Reading, etc

The lasting pleasure of owning a literature degree isn't, often time and sadly enough, financial, but emotional, spiritual, satisfactions achieved in the late hours or those morning commutes to work when you find yourself doing an extraordinary thing.One can feel intelligent for a moment without having to look over their shoulder to see if someone smarter is frowning at a conspicuous display of vanity. You're still talking to the novels you read and re-read years before, still interrogating the author for inconsistencies of style, chastising characters for lacking hindsight or being intuitively dumb. For a moment, you have your own version of the Borgesian library, but in this scenario the shelves are in your head and the books are an apartment building,not an institutional structure. So sometimes a strange smirk comes over my face on various bus routes. Odd, yes, but imagine thinking of something that you think is clever and having no one nearby to share it with. All you can do is smirk, take in a deep breath, bring the book back to eye level.
**
I have generally enjoyed and admired the Hemingway I've read, and I think the short stories in In Our Time are among the best by an American author in the 20th Century. That said, The Sun Also Rises was amazing and To Have and to Have Not equally so. THAHN, in my view a perfect example of Hemingway's skill at creating a visceral feeling of unspoken emotion, events and actions in a brief, concentrated syntax, contains another pleasure that contrasts with his signature brusqueness. In the center of the book, the story leaves the protagonist's plight for a time and takes the reader on a tour of the Marina, where a series of long, carpenter-crafted clauses seems to skim along the surface of the water and explore, in passing, a number of the boats docked there, wonderfully and credibly making the reality of this short novel more complex . You hardly know your reading a sentence that's untypical of Hemingway, ie long, until your done. The irony , one realizes, is that the master of the short sentence went for the long line as the best method to expand the social range of his novel without adding reams of undigested research, a malady that plagued the prolix James Michener his entire career.

At his best, Hemingway really could convey large emotions and subtle movements of mood with very few words. It was a reverse virtuosity that couldn't sustain itself, though, and left him with nothing but self parodied the more he was unwilling to change his style. Old Man in the Sea, among others, are relentlessly dull and full of the kind of self-pity that makes you want to smack him. Hemingway may have fallen short of the self-actualization, but his fictive attempts, at best, resonate and move, and achieve transcendence even when he did not. Perhaps it is a male thing, that these are matters that a reader might have to be intimate with in order to enlarge their appreciation of the work, but I think not. More, I think, it comes to personal taste, as in, if one does not care for the way Hemingway described his universe, fine. But I don't believe the ability to relate emotionally to a text need be restricted to gender, nor should it be limited to any other smoking gun criteria.The college professors who instructed me through his work were men and women, and the women, I have to say, win for inspired lectures, wedding appreciation with critique, understanding the poetry of the struggle, and why the struggle was futile. It would be good to note that in the course of the struggle to rise above one's demons through art, a good amount of good story telling was left for us to enjoy. I wish, at times, Hemingway had found some solace and continued to write stories that reflected a sane, balanced personality. But I am glad for the best of what's been left.
**

Prospecting for insight through Kerouacs' journals will be give scholars reason to devastate another section of prime forest, but his novels remain , inspite of it all, maddeningly inconsistent in their best forms, and progressively unreadable in later writing years. Kerouac had his moments of divine lyricism, I admit, but the cult around his grey, sotted visage is nearly as objectionable as the devotion many give to Ayn Rand: the matter is not how good the writing was, but what the author stood for. Once the chatter about writers drifts, or jumps desperately, from concerns with style in the service of great storytelling and lands in the odious camp that insists that a writers' primary task is only to reaffirm a readers' shaky self image of being a rugged and forward thinking individualist, I reach for a good book, or ponder taking a nap. Either option is more fruitful, and both are more interesting endeavors. It galls me that comparatively little attention was given to the passing of William Burroughs, the one true genius of the Beat group, while the easily assimilated rebellion of Ginsberg and Kerouac claims the top half of the Literary pages.

