About The Noise

A screaming comes from the balcony of the apartment next to you, some one else is drunk under the summer moon again, the armies of the night troll the residential streets looking for the cars they parked for their pub crawls on the business strip three blocks away. More screams, yelling, every clumsy curse word you ever on the play ground said this time with no relish or daring, just animal sounds an animal makes when you poke it with a stick. I'd been working late, writing away on some issue or the other, Bill Evans playing sweet and brittle piano through my head phones as I let the screen swell with paragraphs praising Mailer, DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, yet again, for raising the conciousness of the era, or at least inspiring me again to write late into the evening.But then the writing is over and the computer goes off, and when I take off the headphones, helicopters swoop over the roof, police radios crackle along a wet, dank street, drunk males are scrambling over the fences to avoid the Long, Arthritic Arm of the Law.

 Thank god for His Miracle Invention of Ear Plugs. At a younger age I would be in someone's face, making threats, chest puffed for a fight.What can you do? There's a minute of satisfaction telling some to shut up when they've woken you up more than once, late at night. But then comes the idea, the cold and sobering realization that the only thing you've done is come off like a cranky old geezer who's ready to choke on his congealing sense of comfort. There's a principle at stake, yes, but it has everything to do with my sense of what's right for me, of what I think I'm owed in small measure rather than the application of any greater good.

I just want the nights to be as quiet as the likes mom and dad enjoyed before they decided to have us kids. There is the on going irony of aging, getting older, that the original night owl alkie is now a middle aged working stiff who requires his sleep, and feels the creaks and groans of the joints and the disposition if he hasn't the fabled eight hours, give or take. That much annoys the fuck out of me, and it's not uncommon to find myself using it as a way of making the noisy kids somehow correct in their pestering ruckus.

The facts remain, though, that it's most likely that I'll continue to wave my shoe like grandma used to , and make the harrummmmpphhing noise when it comes down to my will or nothing at all. Sometimes I wonder if I was born or merely set aside in another dimension of newspaper grey and was launched into this world because what ever the case was running low on the premium designs. It's a habitual thought, a shudder of doubt when staking hands or crossing streets or visiting people who and which are so familiar, so complete in intimate nuances and shared knowledge that they seem alien and strange, like specimens under glass in a museum I keep visiting for a lesson that just keeps turning the corner to the next gallery when my hard shoes hit the tile. Everything I look for is just out of focus, short of the designs I see and have drawn.

Believing the world is seeing beyond the box scores and trusting what it says on the certificate; the biography has already been started, a page of facts that have gotten absurdly complicated, in love their own inventory of details that are pressed now in their uniqueness, creased and pleated, ready for rough waters I imagine await at the end of the map, where boats fall off and drift with sails full of solar wind until I wake up and yawn and scan the items on the table, the newspaper, the dirty bowls, someone else's pack of Marlboro 100s. The universe is reassembled, seamless as death itself.

Years ago I wondered if there was life on other planets precisely at the time when she left me, or asked me to leave, I wondered who else in this darkness knows this hurt as well as I?, and I stared for hours at her apartment as if trying to make the walls fly away, to lift her off the sofa, away from her meal , and bring her into my arms where I stood in the dark, next to a payphone, with out change to call out far enough to the wilderness where there is only wind and tall grass, maybe houses at the bottom of canyons that you see from jets leaving your home town before you enter the clouds that will drag on the wingspan, I would stare and the walls would stay where the carpenters intended them to remain, there was nothing to see, but I stared harder, right through the building, to the stars I knew were there, receiving radio waves, TV shows, thoughts of strong desire translatable only by action, hear me, hear me, who else shivers in a dark corner in unique misery, genius of articulated regret, who else speaks when no language gets the purity of the idea right, just right, thus forcing one to live in craziness, at the end of the alley, drinking from bottles I've pealed the labels from? As usual, the stars don't answer, they don't say a word.

Whoroscope by Samuel Beckett

The rickety and decidedly repetitive rhythms of Samuel Beckett's plays and novels suggest modernist poetry itself. As literary art shifted from universal declarations of world spirit and dwelt more on the interior life and the inability of the individual to convincingly make totalizing remarks about the makeup and purpose of existence. One is always waiting for something to happen to make the body's labors and the mind's intellectual achievements cohere with a serenity that comes only when imagination coincides with actual fact. 

Beckett's characters are not much less than obsolete machines that still make noise and can move their gears involuntarily, at crossroads awaiting the arrival of an unannounced re assignation, cloistered in boxes responding to daylight and sound with responses mimicking the slow grind of old gears. Beckett's novels and plays are in various demonstrations an acute set of visions of when the machinery of habits breaks down and grind against one another. His poetry, those few stanzas he actually wrote, get to the despairing and darkly funny heart of his matter in an even colder, more challenging light. This is the case with Whoroscope, one hundred lines of click-track short-circuiting referencing a gripe of Renee Descartes grousing over the nutritional value of an egg that had been served him. An extract from the poem, with Beckett's own notes:

WhoroscopeBy Samuel Beckett

Extract:

What's that?An egg?By the brother Boot it stinks fresh.Give it to Gillot
Galileo how are youand his consecutive thirds!The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler!We're moving he said we're off - Porca Madonna!the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoes charging PretenderThat's not moving, that's moving.
What's that?A little green fry or a mushroomy one?Two lashed ovaries with prosciutto?How long did she womb it, the feathery one?Three days and four nights?Give it to Gillot
Faulhaber, Beeckmann and Peter the Red,come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi's sun-red crystally cloudand I'll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half onesor I'll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst of dayTo think he was my own brother, Peter the Bruiser,and not a syllogism out of himno more than if Pa were still in it.
Hey! Pass over those copperssweet milled sweat of my burning liver!Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing Jesus out of the skylight.
Who's that? Hals?Let him wait.
My squinty doaty!I hid and you sook.And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-parlour foetus!What an exfoliation!Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils!My one childScourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood-Blood!Oh Harvey belovedHow shall the red and white, the many in the few,(dear bloodswirling Harvey)eddy through that cracked beater?And the fourth Henry came to the crypt to the arrow.
What's that?How long?Sit on it.
A wind of evil flung my despair of easeagainst the sharp spires of the onelady:not once or twice but?(Kip of Christ hatch it!)in one sun's drowing(Jesuitasters please copy).So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid leather-What am I saying! the gentle canvas-and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,and farewell for a space to the yellow key of Rosicrucians.
They don't know what the master of the that do did,that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul and sweet air,and the drums, and the throne of the faecal inlet,and the eyes by its zig-zagsSo we drink Him and eat Himand the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of Hovisbecause He can jigas near or as far from His Jigging Selfand a sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asksHow's that, Antonio?
In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?Anna Maria!She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.Leider! Leider! She blomed and withered,a pale abusive parakeet in a maistreet window.No I believe every word of it I assure youFallor, ergo sum!The coy old fr?r!He tolle'd and legge'dand he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat.No matter, let it pass.I'm a bold boy I knowso I'm not my son(ever if I were a concierge)nor Joachim my father'sbut the chip of a perfect block that's neither old nor new,the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.
Are you ripe at last,my slim pale double-breasted turd?How rich she smells,this abortion of a fledgling!I will eat it with a fish fork.White and yolk and feathers.Then I will rise and move movingtoward Rahab of the snows,the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon,Christina the ripper.Oh Weulles spare the blood of a FrankWho has climbed the bitter steps,(Ren頤u Perrron?!)and grant me my secondstarless inscrutable hour.

