Smitten by fame

I know I railed against the worship of celebrity in the previous post, and be assured I meant every word of what I had to say regarding the general view that such
mindless adoration reduces us individually and diminishes us collectively. There's been thirty years plus of reading a wide swath of social criticism, from Marx, Adorno through Mills, Mencken and Vidal that's given my gut feeling a theoretical, if
densely phrased base. None of what I've said is original, I might say, though a phrase or paragraph might keep the torch lit a while longer. And yet I have to confess that tonight I am working an event at a local bookstore here in San Diego,
and that for all my objections against the the religion of fame that I am looking forward to meeting the acerbic and beautiful New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
She'll be appearing for the paperback edition of her recent book Are Men Necessary? My integrity is comprimised, and I am willing to be a slave, at least temporarily, for the smart and funny lady.

A week without Celebrities

It would be a fine Holiday gift if print, broadcast and internet media gave us a week without celebrity "news" or gossip and give us a chance to consider lives of less mythical proportions.

After all is said and done, someone like Jennifer Aniston is no more interesting than the bowl of cereal that sits in front of you each morning. Probably less so. But given the way this obsession with the increasingly banal coverage of the famed and moneyed, are we that far from stalking celebrities should paparazzi chance upon JoLo tying a shoe, or Matt Damon being told by counter help that the CD he wants is out of stock and then foaming, fuming and gasping at the impossibly demanding pressures celebrities have heaped upon their special lives? The possibility of seeing or reading about the over-renowned having tantrums , among other things, gives us the thrill of seeing ourselves as others would see us if we were given to
having breakdowns in ridiculously public places. I might guess that it assures us
the melt down and other egocentricities are okay after all. The inner child never takes the afternoon nap.

Why is it that we anguish collectively over whether Robert Downy is able to revive his film career and forget our personal obligations as citizens by failing to show to vote in elections, or offer our services to projects in our community that can really improve the lives of others. It comes down to selling papers, of course, but the level to which our obsession with celebrity has advanced suggest a religious intensity, a love of icons and their status among the heavens, which is precisely what corporate powers want us to become, passive investors in entertainment and distractions to keep their means of production running and in their firm control and to forgot about how to change the reality that confines us in grim and grey banality.

Shame on Alfred Corn

"Windows on the World", a poem written by Alfred Corn and published in Slate on September 11, 2003,is an ill conceived poem commerating the attack on the World Trade Center that would seem to confirm the skeptic's view that poets are willfully suffering narcissts who think everything in the world is in play in order to disturb their peace. In other words, to fuck with them. It's strange, odd, perverse, and somewhat immoral to write a poem using the 9/11 attack as a pretext to write another self-infatuated poem that really is more about how much the writer thinks about himself and his assignation as a "poet"; whatever the goddamned what Corn puts on his tax return as "occupation" has to do with the still barely speakable horror this day has come to mean is beyond any sense I can find, and worse, it is beyond anything useful to others.

This is a wandering and traipsing along the subject matter like a drunk tourist gawking at the bizarre ways of the big city, a laughable and loathsome tour of Corn's intellectual baggage. Connecting the ruin of the WTC with the crashing of Windows operating system is a ploy him to remain a thousand miles from any connection with real emotion; it is relentlessly ironic and snobby in its form as a poem. The subject matter, the real horror is aestheticized out of mind the way a narcotic lulls one into a stupor and then a nod against a world that still must be faced and made sene of.

Corn does none of that at all, but what he does do is give us a long, wavering and arrogantly ambivalent stretch of muddled semiotics where everything is a straining reach, a forced association, a willful perversion of real imagistic reach. Had the subject not been so grim and disheartening, this would seem more parody than anything else.

This poem angers me to no end. If Corn was paid for this piece, he should feel honor bound to donate the sum to a cause that actually gives hope to others in the human community. Following that, he might quit whatever teaching job he as in the instruction of writing and get a job in the receiving area of a Salvation Army Thrift store.

Gregory DiPrinzio's Canary Sings the Hits

Although it threatens at first to become a sentimental gush, Gregory DiPrinzio's poem"Remember Baby?"is a nice surprise, a poem clear and clever and creating a sweetly constructed vernacular which makes the small intimacies between the narrator (who I assume is male) and the woman real, tactile. It reads like a belated postcard to an ex wife, a recounting of events after strife and turmoil where the wounds have healed and sufficiently scarred the soul and now there is only recourse to maintain a resentment or to laugh at what was said, what was sought. This poem is neither confession nor blame-placing, but rather recollection. There is a crucial difference.

There's a bittersweet quality that's appealing , alluring for the fact that just enough information and characterization is mentioned in the memory; although we ostensibly come in in the middle of a conversation, the situation is coherent, the narrator's monologue affectionate and insinuating all at once:

At first the house was so quiet you could hear the songs
no one was singing and you wanted company,
so you went down to the pet store and bought a canary.
You told the boy you wanted one that sings:
no bird in a silent blue-funk, no washed-up has-been
crying into his water dish.

