Miami and the Seige of Chicago.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago
By Norman Mailer
(New York Review Books)

We've all heard the remark used too often to describe an egocentric's prerogative to to be self-consumed and reticent to acknowledge the rights and opinions of fellow citizens: " It's his (her)world, we're just living in it..." There are infinite variations and elaborations , all headed for the same punchline no matter the navigation the teller chooses, with hardly an improvement on the insight. The phrase, in fact, is stale and in need of retirement.
The phase had been used recently in a chat I had recently with someone regarding the re-release of Norman Mailer's account of the 1968 Republican and Democratic Conventions, and the mention made me want reach for the imaginary lever for the equally imaginary trap door down which the utterer of petrified phrases would fall, the bottom chamber of which they would remain until they appreciate that cliches are no substitute for an original aside, a choice metaphor, a wild ride of associations that prove that one has been paying attention to the events about them. Paying attention is precisely what the literary journalist in his nonfiction writings, and what Miami and the Seige of Chicago (blessedly reissued by NYR Books)shows is that for all his self-obsession, Mailer was no mere narcissistic punk considering the world his realm and its inhabitants his subjects. What gives the narrative its tension is Mailer's knack for addressing the world as he thinks it used to be what it ought to become and then confronting blunt facts that won't bend to his wishes, give in to his whims, follow a script he might have written. Mailer is a counter puncher, to use his parlance, someone who reacts with a mind that brings details , thesis and counter thesis , call and response into spinning loops of image-saturated language. Miami/Seige , like a good amount of the nonfiction Mailer wrote during the sixties and seventies, is a richly nuanced , feverishly grandiloquent mid century reversal of Whitman's latter day desire to contain multitudes and find himself in each breath , phrase and circumstance of every American's story; Mailer, an early idealist who wanted to forge a revolution in the consciousness of the nation, as he announced in Advertisements for Myself, refuses bitterness and despair when his designs become moot and embraces ambivalence and irony instead. This makes for a desireable place from which to wrestle with the things that irritate his senses and insult his intelligence.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Shane Black, the screenwriter behind the Lethal Weapon franchise, comes up a decade later deciding he wants to give the buddy movie thing a new twist, like Tarantino. That is to say fatally hip, self-aware, deconstructive and distracted, fitfully amused by its own absurdity. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which Black wrote and directed, is that movie, with a premise worthy of Elmore Leonard (which I won't bother to summarize here) but which gets lost in cleverness, cute tricks, and smirking flashiness. Imagine Oliver Stone directing this mess, with as many gratuitous PoMo interruptions, witless edits and grandstand mugging for the camera. Leonard has all manner of convolutions and twists and bizarre bits of business, but his novels are little masterpieces of craft and, lest we forget, storytelling and his ability to create characters and dialogue make the strange world of the criminal mind a fascinating place to observe. There is that observation of craft for all of Leonard's weirdness, which at times can make for splendid film diversions, like Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, and Out of Sight.

But not always, with last year's adaptation of an earlier Leonard novel, The Big Bounce is the case in point; good crime novels require good scripts, as good looks and pretty locals alone won't create something we care about. The crucial flaw in The Big Bounce was fairly mindless, let us say the arbitrary shift of the novel's location from Leonard's native Detroit to Hawaii, which someone thought would be a better backdrop for turning the gritty novel into a romantic comedy. It was a rudderless enterprise in all, without rhythm or snap, highlighting Owen Wilson running low on whatever beach- bum charisma he'd trading on for the last half of the Nineties, and sadly the avuncular Morgan Freeman with little to do but look wise, bemused and entirely non-threatening. The best news from that effort, assumedly, is that the producer's checks cleared for Mr. Leonard. Kiss Kiss...is a sometimes amusing, visually busy effort that is graced by some good dialogue,but chokes by a sense that everyone is laughing at their own joke.

The punchline is never delivered. Which makes this movie a shaggy dog story, all without the zen "aha". Robert Downey is fine, though. Sober and confused, just what his part called for. Here's to seeing him in better movies. Val Kilmer is a homosexual private detective named Gay Perry, no kidding, and is wonderful in a slow boil performance; with all the flashy cuts and ragged edges to suggest a faint idea of self-referential ugliness (too much motion, not enough music) Kilmer has understated fun, and delivers the best line I've heard in a film in 2005. When asked by Downey's character if his Dad loved him, Perry replies that he didn't know but "...he used to beat me in Morse Code, so maybe I didn't missed it."Kilmer appears to have a developed a fondness for the weird character, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.