NotesThese notes were provided by the author.
1. Rene Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting. He kept his won birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity. The Shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days.
2. In 1640 the brothers Boot refused Aristotle in Dublin.
3. Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytical geometry to his valet Gillot.
4. Refer to his contempt for Galileo Jr., (whom he confused with the more musical Galileo Sr.), and to his expedient sophistry concerning the movement of the earth.
5. He solved problems submitted by these mathematicians.
6. The attempt at swindling on the part of his elder brother Pierre de la Bretailli貥--The money he received as a soldier.
7. Franz Hals.
8. As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl.
9. His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six.
10. Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had explained the motion of the heart.
11. The heart of Henri iv was received at the Jesuit college of La Fl裨e while Descartes was still a student there.
12. His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto.
13. His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his doctrine of matter with his doctrine of transubstantiation.
14. Schurmann, the Dutch blue stocking, a pious pupil of Vo봬 the adversary of Descartes.
15. Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul.
16. He proves God by exhaustion.
17. Christina, queen of Sweden. At Stockholm, in November, she required Descartes, who had remained in bed till midday all his life, to be with her at five o'clock in the morning.
18. Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes

What's striking is how this foreshadows the late William Gaddis' final novel Agape, Agape, where a dying man holds forth on a scrambled, stewing monologue about the history of the player piano and how that was an omen of how technology would invade our private lives and monitor the stirrings of the soul. Pouring over a lifetime of research, notes, papers, he rails between the sources of his misery and the increased misery he made for himself, trying to diagnose the cause in anticipation of a cure. Beckett has no such irony; his speakers are crushed by routines that have taken over the spirit. 

It is the weariness of someone too exhausted to know the world on terms other than the sheer effort to form a vowel. Gaddis' unfulfilled researcher at least retains his belief that his ideas mattered even if they were ignored or not acted upon; the frustration he feels, painfully aware that he is out of time, causes him to rage at the world, technology, himself for perceived failures to change the ten of his time. Anger animates the monologue. Beckett's language is post emotion altogether. The long discourses of his plays and novels are not monologues as they are imagined transcriptions of sounds one might have made when the genuine feeling was still possible. The lines are shown here in "Whoroscope," with their fowl references and interventions upon arriving at a point of recognizable memory or sensual sensation, are made of static signifiers, weathered billboards on an abandoned road.

I'm a fan of Beckett's poems, and it's impressive to find out how fresh and contemporary these abrasive lines still are. Beckett's speakers are those for whom the effort to contain their rage within the conforming protocols of civil nee rational language is as herculean as any physical labor. The topics are lost as the sentences stop, break, take fantastic leaps from idea to idea to view. This is the narrative of a man trying to resolve many particulars of his life and finds that having that secret history to himself for so long finds that there are no resolutions for his contradictions that he can speak to. This is the state where words lose their ability to shape the world and become something like animal sounds, the equivalent of grunts, moans, and snorts to signify the internal grinding of a mind that can no longer be molded.

Prostitutes, abortions, issues with sexuality, guilt, self-recrimination, the objectification of women, mother issues, religious torment, the gaping gates of hell welcoming the self-consumed sinner? All that is in there and good stuff for poems and literary prose to deal with. You, though, seem to have issues above and beyond experimental writing. I will simply say again, briefly, that his kind of obscurantist, indirect writing is difficult to do effectively, and Beckett does it brilliantly. There is a reason why his name and work still provoke controversy and heated discussion. There is something he tapped into that still filters through the current age. His work still resonates with readers who choose to read him. Great writers have that effect. 

Spielberg's War of the Worlds

Steven Spielberg isn’t my favorite directors but one needs admit that he doesn’t make a dull movie; the one thing he remembered all that time in film school was that movies move , and that what we see moving across the screen would be impressive, memorable, larger than proverbial life itself.Spielberg understands spectacle the same way Cecil B.DeMille or D.W.Griffith did, with internal coherence in narrative structure and development being quietly absorbed by the need to advance his enormous fantasies forward, at a rapid clip, with each frame burnished, highlighted and processed for maximum defamiliarization. He doesn't let you forget that you're watching a movie, and that's a good thing. Stasis I can get by staying home.

That’s not to say that Spielberg hasn’t problems , major ones. Pandering? The deliverance of obvious an morality? A unfailingly black and white world in his movies, full of cause and effect and not much else? All these matters, the things that prevent one from admiring Spielberg’s movies beyond his untouchable technical mastery, are the stuff critics will hash out for years. Still, we will continue to see his films and argue over the relative merits of the small matters that nag for your attention. War of the Worlds, revived by director Steven Spielberg, is a satisfying special effects orgy that makes the devastation of the earth, in this case New Jersey to Boston, a cool and at times, yes, scary spectacle to witness on a big screen in a dark theatre.

The Martian Tripods, resembling something very wormy and metallic, are especially stunning constructions of computer animation, with the death beams they fire unto helpless city blocks and citizens seem especially formidable devices to avoid during a full scale panic. What works well, I think, is the view from the ground up: Spielberg's camera positions camera is upwards upward, from below, which provides an alarming scale of things going over head; this underscores a line delivered later in the film by a character (well played by Tim Robbins) that what is happening on earth is not a war, since a war implies a battle between nominally equal sides. "This is not a war" he says, "this is an extermination." There is an appealing air of paranoia here--Spielberg, if nothing else, can create tense airs of sensory overload. Also, the fact that we can only guess as to what horrible purpose the aliens are using their human captives for makes our imaginations work overtime constructing the cruelest mad scientist project the mind of a twisted twelve year old boy can muster.

The ending is faithful to the Wells novel, which makes for an unsatisfying conclusion to an otherwise brilliantly arranged piece of cinematic catastrophe. As the menacing tripods stall, fall over, die, brought to their seamless knees by earth's native microbes, Wells hands Spielberg an excuse to indulge in his worst habit, of wrapping up thing up in a family-values cloak that never fails to ring false. Every character who matters t the hero is present at the close of the movie, and the going here becomes so cornball that you half expect ET to emerge and make magic amends for the sad, unfortunate invasion. A hasty gear switch here, a jolt to the sensibilities.