This is as lovely as it is plain spoken, the description of the house empty of human sound and the solution of going to the pet store for a canary. This is a rush of detail, with all manner of knowing detail and action laid out in an idealized
speech . Remarkable, too, is Gregory DePrinzio's
deft touch with item and incident in the way he has the choice of canary reflect what is the dear woman in this poem fears, "no bird in a silent blue-funk, no washed-up has-been crying into his water dish." This is rather masterful, a salient element of anxiety made tangible without portentous and unwieldy metaphors and cliches that would clumsily botch the description of a more complicated and denser state of internal affairs. This is a confection that is spun and layered with a master's
sense of grace. Cheever couldn't have described a better scene of man/woman awkwardness any better, and Hemingway would have admired the exactitude of the phrasing. A male world, I would suppose, but there is poetry and beauty here none the less. For a change we have a male not moping over the failure of a relationship, but rather giving his account of what he's seen and thought of it. This is not a negoiation for a seduction, but a conversation that has continued after the sparks have gone out and the music has soured. This is a relationship that continues in some form, in grudging maturity.

DePrinzio sticks with the symptoms, the mannerisms, the glaring contradiction of what's avowed and what is actually done, revealed in an atmosphere where
a friend, a confident, lays out a memory. I am attracted to the absence of malice here; a fondness undistorted by lust or obsession emerges as the narrator goes further with the tale, citing the bird's name as Leo and how wearisome his songs became. More beautifully arranged details:

...Often
you dropped the purple cloth over his cage,
closing the curtain in the middle of his set,
but still he couldn't take a hint...


or

The cage
kept getting closer to the window, the sliding
doors kept getting left a little more open
as Leo pounded away at the standards
to an empty room, or competed with the stereo.

The tone is comic , the telling is unvarnished but tempered, and there seems, under the irony and exasperation, a feint hope that the woman, the girl friend, the ex wife might put the pieces together and gain an insight about how to stop making her life miserable. This is guess work, to be sure, since we appear to come into the middle of a conversation that had been going on awhile before we entered the the scene as eavesdroppers, but what is left out makes for the kind of speculation and wondering that gives us a richer experience. There is a shock of recognition here, slight as it might be; there are more than a few readers, I would wager, who had a sudden recollection of small matters with their wives, girl friends, life partners, the things said when the rest of the world was absent, that one carries with them and has little opportunity to reveal. DePrinzio's poem was a key that unlocked one of the doors in my available memory, and I mean that in a good way.

Maynard G.Krebs, America's Premier Existentialist

Machiavelli is said to have coined the subtle curse "May you live in interesting times", surely an extra jab at the dimwits he'd have been insulting who would be slow to realize that "interesting times", generally speaking, are the domain of periods of unflagging disaster. One would imagine a man in his living after the ceiling has fallen around him deciding finally that he needs to call the roofer for an estimate. So we are in interesting times with respect to the Iraq war, as unmitigated a catastrophe as the U.S. government has gotten us into. And now Hurricane Katrina, water logging and virtually destroying New Orleans, with the response from the Federal government being sluggish, half-witted, ill-prepared. To coin a phrase, it was as though we had Gilligan running the show from the TV Land archives. I made that remark to a friend the other day, as doubtless, millions had as well as we all witnessed the terror unfold from our TV screens. We were in a hand basket just a half mile from Hell's gates and buffoons and lesser thugs were in charge of those agencies that were supposed to help citizens in dire times, in a grievous emergency.Gilligan.Irony seems the only way a quizzical God can speak to society as fragmented, distracted and functionally insane as we often time again. Actor Bob Denver, who played the character on Gilligan's Island for three years in the Sixties, has died at age seventy. It was not a show I ever liked, not then, and not now, not even out of some gross romanticizing of the decade, but the surname did become synonymous with fucking up, falling apart, goofing off, a display of genius for doing precisely the wrong thing at the most crucial instance of an emergency.I preferred Denver as Maynard G. Krebs from Dobie Gillis, an earlier show where his character was a hipster par excellence, a jazz-loving, intuitively-inclined White Negro, but without the mind-expanding violence or star-moving orgasms. Krebs was a latter-day Candide in tow with Dobie Gillis's reverse Panglossian shroud; no matter how confounded Dobie found himself week to week, Maynard would appear and find something uniquely wonderful about the particulars and the world it existed in to remind his good friend. Not that anything he had to say was appropriate or useful as a curative for Dobie's gathering cluster of blue notes, but there was something sublime in the way Maynard G.Krebs saw the world as a series of moments that were unique and which needed to be appreciated for the surprise each waking hour brings us. Maynard was hardly a theorist of anything, but he was a better man to have around in a moment of crisis. This is a better legacy for Bob Denver. You have to honor a man who's best actorly creation explained that the "G" in his name stood for

Walter!

Frank Rich and David Plotz Fill in a Vacume

Photographer Thomas Hoepker was one of hundreds of his trade who worked on September 11, 2001, getting the images that would help us define a momentous day in our history. A photograph Hoepker withheld, pictured, has caused something of a stir in the Pundocracy whose members like to reduce complexity to tasteless and easily passed morsels. Frank Rich of the New York Times invests the shot with these words:
"What he caught was this: Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American. In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust themselves off and keep going explains both what's gone right and what's gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds itself in today."