Pounding the Poetry Beat

By Ted Burke
Steve Gehrke is a wonderful poet, a fine lyric intelligence who is brave enough to investigate issues of art and aesthetics in ways that suggest that our vanity is more wrapped up (so to speak)in our creation of pretty images than we were led to believe on those grade school field trips to the county art museum. Chosen for for Slate by poetry editor Robert Pinsky in November of 2005, it is not something you could easily warm up to, which is Pinsky's style. Gehrke gets to the heart of the artist's obsession with the image as a hedge against aging, of forestalling any hint or sign of his or her inescapable death. Gehrke understands the outer edge of aesthetic fixation, and in his poem "Self Portrait; Masterbating (after Egon Schiele)" we understand how the up close examination of skin, it's folds, it's unexpected contours and deviations from the perfect moment of perception can become sticky.

Our painter, aged, flabby, slow to respond either with his art or his body to stimulations that formerly would have sent him raging with inspiration and the need to cast his vision into the world, now confronts himself wizened and not wiser) save for an idea that youth is wasted on the young)and finds his gaze turned from the world he sought to remake in his image , but upon himself, his body a failing range of fleshy, wrinkles, folds of old muscle, flaccidness itself. This is masturbation as a way of remembering when the gesture, the movement, the inspiration of youth was effortless, boundless, and the reward was an overload of sensation that was reward enough for the intensity.

This is not my favorite subject matter to read, but I admire Gehrke's skill to set this potentially tasteless scene in a kind of writing that is sympathetic without a miss step into bathos or apology. Personally, I'd rather re-read Dorianne Laux's poems about giving a blow job--the subject is a better fit, so to speak, for my view of myself in the world--but the present poem commands respect. That is a poem whose scenario I could see myself in. Truth told, I see myself in Gehrke's poem as well, and all the tangled issues one can imagine it knots up ever further. It's just that I prefer Laux's wonderful words of adoration for her man. Gehrke's rumbling has at least the benefit of being well done.

Dickinson, syntax, the poem that does not get written down

By Ted Burke

There's an intriguing discussion over on Slate's Poems Fray forum regarding Emily Dickinson's condensed visions and the use of syntax to achieve her odd and impressive effects. Poet and professor Paul Breslin argues that there 's an underappreciation of Dickinson's mastery , and rewrites the poem somewhat as if it were a single sentence, furnishing the missing words to make the poem a coherent example of her inner motions. I think that there might more to it.

Syntax is key in getting to the things Dickinson mused and murmured over, but I'm not inclined to think of a many of her poems as single sentences with the connecting articles and transitional qualifiers removed . I'd think that hers would be a poetry of longer sentences that had been scissored and had their parts arranged in abrupt, quizzical verbal eruptions. Her dependent clauses sometimes hit you in the head like a flying rock you didn't see coming, that shingle that conks you on the noggin when you're trying to repair the rain gutter.

The actually poetry for much of her work would be the unwritten empathy between her lines and cohering strategy a reader creates on the spot to translate, literally, her language into a diction that a contemporary fan can understand.

We have a situation that might not be dissimilar than that of Ezra Pound's translations of Chinese poetry, where he was not translating directly from the original language but rather modernizing, re-writing another translation. He had , in essence, not done a translation as much as written another, unique poem altogether, in pursuit of a verbal ideal.

Eliot, aware of Pound's habit of remaking literary ideas in his own image, referred to his editor as the creator of Chinese Poetry; it isn't a bad thing, of course, but the results are brilliant other than what's been claimed by Pound or his early champions. For Dickinson, her intriguing impressions, her conflated monologues, her faint but evocative traces of interior complexity, often times results in a brilliance that is exterior to her own writing, that is, the genius of the reader responding earnestly.
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I don't disagree that Dickinson's poems are fragments and shards of what she might have been thinking about in lifetime seclusion; the habit of mind she displays in the poems is indicative of someone who's developed their own lexicon and signifiers that are sealed against obvious interpretations, a short hand that, in the context of the poems, are not elaborated upon. This enigma is a large part of the allure her work has , and a I think a great deal of her greatness resides in the legacy of interpretation that her small stanzas have provoked.

Whether we've written in done in essay for or have contemplated the consequences of the dashes and asides in private, we find ourselves so furiously "filling in the blanks" and providing end notes to suggest context to the poems that there exists, in fact, a secondary literature that rather seethes, flows and weaves brilliantly, sloppily, energetically through large portions of the Western Canon; rather much of Dickinson's poetry gets lost as comprehensible statements and are converted for, say, more recent generation of response that cannot help but leave Dickinson and her world behind and instead discuss her work against contemporary conditions and philosophical drift. She is not a little like Bloom's,Shakespeare, casting a shadow a younger writer cannot step wholly from under.