The weakest link in the film is Tom Cruise; he's gotten some good notices for his performance, but as in all his roles, he seems here only adequate to the star turn. Like Kenneau Reeves, Cruise is a wind up toy, albeit one blessed with some actorly grace. Ironically, his acting reminds me of the early days of computer animation when experimenting animators tried to get the slightest nuance of human emotion , gesture and facial movement; so close, yet so alarmingly false to the source. Distance here is not a blessing. Happily, Spielberg seems to have a way of keeping Cruise's facsimilie emotions under control, and puts his range to get use, same as he did with his mostly impressive version of Philip K. Dick's novel Minority Report. That film is worth a rental if you haven't seen it, but be warned, it is marred with the Spielberg ending , gratuitous hearts and flowers. The man cannot seem to bear to allow a grim story to remain grim, start to finish.Was Steven Spielberg exploiting 9/11 with his added element of terrorism and “sleeper cells” in his remake of War of the Worlds?
The question is inevitable, really. Had 9/11 not happened, there would writers searching for a lapse in ethical production with a question or two about whether the director was exploiting the Oklahoma bombing for topical subtext, with the Michigan Militia taking the place of Al Qaeda as the sublimated fifth column represented in the film. But 9/11 and Al Qaeda it is, and there defenders to Spielberg’s use of the attack as an undercurrent in is remake. Slate’s reviewer, David Edelstein, one of the better film critics working, goes overboard and maintains that Spielberg had earned the right to tailor his film to mirror the current paranoid state. It’s the sort of argument that uses every item on the shelf one can throw at, which makes the defense breathless, barely aware of its own absurdity. The first question to Edelstein's quick-draw defense is who among us hadn't earned the right to discuss, depict, interpret and frame the attack by dint surviving it , witnessing it, grieving and raging over it? Spielberg has his right to conceptualize his meanings of 9/11 all he wants, but his right to the material supersedes no one else's who was here, on this soil, American-born.

Precisely how Spielberg "earned the right" to invoke 9/11 in War of the Words isn't clear in David Edelstein's defense. Despite what the headline of the story implies, there is no gauntlet that Spielberg had to run, no set of noble tasks he had to perform, no spectacularly patriotic deeds he had to commit in order to gain the moral right to refer to 9/11 in his work. As is, the only rights he needed are those afforded him by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; the fact that he's a fantastically successful director whose name means large profits didn't hurt him either. I doubt there was much mulling over his "right" to make transparent allusions to 9/11 while the film was in production, or even under discussion.

For all the rest of it, War of the Worlds is typical Spielberg fair, blatantly pushing hot buttons, skirting the edge of the gross and edgy, but reeling back from the abyss for the fabled Hollywood Uplift that have made analyzing his films useless beyond a certain technical appraisal. Spielberg makes spectacles, loud, noisy, and fast paced, unencumbered by character depth or situations that don't fall into a play book of tropes we haven't already seen in his movies since 1941 or ET. The stab for significance, for a resonating theme against recent national catastrophe, is to be expected, but one cannot seriously argue that this makes for a new level in Spielberg's film making. He's tried his hand at being an important movie maker, but he remains someone who loves all the technologized smoke-and-mirrors over the examination of one real human detail. Even with all the references and metaphors to terrorists and sleeper cells, War of the Worlds is exactly the sort of expensive wind up toy we expect from Spielberg and his sort; a mechanized, mindless engine of activity that will pursue its own demise, clamorously so.
As it goes, Spielberg consistently demonstrates mastery with the big effects and visual garnishes he loves to deploy. They're eye-popping treats, and sometimes there is even a horrible beauty in the crammed images even as he strains, preens and exerts his directorial will for effect. The rain of clothes in the forest as the family flees a Tripod attack in particular is haunting for any number of reasons, not the least being that it's a well composed scene that appears at the right point in the proceedings. Subtext , ambiguity and philosophical-laced irony are not his strong suits, however, and what attempts there are in his works to grapple with the uncrossable essences of life are either complete muddles, demonstrated with his curious and garbled "collaboration" with Kubrick AI , or rescind all claims at problematized edginess by an arbitrary insertion of family-values endings, viewable in Minority Report. Other praised "mature" works like Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List never rise above the ham-handed when it comes to offering wisdom to an audience, and that's Spielberg's flaw; he tries to think and succeeds principally in dressing up civics-course clichés with 100 million dollar budgets. There are those who will make a case for Spielberg as having more gravitas than he's been given credit for, but it's the sort of argument that produces language much too eloquent for the cause at hand; they don't sound as if they really believe the hype and overstate the case.

Hollywood would prefer that he most successful American director in history be an intellectual as well as an entertainer , but little in the gale of words coming to Spielberg's defense obscures the obvious, that he is a technician, an extremely competent craftsman who occasionally make satisfying, crowd pleasing entertainments. The final scene, with the reappearance of the assumed dead son at Grandma and Grandpa's house in the only Boston neighborhood that hadn't been torched by the aliens, was nearly enough to ruin the film for me. As sheer spectacle, WOTW has the slick allure of a disaster movie, but Spielberg feels required to assure us that the central characters are all okay in the end. The son's reemergence was as sloppy and cynical a ploy as the resurrection of ET.

Spielberg's right to use 9/11 references isn't disputed here, it's the pretense that what he's offering up is anything more than entertainment with an overlay of topicality. Spielberg has tried his hand several times to be Serious Director, and the results--Pvt. Ryan, The Color Purple, Schindler's Lis, Munich-- are notable for the fact that he was trying too hard for significance. The fatal flaw with these films, I think, is his inability to abandon visual hugeness and instead explore an idea of human concern. War of the Worlds works well it does because he's back with the kind of material he does wonders with, the sci-fi action-adventure. The secret in this formula is to keep the number of ideas you're working with to a minimum, keep your focus, and keep things moving at a brisk, efficient pace. It's a darker vision, it's topical and fraught with a sharper paranoia and alarm than before, but it's intended, finally, as escapist fare, expensively mounted. I don't attack Spielberg for doing what does when it comes together, but we ought not to pretend that his intentions are nobler than the woman who cuts your hair or the man who bags your groceries. On that level, nothing is nobler than showing up for work.

"The Vise" by Mary Baine Campell

Mary Baine Campbell's poem "The Vise" seems to be a missive from a soul who cannot get out of Plato's Cave. This nameless one must have done especially offensive to warrant being gripped in a vise rather than merely chained to the wall of the cavern. But it seems the same old punishments, the same tortures and teases, all those fleeting signifiers in front of him (or her), forcing all the senses onto to one set of appearances (and appearances only) so that they have to construct an idea of the world outside the cave, free of the vise, a faith, so to speak, that this vise that holds the head is exactly where it should be, doing what it must do to whom it is doing it in the framework of an infinitely larger universe, multiverse, omniverse, what have you, that is unseen. Or it might be something else entirely, such as a description of being dead, with the world burning and eroding and washing away with the monsoon as described. This may well be a poem of a great journey that starts at death and ends when a soul has reached the other side, a particular culture's conception of an afterlife. 

