Sylvère, who was Jewish–I think everyone was on the tour except me, but Sylvère had barely escaped the Holocaust as a child and at the barbecue he was having fits. On the whole tour, really. Some Jews can go to Germany but not Sylvère. And one by one, during the barbecue, we were led away alone into a small library and told by the cameraman and his friends to sit on a stool in front of a wall of decrepit gilded books. A light shone right in my eyes. The moment had come. I was being interviewed by German teevee.

How do you like Goethe? Do people in America think much about Goethe. I was actually very excited to answer the questions of the cameraman and his friends but it was my discomfort and ignorance that they wanted. My American stupidity. My knowledge was not of great interest to them. People don’t care I told them. They nodded knowingly.

Goethe’s studio was one of the rooms we got to peek into–across a rope. I remember his big black carriage filling the garage, his serene private garden out back and the great classical busts of his men friends that punctuated the house’s furnishings but I actually don’t remember the study. Who’s asking these questions anyhow. I think a poet’s study is just an idea. Wherever I’m writing, it is.

In Belfast my studio had extremely high ceilings with wooden beams and stark white stucco walls and large windows onto the front. The room was in fact the summer kitchen. It’s a landmark German farmhouse, a little gem Eden said. It cost us a million bucks. It was sort of cool that she told me.

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