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Purple America by Rick Moody was a novel that enraged me. He's been compared to one of my favorites, John Cheever, by many well-meaning critics, but rather than a young writer taking some cues from Cheever's careful and lightly applied poetry and sentiment as regards infidelity, alcoholism, insanity and lurking bi-sexuality, Moody is as effusive as busted water main. All of the previously described elements are there, but without Cheever's wit, irony or craft. None of his grace , either. Moody is one of these young novelists who is in a hurry to cram the world into each paragraph, with the goal being not to persuade the reader to go along with a story but rather to make the telling as intense as possible. This is the kind of ham handed narrative style that is a prose equivalent of an Oliver Stone movie, the uneasy work of a artist obsessed with keeping their "edge". Moody may have kept his edge, suggested by the jittery run-on disasters this rag of a novel lays out, but it's nothing worth sitting down for. Purple America, though, is worth throwing away.

Edward Hirsch befuddles the Gnostics

Edward Hirsch is a perfectly fine lyric poet, sometimes a little obvious with the carefully placed poeticisms that crop up in his lines. There's what reads like a desire to be seen as thoughtful and sensitive to Jack Handy like "deep thoughts", a habit that will trip up what are otherwise readable and soundly evocative poems. The philosophical turns are not what he does well , as the language betrays an embarrassment from having to rely on instinct and feeling for a reason to write; intellectualizing a visceral response leaves you with a brittle, match stick construction that will simply tremble and collapse under a casual inspection. Hirsch is a superb poet of feeling and evocation, and the corrosive realm of ideas and argument are not his neighborhood to hang an address. The writing is rich in atmosphere, detail, concrete in metaphor and fleet of adjective and verb, is a poet best writing in the present tense. A case in point is his basketball poem "Fast Break":

Fast Break
In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946-1984

A hook shot kisses the rim and
hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop,

and for once our gangly starting center
boxes out his man and times his jump

perfectly, gathering the orange leather
from the air like a cherished possession

and spinning around to throw a strike
to the outlet who is already shoveling

an underhand pass toward the other guard
scissoring past a flat-footed defender

who looks stunned and nailed to the floor
in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight

of a high, gliding dribble and a man
letting the play develop in front of him

in slow motion, almost exactly
like a coach's drawing on the blackboard,

both forwards racing down the court
the way that forwards should, fanning out

and filling the lanes in tandem, moving
together as brothers passing the ball

between them without a dribble, without
a single bounce hitting the hardwood

until the guard finally lunges out
and commits to the wrong man

while the power-forward explodes past them
in a fury, taking the ball into the air

by himself now and laying it gently
against the glass for a lay-up,

but losing his balance in the process,
inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

with a wild, headlong motion
for the game he loved like a country

and swiveling back to see an orange blur
floating perfectly though the net.

Fluid, cinematic, switching between points of view,Hirsch creates a narrative line that he speeds up and slows down at will--the progress of that ball and the players trying to advance or impede its advance down the court leaves the willing reader breathless. "The Gnostic Gospels" Slate
is not Hirsch writing in current time, but rather as a voice among many in a long forgotten Christian sect which seemingly has been monitoring what Christianity has become through history and into modern time. The speaker, agitated, aggrieved( self righteous, shall we way?) announces the tenets of his faith and his suppressed gospel and eviscerates the falsification of the faith by a culture that has constructed false idols in consumer disguise:


We are like a surviving Gnostic sect,
*****living in caves and eating fallen fruit,
**********practicing our own brand of adoration,

which is devoted to wondrous signs,
*****inner mysteries, the radical unknown.
**********If you bring forth what is within you,

what you bring forth will save you.
*****If you do not bring forth what is within you,
**********what you do not bring forth will destroy you,

so Jesus said. Let others praise
*****the electrifying force of mass media
**********or kneel at the bruised altar of politics.

We keep faith with the technology
*****of the body, with the voices of pilgrims
**********naming the unnamed and resurrecting

dead languages of grief, inaudible pitches
*****of praise. We believe in the root power
**********of words, dreams, ecstatic trances, visions.

You are my twin and true companion,
*****Jesus said to the citizen, examine yourself
and be called "the one who knows himself."
It's true that our robes were stripped
from us, yet we are as stubborn as birds
searching for morsels of food in winter.