The wind, from which the head cannot shield itself from, blows over the face and whisks along whatever has turned to dust back into the unmade earth. To be honest, I haven't the foggiest what Campbell is getting at here, other than to describe the quality of being dust in the wind, but this is plainly too obscure and mannered for me to even care. It used to be that I thought it was cool to be mysterious and cool and utterly and completely baffling with my writing, but hey, I was fifteen at the time and reading too much Dylan and Jim Morrison and the cursed share of Kerouac, and it took me years to learn to stop being abstruse by design and instead become interesting by intent. That might have happened when I finally got something to write about, some comprehensible subject matter, which I managed to link up with a credible language, a combination that created whatever mystery I sought. The abstract quality is a result of writing well about something, not writing syntactically challenging pieces in a mistaken notion of what cubist writing might sound and read like. Campbell's poem is well structured, the language clean, spare, exacting to the the objects and their qualities, but this is just too much to put together beyond saying that it seems to be out funerals, death, and the perspective of the deceased once they've left this life, observant yet powerless to intervene in the affairs of the living . There is that odd mix of regret and acceptance that mingles in the images. There's a feeling of loss that pervades the stanzas, and a feeling of powerlessness that there is nothing one can do with what is slipping from their grasp, whether youth or life itself.

There exists here a tangible feeling that the narrator is in some fixed place of observation, taking it all in, motionless and unable to speak or intercede on behalf of the world; I took this too mean that the speaker had died and was in some astral place, perhaps from a cloud, maybe from a closet as a ghost as yet unseen, because the imagery Campbell have a museum quality, implying gold ornamentation, fruits, things one employs in funeral preparations from an unspecified culture and time. Norman Mailer's quizzical and enthralling Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings which deals quite a bit with the cult of the dead, reincarnation, and has a good amount of description of funeral preparation, all of which this poem brought to mind. But I do see the other side, the observations of one getting older who is so much wiser and suffers the eventual regrets of bad decisions, missed opportunities, consequential expressions of arrogance and pride that cannot be undone, and how all this comes to the eventual acceptance that everything in our view is somehow as it must be in the larger pattern we can only faintly imagine.

I don't want to say that this is a bad poem since I keep re-reading it to puzzle it out a bit more. Unless it's from the pen of the insanely overrated and over cited--Kerouac, Neruda, Bukowski--insert your own pet peeve here-- a bad poem does not stay long in my thinking, and it is the easiest thing to pass on, like beer. Life is too short to deal with wooden, cryptic, stick-in-the-mud language. Campbell's work has it's attractions, and I would say her minimalism succeeds to the degree that The Vise gets more than one going over. Death, though, seems to be the operative idea here--as you say, and to paraphrase crudely, life may be good and pleasantly cushioned for our narrator, but there is a defeated tone to the words, a sense that one's comfort is also one's manacle around the neck. Maybe it's the sense of defeat that puts me off about this--I am of the notion that one shouldn't require anything of a poet other than to be interesting and their work to be nothing other than good, ie, worth reading--but the lack of rage here is vaguely troubling:

It is not

That the world is unkind.

Kind hands once touched

My lips and eyes

To say whatever such

Touches say.

And every day

A spoon, laden

With softer gold

Of honey

Spilling

Forces me

I would want more of a rage against the stasis, the sterility of the apparent perfection of this flesh and blood life; I would read the above lines as being something of a junkie's reverie as he nods into whatever oblivion he seeks through the needle and the spoon. Every care and dread is dissolved as a slowly corrosive bliss overtakes the body and the spirit that attends to it. But this may be exactly what Campbell sought to get across in her tightly sealed stanzas, that being alive is filled with it's own kind of death, our material and mental blockades to the world, save for a noise, a chime of a phone, a flash of light in the sky at dusk that reminds us of the churnings outside the body and its republics of dulled sensation:

From all directions

Lightning tells us

What is lost

Or burnt

In the collapsing

World.

The nod produces its own ceremonial Edens from which the glance of old archetypes, readings from the nursery or a junior college textbook are conflated in a shifting illusion that replaces the substance of one's history, objectified into notions of the weather taking a personal care

of the layabout's bedding:

Tonight, a monsoon.

The diamond-fall of rain

Bruises my face

Washes honey

From it, and

All else.

This is all that can be seen, that can be comprehended through the suggested splendor or comfort the narrator cryptically speaks from, and so the poem may be ironic in that we have veiled comments emanating from what are already a veiled, not the least blinded sense of reality, and what is maddening for me is the acceptance that the speaker suggests as to what their situation is, hazy as it is. Although there is a chance that Campbell intended our subject to be alive as they recited their spare vistas, it suggests ritualized death all the same, a ceremony of surrender:

But in the vise

I can still stare --

Through brilliant

Obliterations of storm --

At what is

Still there.

USED BOOKS: A Multitude of Sins

A Multitude of Sins
stories by Richard Ford(Vintage)

Currently finishing A Multitude of Sins, a collection of short stories by Richard Ford. He has the strained relations between men and women falling in and out of love with one another nailed, better than anyone since John Cheever, with a prose that is flawlessly crafted and deeply felt in its economy . Richard Ford is an extraordinarily gifted prose writer whose control of his style is rare in this time of flashy virtuosos , ala Franken and DF Wallace or Rick Moody, whose good excesses run neck-and-neck with their considerable assets. Ford, in his The Sports Writer, Indendepence Day, and certainly in this collection of Multitude of Sins, understands his strengths in language and advances , seemingly, only those virtues in his work. He obviously understands the lessons of Hemingway , and wisely chooses not imitate: rather, the words are well chosen.

For the more poetic language of simile and metaphor, The Cheever influence is clear; the imagery to describe the detail make those details resonate profoundly, as in the last story "Abyss", without killing the tale with a language that's too rich for the good of the writing. His writing is quite good, although the shadow of Hemingway dims the light of his own personality. Ford seems as if he’s made peace with the gloomy and morose code of honor and betrayed idealism that is said to the heterosexual male’s stock and trade. But maybe not just peace; it’s as if he’s cut a deal with the emotional sagging age brings upon his brow, and he cherishes each sour taste and resonating resentment to give his brooding prose the feeling of being more than cleverly disguised metaphors simulating the moral dissolution of a grown man’s sense of situated-nests.

"The Names" by Joe Wilkins

Someone is in a bar, having a long neck Budweiser as they look across the dark room, past the floating dust particles highlighted from glaring light from the street, talking past the person they're talking to, summarizing the state of the economy, the community, their own slice of a wretched existence, and conclude with what is they're willing to settle for. "It is no good to grow up hating the rich" warns B.H.Fairchild, to which our monologist, a persona who had read this quote somewhere and found a space in a conversation he was having to both cite the reading and to respond , responds thusly to an undifferentiated Pete, a name that in the course of this story never takes on a personality. He might as well be a mirror for this beer soaked gripes to spoken to:

Why not hate the rich? It's easy,
and some days easy's what I need.