The Poet as Interior Decorator

"In Another Country" is a big , comfortable chair of a poem to write, a familiar and over upholstered seat in the middle of a crowded room where the poet can plop and sink into the cushions, gaze at the books and ephemera surrounding here, musing, or rather half musing, on a snail-paced account of the week that is more wistful than touching, brittle rather than robust. Mazur has written of being dislocated before and has done some interesting things with the idea of culture shock within the larger stretches of one's own culture meeting up with minor key alienation to produce a sense of fleeting anxiety.This, though, is a return too many to the same well.

The writing is shiftless, too cute--are we really supposed to think that her Houston students are such hicks that they shyly steal gazes at her mismatched shoes in the assumption that this is a fashion trend from the East Coast?-and smug. Not that Mazur is smug herself, but there is a tone and unapologetically disregard for thematic tightness where her comfort level for the details she is sifting through, highlighting and making half-formed asides about excludes the others in attendance, the readers. There's not a poet alive who hasn't written reams of poems one might consider "practice runs" or "finger exercises" that prepare one for a substantial bit of writing, and here Mazur suffers the embarrassing, albeit nonfatal indignity of mistaking her notes for a poem for the poem itself.She is a more interior designer here than poet, moving the furniture from one corner to the next, bringing in new pieces, refusing to toss anything out; someone might tell her that it's a bad habit to exhibit one's erudition in the form of formula name dropping

I sat at his oak desk trying to write,

ate at his table, holding his fork in my right hand,

turned the pages of one of the books,

then another, from his alphabetized shelves:

Mandelstam. Merwin. Milosz.

O'Hara. Petrarch. Pound.

It's fitting she ends the poem that she ends the poem with a paraphrase of an old joke relating to the mismatched shoes she stunned her Houston students with

—But those shoes, the maroon and the blue:

 as the joke goes, I had another pair, just like it, at home.

Likewise, it's likely she has a dozen poems in her files just like this one, earnest gatherings of incidental autobiography and tidbits of wit and self-effacement, some of which make it out of the drawer and fulfill a reader's expectation. This isn't one of those lucky poems. This is dizzy, torn, and mumbled, and the associative leaps Mazur tries don't make it over that yawning abyss of self-reference and land in a terrain where her subject is less private and insulated, more animated, more full of life we can empathize with.without a mention of an idea, a notion, a metaphor any of these writers have written or said offhand, let alone conducting the work to expand on the paraphrase and produce a discourse . The addition of these names to the poem's length reaffirms the amateur interior decorator analogy, as they're treated like pillows and throw rugs one leaves about a space to brighten the place up.

MANNY FARBER , 1917-2008

A friend of mine commented a couple of weeks ago that in a time when what we consume in popular culture is so prefabricated, formulated and test-marketed until all potential joy is legislated from its predictable husk, we tend to praise any movie, band, play, novel as "brilliant" that displays anything resembling a heart or half a wit about itself. Other superlatives come into play as well, like "great", "genius", "masterpiece" and all the rest, and the overrating of perfectly ordinary albeit respectable entertainment goes on. It's a sad and sorry cycle, especially in the case of the movies where the critic's assessments are most readily consumed by moviegoers and used to pick the flick to while away the dark with. It's a sad time for anyone who wanted to write about movies because those that influenced--Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, James Agee--could think cogently about films in their essays. 

The shame of it all is that readers seem not to value critics who not only break with the reshuffled deck of platitudes and clichés that pass as criticism but who offered as well a coherent, tirelessly focused take on the art of movies. The late Manny Farber was no mere contrarian loudly blowing his nose into a dirty rag, he was a writer who spoke instead about what it was in a movie maker's art that interested him. Extracts from reviews in our current time are not pithy quotes from thoughtful and idiosyncratic points of view, of writers who actually did some heavy lifting when sussing through their responses to a movie. 

The cited remarks are "blurbs", concoctions of gutless verbs, lazy adjectives, and quizzical qualifiers that are more sound effects than meaningful statements. Pow, Zap, Pow!!! The passing of Manny Farber this week underscores the mediocrity of the scribblings that pass as film criticism these days. With newspapers dismissing their staff film reviewers in wholesale fashion, one pauses to consider if what Farber did exceedingly well and originally, think about movies, is headed for the dustbin of antiquated skill sets.