It's a plain case of us against them, the pure of heart, intent and action against the soul-less pragmatism that has de-centered Christ's teachings from care for the poor and the earth to distorted interpretations that remove the humanity from our dealings and replace them with bottom lines and expedience. It's a loaded spiel, and a hard one to say anything against; the audience for whom this poem is intended doubtlessly agrees with Hirsch to varying degrees to give him a pass for a weak poem.

The Gospel of Thomas intriguing myself and wonder if Christian faith can be re-tooled in a more politically progressive cast-- isn't it time for the Left to reclaim God and Jesus as the center of their moral certitude?-- and perhaps Hirsch does as well, but the poem he tried to write, the agony of the believer in a more human-centered Christianity toiling in their duties despite the shadow hanging over him, is more resentment than rant. Rants, when they work,get the blood pumping and instill the rage to get something done. The contrast between the gnostic gospels and the observed Christianity-Without-Christ that is the modern distortion of the Word is saturated with smug defeatism. It is the slave morality Nietzsche detested . I would call it befuddled and befogged.

The Dead and their Sucker Punch: A poem by Dorrianne Laux

Dorrianne Laux is one of our best free verse poets. She can write about everyday things and easily comprehend emotions clearly and with some genius of expression. She serves the situation with a fine, delicate balancing of the prosaic, the simple phrasing, and the higher allure of lyric speech and allows neither for overwhelming the other. Her poems, often time presented to us in the guise of prose, has an intimacy rare among a generation of poets who maintain distance from their most volatile emotion; her poems have the power of revelation, of someone sorting through old photographs or a rediscovered journal which, while recounting their day, gets a high pitch in their voice as they realize something even they hadn't realized. Laux never forgets herself as a writer with a goal; fret not, there is a point she comes to, the payoff one expects to make the listing of a poet's personal world resonate in ways it otherwise wouldn't. 

 She is suspicious of rhetorical resolutions to real problems and relationships that inhabit her poems and offers instead an intimate tone, the voice of someone who begins to tell you a story after some arduous activity which then lays herself bare. Not a confession, not dumping of toxic emotion, but a revelation, possibly at the very instance when the clarity comes to her; all the bits and pieces of past events with family, husbands, friends who have passed on are now a whole. Her poetry quite often is something extraordinary, intimate, moving. I found this poem fitting for the month since both my parents died in August at different times. Since then, the month has been a bit touchy for the family, but we collectively give a shrug and move on with nary a pause to linger over the lives of the couple born the four of us. One grieves, commemorates, and then moves on, right? Not so fast; sometimes, in the middle of watching a television program or waiting for the bus, something falls inside of me. It's the sensation you'd imagine having inside an elevator whose cable had been suddenly cut. The bad news hits you again, and yet again, if you let it. Laux's poem on the matter speaks to me and punches me in the gut to coin a phrase.

How It Will HappenWhen /Dorrianne Laux

 

There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch, the floor, at the foot of the bed, anywhere you fall you fall down crying, half amazed at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry anymore. And there they are, his socks, his shirt, your underwear and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile next to the bathroom door, and you fall down again. Someday, years from now, things will be different, the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows shining, sun coming in easily now, sliding across the high shine of wax on the wood floor. You'll be peeling an orange or watching a bird spring from the edge of the rooftop next door, noticing how, for an instant, its body is stopped on the air, only a moment before gathering the will to fly into the ruff at its wings and then doing it: flying. You'll be reading, and for a moment there will be a word you don't understand, a simple word like now or what or is and you'll ponder over it like a child discovering language. Is you'll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that's when you'll say it, for the first time, out loud: He's dead. He's not coming back. And it will be the first time you believe it.

This speaker is talking about spending a period of her life trying to talk herself into accepting the loss of her dearly departed, and goes on from there to talk about a life that seems detached, dreamlike; there is an unreal calm in this world as she struggles to push on. Laux isn't contradicting herself but instead talking about the transition from merely mouthing the conventional platitudes of acceptance of a loss and the eventual, inevitable realization that her friend's absence is permanent. She is emotionally numb, so far as I can tell, until it hits hurt, triggered by what some small matter acutely detailed her when the artifice comes apart, and the fact of her friend's absence hits hard, almost like being struck. 