This is speech from a Larry McMurtry novel or one of those films where a minor character suddenly becomes very chatty in a key scene and finds an articulate voice and give us the complications of his life and world view in a writer's attempt to give him more complexity, and as a speech it might work fine given the context and narrative conventions fiction or a movie would allow. It might not seem so, let us say, incredible and contrived. It's a splendid thing when a piece composed of a character's voice works, with the precarious balance between natural , loose cadences and digressive tendencies and a writer's control of the idea , in getting it across for an effect without showing his hand, but Joe Wilkens ' tone here is Hollywood production.

There is one thing for someone in theater to go off on a soliloquy in the presence of another actor , since good stage writing and direction can effectively imply that we've entered the character's more resonant thinking for a few beats; the lights come up again, the other actor recites his line, and the plot continues apace. We have no such context in "The Names".

The other person this narrator is assumed to be talking to is insufficiently established , and the notion that these are the private considerations doesn't convince me either, since this poem strains between being a rambling string of anecdotes and a polemic. One can’t imagine this kind of conversation happening in a bar where the working poor gather ; Pete, if he were a kindred spirit in this narrator’s peer group, would competing for the spotlight himself with a competing monologue, another list of complaints and ready lines. Even in commiseration there is competition, a competition to out bottom and out –bad luck the guy you’re sitting next to. But here, the fix is in, and this is what ruins the fidelity to describing experience that is intractably tragic.The thoughts are too complete, too polished. Someone with this kind of insight, or at least this ability to artfully phrase his details, ought to be able to do better than wallow in his own disappointment:

This country I call home is, like yours,
lost, and my people too are lost, like me,

so let me hate with them, let me sit up at the bar,
and curse the banker, the goddamn-silly-designer chaps
the new boss man from back east wears,
let me speak the names of the dead and get righteous,
for at least one more round.

The writing shows, the urge to totalize a context. Wilkens doesn’t show the moment as much as gives it shape with conventional writerly moves.Barroom bathos, a country singer's stoicism, a poem that seems more like something emerging from Central Casting than coming across as something made from things that one might actually have heard or had seen. Over rehearsed is the phrase for this, with the small town details arranged in such a circuitous way that they unintentionally expose what "The Names" actually is, a tall tale to flesh out Wilken's sarcastic reversal of Fairchild's one-sentence quote. It's a lot of work for so little effect.

Bo Diddley, RIP

Pioneer rock and roll genius Bo Diddley has died at age of 79. Along with Chuck Berry, Diddley was a musician who had the very rare opportunity to create a new kind of music. Shave and hair cut rhythm, chunky guitar swipes, a street wit, a bellowing voice of desire, his was the sound of inevitability; you didn't know what was coming exactly, but you could hear it and you couldn't stop it.

Hey, Bo Diddley, RIP

Yes, I bought a damn cell phone

I long refused to get a cell phone and preferred rather to rage at the yakking philistines who couldn't stand silence in public places like bus stops or airline terminals, nor be bothered to bring a book or a magazine with them if they knew they might be alone at some period in the day, between stations, with no one to confirm how bitchen they were. It was a satisfying arrangement; overworked and underpaid and yet with so much unfulfilled promise that I could barely speak when my anger welled up like some dystopic stew blowing off the oppressive lid, my contempt for cell phones and the tech-addicted jerks who diluted the language with the odious devices was just the thing one needed to get a psychic leg up in the world.

I was smarter, I was old school, I revered books and the words printed on them by great writers who took their mission seriously, I cherished meditative quiet and loathed boorishness, I was a man of the ages (or at least the Seventies), I was an arrogant jerk. Arrogant and a jerk, yes, but it fed my ego, made up for whatever perceived failures I might have brooded over and over as the years wore on. The thinking was that for all the shortcomings and defects of character and amends that have been a part of my story, and for all the spasmodic awkwardness of getting my life back together, I at least had integrity and maintained a standard of using words carefully. I spoke only when I had things to say, and that I wouldn't indulge in an appliance that would, for a fee, indulge the prolix demon that lay dormant inside me. I had a home phone with an answering machine, and I would well wait until the end of the day to listen to who wanted to speak to me and why; if I needed to make a call en route somewhere, I could always use a pay phone.

Always use a payphone. Things change incomprehensibly when you're not paying attention, and came the time I needed to make one of those calls from a pay phone, none was to be had. There used to be two pay phones at the gas station next to the bus stop where I catch my bus to work. One morning, I needed to call and tell them that the bus was running late. I turned to where the phones were and noted that one had been missing, and the other had a smashed receiver dangling from the end of the phone cord. It would have made a great photo urban reality, an example of all the shiny things of the recent past becoming obsolete, smashed, useless and lacking even design virtues for one to consider in self-satisfied repose. Or maybe it was self-deluded repose.

All the integrity and class and hard won soulfulness I assumed I'd garnered by refusing on principle to be reachable virtually anywhere, at anytime, benefited me not at all. I stood there in the familiar raging powerlessness, staring where there used to be two perfectly operating phones. It was all I could manage not to fall into that abyss that seemed to suddenly appear just below my belt line, a gaping chasm of nothingness and undirected Being. It was dread, nausea, the whole anxious existential moment Kierkegaard fretted about with such vituperative relish. All this to say that I was annoyed unto death that I couldn't make a phone call when I needed to with the pay phones that were formally available with an Eden-like convenience. One ought not to have been surprised, or feigned the indignation of being caught short, as I had noticed the shells of old payphone booths dotting the city blocks from the lower to the higher economic sections of the city; gas stations, 7-11 stores, strip malls were having the pay phones removed, leaving an acceptable scarring on the building sides where they formally waited to be used, abused, bashed with hammers and spray-painted with gang graffiti. Like some of us, I never considered the world to change this close to the route I take to and from work every day. There was sufficient warning, my senses were not addled, I wasn't unaware of what would need to be done sooner or later. Sooner, though, comes sooner than you think.Meanwhile, a mixed clutch of exchange students drifted toward the curb as the wayward bus finally emerged in the horizon. It then approached the red painted curb, every other one of them rambling with a dead pan earnestness in the narrative tongue into cell phones wedged between shoulder and tilted head while they fumbled for bus passes or exact change. Doubtless, whoever these folks were talking to knew when their phone mates would arrive, and how to reach their party if they didn't show.

So, there I was, in downtown San Diego, entering a cell phone vendor's storefront as a newcomer. A salesman with a name tag reading “Jesus” offered an inquiring hello. I swallowed what small portions of pride I had left and told him my dilemma;

“I need a phone, and I need a plan”.

A bitter sweet comedy from Philip Schultz

This was originally posted a year ago, I believe, and just today found some additional thoughts on Philip Schultz's fine poem; vanity , perhaps, but not without purpose. Enjoy.--tb
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The last Tuesday poem in Slate caught my eye, made me laugh, and made me sigh (just a little). "Failure" by Philip Schultz is that kind of poem, a potentially maudlin and morose subject matter that draws you in with some unexpected punch lines and left turns. This is as fine a lament for the Walter Mitty type as Tragic Figure as I've ever read. I thought this was a piece of comic writing, a funny monologue that gathers each tense muscle and clustered ganglia in a man's set-upon shoulders and releases the collected negativity as a Woody Allen digression where one defends the unsupportable with unexpected distinctions. It opens up with an opening line worthy of an early Philip Roth novel:

To pay for my father's funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can't remember
a nobody's name, that's why
they're called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.