David Plotz of Slate.com found Rich's summary distasteful and responded in opposite adjectives here.The fact of the matter is that we don't know what these people were talking about at that instance when they turned their gaze away from the smoking Manhattan skyline and toward each other. It's striking in contrast to the host of dramatic framings we've become accustomed to seeing in relation to 9/11; there is an eerie calm here, an image of people who seem to have stolen a moment for themselves to reflect, ponder, digress among themselves while the rest of the world collapses on itself.

All the, what were they saying? We don't know, and we cannot know for sure, and the lack of documentation makes some on the public soap box to tell us what it is they see in the details (or the lack of them) , later to be followed by yet another hack with a megaphone taking the opposite tack, emphasizing the same details (or ones he imagines) to suggest an opposing qualities. Disengaged? Debating vital issues? Bored and indifferent?Shocked and outraged? All the evidence, such as it is, is there in David Friend's photograph,and it strikes you, after reading Frank Rich's mandarin claims about this being a country that likes to move on and David Plotz's assertion that this is evidence of Civic debate, that we haven't the slightest clue, not the faintest shade of a hint to what these folks were talking about, nor what they felt seeing New York seem to give itself up to fumes and flame.

Idylls of the cave, to be sure, and one assumes smart men like Rich and Plotz have taken a variation to Intro Philosophy. I suspect they have and attribute this phony controversy to deadline pressure and the irrational notion that one must say something significant on a significant anniversary. So much eloquence and banality has come and gone in the five years since the attack that every truism has been mined, every fresh expression of outrage, grief, hope, patriotism has been formulated and put forth that there's a desperation to devise fresh metaphors, new simulacrums through which our rusty platitudes can be channeled. Centering on the photograph and it's alarmingly un-alarmed image would seem the perfect dust storm over.

But we don't know what they were thinking, nor what was said, and the suppositions of Rich, Plotz and other smart guys who might join this faux fray are engaged in undertakings that Daniel Boorstin described in in his 1962 book "The Image", a deft, precise and early description of how news organizations willfully create non-events to cover in order to sustain themselves as an economic entity. One may mention Baudrillard and his limitless meanderings, but this is something that is closer to a Don DeLillo novel, and is especially re-mindful of White Noise, wherein two department chairmen, one the head of the Department of Hitler Studies and the other the director of Elvis Research, confront each other for a colloquium.

What they wind of doing in front of students from both departments is citing various random factoids about Hitler and Elvis, the smallest scraps of information, the most arcane and useless tidbits only intense research could yield, all to no obvious purpose, nor effect. But everyone is happy and glad that reasonably sound and sane summations were uttered, however untroubled by a crucial absence of context. Rich and Plotz are people who are paid to say intelligent things about important subjects, and speak they did. But at the end of their respective days I can't help think that they're aware their words regarding this photograph were extensions of wishful thinking, and five years after the attack on the towers they, like the rest of us, are still reeling.

9/11

Five years after the attack and I've said and written nothing that equals this poem
I managed to get out between horrified periods watching the Towers burn and collapse. Suffice to say that I will just publish the poem here, five years later. I have nothing to add.--tb
__________________________________________
Rain of any kind

Everything is different
yet nothing really is

in the center of lives
hanging on every word

crackling over phone lines
and wireless transmissions

voiceless where smoke, glass,
the dust of humanity rises in billows

and curls and laces and balloon obscenely
where it seemed the center of the world

was a wealth of words and
sleep after hard work in the

twin aspirations of family dinners,
laughs, tears only when it was

the rain we cried about
when our plans were vacations,

escapes out of town,
toward the wonder of the world,

But everything is changed,
yet nothing changes at all

in the whitened streets choked
with the burning heart of

passion igniting twin spires that
fall onto itself, completely, like

a folding table over burdened with
ideas of desire that give up and

blow up and send us running toward the river,
into hallways, behind gates again,

the wrath of our aspirations gives up
its ideas of settling into chairs or sinking

into cushions while TVs tell us that we
all wear the black hat even

in our best week, yeah, right,
The center of the night, when clouds clear

the arc of the moon
and the crying children

and men is heard coming from cell phones,
face up in the dust,static and batteries going dead,

there are too many people to
say good bye to,
our city smolders on the river,

the moon rises over the skyline,
a hand is clenched and now two hands are clenched

and a rag is dragged across the
furrows of our brow as

every tool that was ever waved and plied and made to align a
home and a store front in the places where

our joy and our speech spoke the many tongues
we were blessed with and

sought to keep alive and on fire,
as we roll up sleeves and

make the world flesh again, a tall and visible pride that
argues with itself in many tongues speaking

all of the alphabets that fell on the world,

we go on
we go on,

and go on into the business that is the worth of the life
that was here filled with commotion of a life

that you either want to have forever
or want to kill

horribly in its sleep
while the children watch, screaming, I say

we go on because we must,

Everything is different
and it hasn't changed at all,

why we must go on
and take back the sky and its promise of

sun,
birds, and
rain of any kind.