 Artifice includes ritual, is the compulsive house cleaning one occupies their time with while acting as if that they're moving on with their life; the activity and the manic obsession with the details of these tasks are, for me, a conspicuous clue that there is something the person would rather not deal with. There's an intuitive leap here. The poem's power is the quick but not illogical insertion of the final remark, that instance when you realize a loved one isn't returning. Laux shows that a feeling like this is like a sudden attack, coming from seeming nowhere, leaving you in what I could only describe as a state of shock. This is not a formal argument she is making; this has that eliding quality few poets capture well, the revelation expressed as if we're witnessing the thought coming to the narrator as she speaks. The "clean house" Laux mentions, with everything neatly arranged and placed in their place, every trace of the person is gone or tucked in some burnished-over corner:

the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows shining, sun coming in easily now, skimming across the thin glaze of wax on the wood floor. (...)

"the absence of pain is mistaken as solace, and the narrator tries to sustain a numbness in her household. But comes undone, inevitably; the years the person had resided in those rooms, the small, shared rituals and pet phrases on familiar furniture have absorbed something of his spirit, it seems, and a memory is triggered, a flash comes upon the narrator. This is an apt metaphor for the attempt to deal with a loss by discarding personal reminders of the departed; the house is "clean," as in emotionally neutral, the goal is that he would be a reclaimed and re-imagined space where comes not to grow but to not feel, not a feel a thing. Those who are gone remain in the details regardless of who hard we scrub the floors or repair the roof:

You’ll be reading, and for a moment you’ll see a word you don’t recognize, a simple words like cup or gate or wisp and you’ll ponder like a child discovering language. Cup, you’ll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that’s when you’ll say it, for the first time, out loud: He’s dead.

Although he was burned and the household has been scoured and cleared of reminders that he once lived there, the space cannot be converted as if nothing had happened before. It's circular; what we toss out comes back to us.

He’s not coming back, and it will be the first time you believe it.

This is beautifully done, a setup for someone telling you that they've accepted life on life's terms, with the strong suggestion that they have exhausted their allotment of emotion, only to be struck once again that they've lost something valuable that cannot be replaced. The narrator is at the precipice, the classic existential situation: aware, finally, of the facts of her life as a felt experience, it remains her choice to stay in stasis and so become bitter and reclusive, or to finally, truthfully let go of what she's held onto and take new risks.

Billy Collins Reflects Rod Serling

470 331 522

"Seraphine": It's how you make it long

For a time after my UCSD years, I was a bit of a film dilettante , and felt cheated if a film was a merely ninety minutes long; I equated length with seriousness of intent and integrity , the way some people consider thick novels to be necessarily better than shorter ones. Getting older makes one discerning about what they’re willing to sit through and put up with, for many reasons, but for me it comes down to not having the patience to wait for a film to start to work. Time adjusted my aesthetics with my attention span. I liked Seraphine formally—the director Martin Provost did a fine job with his composition, and suggested a period in war time convincingly without turning this thing into a turgid, Scorsese-inflected costume drama, and it was a well down outlay of who this woman was, what her world was like, both private and public, and I was impressed with the way the artist’s process was incorporated into the narrative. Her mania to please her guardian angels, endearingly played by the reticent presence of actress Yolanda Moreau, was an intriguing back story to the obsessive art making, from the way she gathered her materials for her paints, the preparation of her pigments, and then the actual painting , with her fingers, on the floor, as if she were wrestling with a large vision that was resisting being captured on canvas. But it was long, very long, too long, and I found myself, like you, perhaps, getting a little antsy; maybe I’ve been seduced by the brutal efficiency and convenience of Hollywood narrative style, but I wanted the pace to pick up. It’s interesting that a director like Clint Eastwood has made a number of movies that one would consider slow-moving—Mystic River, Letters from Iwo Jima –but not consider glacial in the time it takes to watch them all the way through.

 The difference, I suppose, is that Eastwood , an admirer of European film making no less than any of us in the audience, remembers the best that Hollywood has taught him and remembered that movies are things that move. There’s always something going on, some bit of dialogue and visual cue that sets you for some satisfying dramatic complications. Eastwood, I suppose, would be a film maker who has wed a French eye for the small detail, the love of incidental things that make up a world he’s exploring, with the emotional impact of his masters, John Ford and John Houston. Provost, who’s work I’m not wholly familiar with, and tended to wear me out after a while. Lovely images, of course—I liked the final image of Seraphine hauling the chair out to the large tree so that she can be in environment that can enable her to find some psychic peace—but I wanted less of her and more of the others. 