Poet Philip Schultz has a perfect set up with which to riff with variations of the punch line, and that he does, admitting the farcical nature of a father who's plans for success seemed from the outset unworkable to everyone but him

An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father's business failures—
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis—
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand.

What makes the poem moving is the particular reserve Schultz shows here ; there is, to be sure, plenty of material in family recollecting where each stain , wrinkle and idiosyncratic whiff of dysfunction upon the family name can be a suitable launching pad for confessions, first person melodramas, compulsively unfunny comedies of baroque proportions, but Schultz keeps his ground. He admits his father's faults, enumerates documented failures, gives details of things that were bothersome, nettlesome, annoying--watches that pinch the wrist, snoring during movies--and yet embraces him all the more. Admitting his father's flaws he admits his own--the fuck ups of the father are visited upon the son? -- and in doing so finds a clue to what comes to the bare fact of existence, a constant seeking to create a context in which can exist on their own terms , not what's dictated by religion and financial institutions:

He didn't believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.

If the dead father's strivings had been successful, the same said "cause" of his perceived failures would have been viewed as the source of his good fortune. I don't think this poem has any real religious underpinnings other than the rabbi's closed-system dismissal of a deceased's refusal to invest in dogma. He is, rather, more a model of what we view the truly existential man, someone (to paraphrase Sartre) "condemned to freedom" who defined himself by his resolute decisions and actions, and by his acceptance for what the results, good or bad, turned out to be. This implies is that the son assumes his father preferred to live a life of his own defining, in good faith, instead of swearing alliance to a belief systems he had no use for. The son, who left town but never escaped, realizes that there is more of his father's temperament within himself than he might have first realized.

His father wasn't a nobody, Schultz insists, he was a man of distinction: he was one who tried and failed repeatedly to create meaning his life, and that is something to be understood, not belittled. Unsaid and yet implied, Schultz finds himself channeling his father's unrest and sees for himself a variation on his father's life in his own attempts to accommodate a life that seems like a suit that's 5 sizes too big. He left town but he failed to get away. There religious element is important in the poem because it characterizes what cultural institutions the deceased father placed himself outside of while he was alive, making up his own mind about what he wanted to do with his life. It's my feeling that Schultz intends (and succeeds, I think) in conveying the specific tone of the belated criticism. The poem, though, doesn't involve a critique of a man who turned his back on the faith that might have a line on a One True God; that would make it dogma, not poetry, however skillful the language. What's involved here, in a more general (and more purposeful) sense is the judgment of groups casting judgments on members of their faith, their group, who they feel have strayed, be they agnostic Jews, lapsed Catholics. The situation is universal, if we dare use the word, but the texture is culturally specific.

Frank Rich finds his price, loses his voice

Frank Rich, a cultural and political columnist for the New York Times, has recently announced that he has signed on with HBO as an advisor, of sorts, his task being to aid them in creating new programming. A plum engagement in addition to his NYT chores, and the Times, so recently burned with too many reporter scandals, has slapped Rich with a restriction that he may not write about his work with HBO, or about HBO at all. Avoiding a conflict of interest is prudent, yes, but the situation effectively neuters Rich as a critic, even on those cultural products he has no financial interest in. A nominal critic, I think, ought not be accepting any money for any work from any entertainment combine. Whatever safeguards The Times sets in place to keep Rich's intergrety in tact, it's become clear that the man is willing to accept funds and so have his voice modulated, if not muted outright.

I'm of the mind that Frank Rich must choose one or the other , be a critic not beholden to anyone who can say as they please, or be a cultural entrepreneur , delivering arts-related programming to the marketplace and subject to honest commentary. I've never been comfortable with the idea that Time magazine reviewers, for example, are charged with critiquing the worth the movies , television shows and books published by the subsidiaries of its parent company, Time Warner, even if the magazine editors made it a point of including unfavorable reviews among the estimations.The point is that a corporation like Time Warner , in effect, is controlling the conversation of their product by having both film makers and reviewers on their stuff, a situation that mutes negative remarks and converts merely into the buzz that excites potential viewers to buy tickets.

Lacking an independent voice outside the the Corporate culture that produces the products diminishes the reliability of the reviews as honest appraisals. Worse, though, is that the situation of corporations having studios , publishers and reviewers on the payroll makes the task of speaking a brutal truth to power--our entertainment industries produces crap and little else-- too daunting a task, and produces, in effect, a collective feeling to merely allow the mediocrity continue . Rich, in any case, is about to become a compromised presence on the pundit scene, and that's a shame.

Judith Harris: Soma Poetry

There comes the occasional moment in the week when you walk past a room with the door ajar, and note that it's mostly dark save for light straying in from a window , casting the furniture and the folds of whatever fabrics in plain sight in a deep , earthen hue; there is peace, there is a richness and depth to the colors you see by chance, there is a idea that what you're seeing on the sly are things of themselves, in arrangements free of the harnessing concepts of what utility they might have.

We see them , for a moment, in pure form, from a dimension of being only absurd math dares make an attempt to address in dimensional terms. But we get busy with our things we-must-do before leaving the house again, our perception , which has strayed outside the paradigm, finds its purposeful step again, and the room is merely a place where the lights are off. The half shadows no longer suggest magic or tap an instinct at the base of the skull where the brain contains its secret places and spiritual hankers for that which cannot be defined and divided up as commodity. We see these things in passing for years, and some of us spend careers trying to get the moment right, in words, words that fail them.

"Memory" by Judith Harris goes for the moments that seemed so right so long ago and gives us a Hallmark momento as a result. This is not an awful bit of remembering, if one were actually listening to a friend over coffee or a meal , listening to them pull bits of a detail in a story they were telling you, placing the detail in the right place in the narrative , and then remembering even more things as the picture they speak to us becomes an even larger verbal canvas.

It would be something to witness a racounteur stop, rewind their tale, embed and embroider the new information, and then proceed with the tale. In the unhurried moments, those days when there are no deadlines, no timetables, agendas, chores looming, and when the company one has that day is someone who you don't mind listening too at length, the telling, the style and personality of the presentation, can be enthralling. It's one of those times when you realize that life is worth the effort it takes to get through the day.

Harris' "Memory", isn't one of those rare and special get -togethers when the sharing makes for more profound bounding; it's a quaintly antiseptic, nutrition free bit of sweetness that is all set for the last line.

Those years, after dogwoods
and purple phlox
the color of dyed Easter eggs,
the screen door rattling like a nerve …

On the porch, a cardboard box
for the stray cats
who stayed just long enough
to swell and litter.