Painter and iconic film critic Manny Farber has passed away, and here I acknowledge a stylistic debt for my habits of critical mind. In both, his film lectures at the University of California, San Diego and in his groundbreaking collection of essays Negative Space, Farber, who nearly always appeared as if he'd been awakened prematurely from a long hibernation, insisted that movies were an art form of their own, not an ancillary product of other mediums. He broke with the mainstream habits of subjecting Hollywood films to literary criteria and instead developed a method of appreciating movies and movie makers as practitioners of recent and dynamic art that told stories visually. It was a painter's eye he brought to the classic black and white and technicolor masterpieces the old factory system produced like proverbial clockwork, and the good professor was influential in getting a generation of film critics to observe the framing of a film and making note of how editing between scenes advanced a particular narrative psychology. One admired as well his writing style, half of which seemed like a cross between blunt-but-friendly bar talk and aggressively packed care packages of ideas about how moving images, cut into particular sequences, lit in a certain manner and framed in arresting perspectives and odd, telling angles could convey a complexly weaved narrative line, stylized, compelling, confounding audience expectation. 

He better than anyone else I've read or have listened to seemed as well equipped to appreciate the stylistics of a Howard Hughes or a John Ford and describe the effects they could achieve in creating fictions that were sensual, sexy, dynamic. Perhaps because he was a painter, he seemed intrigued by the small details, the arrangement of objects in a frame, the juxtapositions between classes and interests coming into conflict. He noted the small things that made movies work and pleasurable.I took his classes back in the Seventies and early Eighties, and it was rather a treat to see this grumpy bear of an artist overcome his apparent discomfort at speaking in front of huge classrooms, rub his hand over his face, and point out the more salient, less conspicuous details of a director's visual art. More of a treat was when he would have other film professors and critics--Jean Pierre Gorin, Jonathan Rosenbaum-- suddenly have an exchange about the less obvious issues of film art. The topics weren't of particular interest to the general audience but to a student obsessed with intellectual mavericks whose critical apparatus transcended the ordinary BS and qualified as measures of genius, Manny Farber's film courses are among those moments one treasure and one is thankful for having witnessed for a period.

Manny Farber, thank you.

Poetry as on ramp

There's some chatter one hears that poetry is the safe space of ethical consistency and spiritual balance, something to be desired, attained, sought after. Poetry as some ideal garden to get to. Hardly the case, I think; literature is littered with geniuses who's best writing couldn't cure them of their demon summoning ills; they continued to be bedeviled.


Poetry is something to escape through, a tunnel from one place to another. Thinking that poetry is that place itself, the Lacanian "real" that is lost to all of us, is like stopping in the middle of the stairs as an end in itself. You get nowhere that's useful, unless you're sitting next to someone who thinks talking about stairs and their various qualities suffices for a day's subject matter.

The place to where poetry allows us to escape, however, has no geographic location an is namelesss; it is something akin to a heightened sense of extraordiarily weird life will seem if one insists on locating safe havens and resting places for the troubled , contradiction grasping intellect. Poetry is more process than psychic space or state; it's a rigor that enables you to come up against things, in themselves, that will not yield their essences and remain sane as you look for the parking space, fix lunch, return phone calls, check your bank balances. It keeps moving forward without thinking of straight lines.

UpdateSkyplumber ,in the comments, asks the pertinent question as to whether what I've said here might be construed as a arguement in favor of dismantling Fine Arts Programs. Geeze, I hope not.I suppose one can usurp my argument (a gripe , actually) to launch a campaign against fine arts in general in favor of some nativist tradition they would concoct. But that's not the aim, and those who would use anything I've said here for their agenda would have to go to cartoonish levels of distortion.

I aim not like John Dewy who regarded aesthetics more as "experience" a common person can learn to have rather than an end product. I believe in final art objects , "products" to risk the vulgarity. One needs, I think, something from which to start their processing. I just buy the idea that poetry, in itself, as collection of problematic writings trying to accommodate a corkscrewing reality, provides anything of an ideal realm where we get a hint of perfections and harmonies only God can know. The notion interests me not a bit, and the insistence that poets and their writings remain a priesthood deciphering invisible orders of things and offering up obscurantist clues creates a muddled thinking.

Poetry is not theology; I think more along the lines that poem is result of some period of intense inquiry on a set of experiences and conflicting ideas about them. The poem, though, isn't the end of it, in my view. The real success of a poem lies elsewhere, in the readers, among whom a writer would hope their work starts a conversation among voices that otherwise never have listened to one another.