Eastwood is amazing because he has an instinct in setting up dramatic contrasts, two strong minded characters having to clash, negotiate, argue, battle, make peace in dramatically plausible contexts. I wanted more about the critic and his world, his attempts to sell Seraphine’s paintings and the circumstances, cultural, social, economic, political , as to why she never ascended to the ranks of Picasso or Rousseau. The story needed to move beyond being solely about the title character and develop the lives and worlds of the people who interacted with her. The movie’s flaw is that the poor cleaning woman is the only one who is given any kind of complexity, a fact that allows the movie to remain in place, static. An interest in another character or two , with personalities amounting to more than the brief significations of the dialogue, likely would have given this beautifully mounted project a brisker tempo.

Hemingway, the Prolix Dry Drunk

Moreintelligentlife.com has a story provocatively called "When Novelists Sober Up", luring the curious reader with a hint that laying down the bottle is not necessarily the best thing for the writer's art. We have instead a gutless amalgamation of the usual tropes about bards and scribes cursed with the hooch bug; it's a shuffle through the old cards..It is, in general, a bad thing for those who have it and for those around them, and hinders, erodes, destroys, with time, whatever talent or good graces a person might already have. That we still in large measure glorify booze as a needed ingredient to creative process is evidence of a sad business: we make it okay for certain social types to destroy themselves so they can fulfill our vague idea of what an artist needs to do in society. Considering that we have no consensus as to the role of the artist in our affairs reveals our muddled thinking on alcoholism even more.

An excellent book on the subject is "The Thirsty Muse:Alcohol and the American Writer" by Thomas Dardis. Though there were some writers in this study who remained productive and frequently good during their worst imbibing, they are exceptions, with the general scenario for the alcoholic being tragic and, worse, predictable. The talent that was already theirs to use was soon enough diminished by hoot ch, and careers were ended early.

What was especially irritating in this was author Tom Shone's occasional gaffes in describing a writer's style; he announces that writers of short sentences tend to fair better in sobriety than those more grandiose, opining that the "endless clauses" of Fitzgerald and Hemingway doomed them to unpleasant late careers. Hemingway? And I had thought that Papa, with his short sentences and stingy use of verbs, adjectives and metaphors was the prototypical minimalist, akin to Carver and Elmore Leonard later in the century.

How to be flawed

Mad TV had a dating service parody called Lowered Expectations that ran for a season or so, the gist of which were the absolutely undateable citizens looking for other undateables to hang with . The effect was sadder than it was funny--the sight of characters with intractable personality quirks trying a last ditch effort to find companionship through a whimpering admission of their grosser assets. Loneliness is an ungainly crucible for anyone to bear, whether super star or twitching wretch; the confession in the Mad parodies were losers begging for love, the assumption being that those who fall short, perhaps far short , of our insane standards of style and hipness suffer from a magnified self loathing. Which is why I like this poem by Cecilia Woloch. It's a declaration of what's- really-here, the words of someone who is unapologetic about their faults, perhaps a bit embarrassed by some of them, but not ashamed of any of them. It's not in-your-face like the monotonous products of slam poets can be--this is a monologue on a human scale, a bit of a conversation we come in the middle of, a splendid speech that fills in what we've missed without the digression of backward-motion narrative. Woloch is curt, crisp, and sharp in her lines, and manages to be take-me-or-leave-me-alone without being a full time jerk. I like this poem.

FIREFLIES
by Cecilia Woloch

And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,
a hunger that isn't hunger
but something like fear, a staunching of dread
and a taste for bitter gossip
of those who've wronged me -- for bitterness --
and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart
to children whose names I don't even know
and driving too fast and not being Buddhist
enough to let insects live in my house
or those cute little toylike mice
whose soft grey bodies in sticky traps
I carry, lifeless, out to the trash
and that I sometimes prefer the company of a book
to a human being, and humming
and living inside my head
and how as a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt
at twilight across the lawn
and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,
to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering
onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.