So simple,
my mother, home
from the stenographer's pool,
starlings dangling like keys
over the rooftops,

the late hour pulling us in
like a magnet,
the moon baying,
the solitaire train of cards.

We are to linger over the commonplaces set before us and recognize them, remember them in situations of our own, and surrender to the mood of another tingling epiphany, a swooshing rush of nothingness sweeping over us. The details seem less like things one would notice in pursuit of the right phrases to describe to someone else an experience or an emotion that's difficult to contain in a sentence or two, than they seem to be from a list one dresses up their template with. "The moon goes here, solitaire goes there, but lemme put the Easter eggs and stray cats over here". The details seem more from a prop department than from felt experience, and one really shake the feeling their being set up through a series of stiff, over burnished cliches for a finale that is , in some measure, supposed to take our breath away, stun us into silence, have us utter "oh wow" while fighting an urge to weep.

Nothing could budge us
from our own little island,
our own little cushions,
where we stayed,
eating tuna sandwiches,

just her and me,
floating on TV laughter,
her hand clasped over mine
like a first date's.

This is where I feel like someone had dropped a bowling ball on my head and there were cartoon tweety birds and visions of Saturn and star, jagged stars circling my harried skull, meaning that has a hard time thinking they hadn't been sucker punched for sticking with this work , hoping for a subversive element or an idea to emerge and run a parallel, more skewed set of proposals to Harris' medicine -breathed sweetness. We confront a poem that reaffirms its own inanity and which wades in the receding hallows of an unexamined life; Judith Harris prefers the world which never existed, the sort of universe where happiness and joy are givens without reservation, unproblematized by disaster, tragedy, a late credit card payment, even the inconvenience of a cold caller. Hers is a world of perfect forms to match every unruly thought or unannounced glitch in the daily plan, with props , cliches, tropes , schemes, and two dimensional set of equations that are designed to keep a reader sentimental, submissive, weepy and resigned to the sort of
pickpocket morality that will keep one quiet, receptive to every easy answer to come their way; poetry is the prison house of language fans of this kind of sonambulent tripe are locked in. Pity the fan who might actually be surprised by circumstances no items in Judith Harris' playbook can explain.

Rand is smited

Now, more than ever, I believe The Fountainhead, to be a dangerous book. This may worry a point already mulled over here, but one cannot just pass-off this book's implicit assertion that mass destruction is justified in the name of "higher values" whose substance supposedly overrides the need to respect and protect human life. It is only irrational romanticism and literary convenience that Rand softens Roark's destruction with an empty structure. Roark is the hero of all those ruggedly individualist libertarians whose opinions sound as oddly uniform as CPUSA position paper, but shed of the that odious veil, he's pretty much the prototype of the perplexed goons and gangsters whose lives are committed to making the world notice them by the most miserable means available.

Rand a sense of humor, a meat hook kind of satire that wasn't especially funny to a readership unaware of her set of villains; a salon scene in Fountainhead, where progressives and other manner of elite collectivizers hold forth amid an exchange of vaporizing platitudes, comes as a surprise, considering the other wise lock-box seriousness of the rest of the novel. It's ironic that I imagine this scene makes me think of Rand and her circle sitting around themselves at some interminable skull session, reaffirming a core set of involutedly starchy tropes that reduce what they think is a comprehensive critique into short and simple phonemes.

Anyone wondering what practical use a Rand-obsessed architect might be outside a ridiculous plot line would pose the question. Rand's brutal prose makes her hero's activities to be the most direct means to Resounding Truth , but she is an extreme romantic who , no doubt, thinks that her fiction were reasonable outlines of how the world actually works. No doubt she sees the actions in her novels as being the diagnosis of what ails her adopted society, which places her in a tradition of the Naturalists, who in turn wrote longish, turgid works. Even so, one is within one's rights to query what real good Rand's heros might be if you needed them to commit an actual task, apartment demolition excluded.

The idea of social construction has more to do with the structures humans create within a phenomenal world, and it additionally supplies an idea of how the human structures of culture, society, law, institutions are able to adapt to a world that functions quite independently of the absolutism Rand would insists she's able to distinguish. Rand insists that there is a world with a fixed , finite , and intimately knowable existence upon which her Ideal Geniuses can impose their own Systems of use. This is the kind of End-of-History daydreaming that often sullies insight, whether Marx, Toffler, or Rand, and with Rand's ideas, giving the phenomenal world over to the unencumbered exploitation by the kind of genius that is hers alone to define, we come to the end of discourse and arrive at a dreamy heaven.

Social construction, in the writings of Erving Goffman and Thomas Berger, Lyman and Scott, among others, describes the ingenious ways that humans create cultures and societies and form kinds of political resources that aid populations to exist within an unmindful nature, and they describe as well the notion of action within the socially-constructed systems; it is more a theory that describes how communities are formed and remain dynamic within a material world, whose final and ultimate nature is unknown, unknowable, and finally irrelevant.

If we can't know anything about the ultimate nature of reality, how can we make claims about it, such as whether "it" has any "relevance" to the familiar world of medium-sized objects?

We can make our best general statements about what comprises what we know of reality drawn from the best measurements we can take of it, but a claim to a final, , conclusive and "ultimate" definition of that reality , is arrogance, and over rates science's ability to replace the comforting theology of religion and other exotica to contain our references within comprehensible and metaphorical boundaries. Such boundaries prescribe limits to what nature is, and operate on the notion that it is containable and finally exploitable to our own end, as the thinking has been for centuries that reality exists only to furnish us with raw materials to pursue or own needs and abstracted desires, free of consequence.

This is hardly been the case, as the results of industrialization and war have come back to choke us in the air we breath. We can , though, make statements about what we measure, and piece together some sense of reality that becomes a comprehensible world where laws, culture, religion, art and economics are devised to aid in the creation of human communities. Within that grossly over stated riff, there is infinite variation in how resourceful the human race is in constructing relevant communities of politics, culture and commerce. Only that which man makes can man know. Vico wrote that.

Three Poems by Jim Powell from Slate

When he's on his game, Jim Powell has a finely tuned ear for voice, place, and period, which we can see with his poem "The Seamstress," which can be read here in Slate. A good poem, as it goes, nothing special in the long run, but Powell does a neat and not-so-obvious job of creating parallels between a holiday that commemorates the dead and keeps their memory alive (and in so doing preserving some order in the minds and morals of those remaining alive), and woman trying to bring a decorative skeleton figuratively "to life" so it might add impact and meaning to the celebration. Powell is rather good at implying that it is all for naught, under the noise and decoration; the dead will remain in their graves as dust despite collective conjuring, and the skeleton will just continue to look limp and tattered, a rattling assemblage held together with costume thread and brocade. 

Powell's poem "First Light." and so it sits as well with the seamstress, herself old, creaking at the joints to finesse a stitch, squinting in the night light as the seams get wider, less tight, loosened with age. Her bones ache, her eyesight fails by degrees, the skeleton is a limp and tattered symbol whose power has waned, and meaning has lessened to the level of Saturday morning cartoon. The dead themselves are even more deceased than they were before, memories of their existence buried under the same ground the children dance upon other than that children love to the dance for any reason or no reason at all because being alive is only its most fun and enthralling at those times and moments when there is no knowledge of limits, of what you can't do or what can't be done. What about it? Perfectly suited for a slice-of-life poem, an observational piece focusing on the workplace, though it's problematic that the job described turns out to be in a bakery, alone baker just beginning his workday before light. The situation is a shade archetypal, and what has noticed in the lines, "tufts dusted with a snow of flour," and especially "thick arms cradling rolls and crusty loaves, a gift for late-returning revelers..." for the derelict who washes in the creek under the bridge his daily bread at daybreak come off more as wish-fulfillment than an inspired vision.

The setting is too ideal, everything that you would expect to be in an early AM bakery tableau just happen to be there, right down to the homeless man who picturesquely "washes his hands under the bridge." The stops being a poem at this point and become instead one of those faux Impressionist paintings of Parisian cityscapes in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, filled with blurry, alienated figurines in their shops and on the slippery hued streets going about their anonymous chores. There is an idealization in this well-crafted piece that strikes me as wrong and inappropriately dreamy. This may be because Powell gave us one painterly detail too many in this hyper-literalized diorama. Had he omitted the line "under the bridge" -- the problem is that bridges and rain are ever such ready poetic words to use when inspiration falls midline -- and substituted another tactile element, something plausible, recognizable yet unexpected (garden hose, a playground water fountain, a janitor's mop, something that could credibly be in the scene), the poem may well have worked. Even so, one expects something more to be said about this situation than the idea that it swells, dreamy, and meant to make you go "oooooooohhhhhhh" and "ahhhhhhhhhhhhh." There is an underside here that is ignored, and Powell shuns an urge to get beyond his cozy poetics to discover something remarkable, disturbing, and finally memorable. This poem is not unlike those previously mentioned faux Impressionist paintings, which are produced by the hundreds for tourist dollars. Powell's poem reads as if he's written dozens of variations on it. That isn't writing; it's merely production.

Not every poem clicks, of course. Another poem published in Slate, "Two Million Feet of Vinyl," worries an idea instead of bringing it to life. A bit laborious, heavy on the obfuscated detailing of industrial manufacturing in the attempt to let convoluted descriptions yield strange, alienated poetry. But one sees rapidly where this going, where everything, including workers, is mere materials to be converted in endless, brutal processes and wind up as dust. Powerful, perhaps, in a poem that doesn't telegraph its tragic punchline so much--you can see it coming like the Underdog float in the Macy's Holiday Parade--but here it just hangs there. You want more, and it doesn't come. It appears that he's seen "Things to Come" recently and is enamored of "Modern Times" and tried to emulate their effects with his own reassembly of the deadening effects of a technologized economy. But this is not a journey where Luddites and technocrats haven't gone before; it's a setup for a joke; man shapes his tools, after which the tools shape man. It's a poem based on first-semester political science lectures. The level of discourse is fine for freshmen, but by the time one gets around to be a published poet, there is the reasonable expectation that there's more than the gasping gee-whiz of it all occupying the writer's worried mind. 

What's being delivered is the moldy metaphor of alienation in Modern Times, that repetitive and mechanical means of production have made a man a part of the machines he invented to save him labor and time.  The facile equations between machine processes and the rescinded world are irksome at best. I don't know if he intended this to be ironic, a parody of futurist rhetoric, or whether he merely wanted the glorification of a brute, soulless contraption would itself yield remarkable poems of the "found" variety. This isn't the kind of ambiguity that makes for great art because it would have to at least point toward something, give a sense of direction if it were worth discussing longer than a terse dismissal. But this points nowhere other than at its clipped locutions. Powell is a good poet who must have dashed this off in an odd mood and didn't see fit to change it. Fine, I have dozens of poems that are exactly like this; cryptic, spacey, unyielding in their impenetrable weirdness.

Brian Thompson smites himself

I believe it's important for anyone who desires to write to write everyday , for no other reason other than maintain the discipline of composing something even when there is no inspiration nor the germ of an idea. Norman Mailer commented awhile ago that he maintained his regimen even on the worst of days because he needed to hone a style and so become better player of his instrument; I suspect wrote each day because it was important to him to realize how potentially bad he might sound while in pursuit of a suitable voice for the project he might have been working on. It seems to have worked well for most of the near sixty years career he had a professional writer.

We ought to note that Mailer, good or less good, never sounded like anyone else stringing words together, something that can't be said for Brian Thompson, writing yesterday at Chud.com . Titled "Mailer=Hulk", Thompson attempts a big of digressions and asides trying to find a common theme that might exist between Mailer's writing and the rebooted version of The Hulk; this is where we learn that while it's important to sit down and type out something no matter how good or bad, a writer should have the honesty not to publish every small matter they happen to spell out. Babbling in print is babbling all the same, and Thompson informs us that he had known the late author and had to slap him around because Mailer had crossed him, straining to mention matters of rage, masculine grace and the potential of violence to release truth and beauty in human affairs. It's not that these sorts of fantasies aren't needed consider the kind of mythology Mailer created for himself, but Thompson's effort is unremarkable and , well, dull. I'm thinking of the penultimate spoof on Mailer in Alan Lelchuk's brilliant novel American Mischief. Among other matters, a drunk Mailer offers a psychotic professor Bernard Kovell a chance to sodomize him, where upon the professor, aswim with Mailer's theories of murder and such in his essay The White Negro, crams a gun in the fictional Mailer's anus and pulls the trigger. The real life Mailer wasn't amused at the time, and sued Lelchuk for libel.

Thompson has read Mailer, it seems, but perhaps not closely enough. He writes

I leaned over his typewriter. “'The White Negro?'” I asked. “That's completely nonsensical.” His thighs nearly burst his purple jeans. His temples radiated Kirby dots. “I AM PROVOCATIVE!” he screamed. I barely realized the hot bath towel had been torn from my hands before he wrapped it around my neck.

It's late in the day for someone to attempt to parody Mailer now; what can be lampooned, exaggerated, made grotesque in his life has been done over and over through the decades, done so often , in fact, that even Mailer haters tired of hearing the same old complaints and defects brought up yet again, and again, and still again. He outlived his harshest critics and now the unthinkable has happened, one must consider the relative merits of the novels, journalism, plays, essays, criticism and screenplays he wrote over six decades. Thompson , though, seems to resent the fact that he never took on Mailer in any meaningful way and hastens to dust off the old insults, recycle the tired formulas.The satire arrives stiffly here, but while one might debate the worth of The White Negro as philosophy, it should be noted that Mailer composed the essay in long hand, having sworn off typewriters after writing his second novel Barbary Shore. The pencil was his preferred instrument. Michael Lennon, Mailer's friend and archivist, was kind enough to post that to this blog a year ago.