Burroughs: yeah, thanks...

The alternative view of the holiday should be represented, and there's not a better voice for the embittered, the disenfranchised, the decrepit, the perverse, the sardonic, the brilliant, and the ecstatically marginalized than William Burroughs. While the rest of America, we assume, gives thanks for what they have in a world that demonstrably avails them nothing and is winnowing away any localized genius part to imagine and creatively act toward better, more interesting lives, Burroughs elevates sarcasm to the highest level, beyond nose bleeding to the peak wear strokes occur and tells us some grim truths in reversed salutations. It sticks in the craw, yes, but it ought to. To paraphrase Marx, in an instance where he happened to be right, the task isn't to thank God for the luck we've had, but rather to use the brains he gave us to use in order to change our luck. Happy Holiday. -tb


Thanksgiving Prayer
William S. Burroughs

To John Dillinger and hope he is still alive.
Thanksgiving Day November 28 1986"

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shat out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.


Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.


Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.


Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

Bad vibe

This is one of those situations where a boss can find fault with your failure for providing "a good vibe" although you may be hitting all the marks for civility.

I was in a job where where a control-freak hotel manager refused to let do the job he was nominally training me to do--he took over tasks I started, reduced the number of things on my checklist--and took me aside to tell me that he didn't like the tone in my voice when I said "Please", "Thank you" or "you're welcome" to our hotel guests. That was exasperating , of course, but I just nodded, contained my impulse to scream, and assured this guy that I would try harder to have less tension. I hadn't a clue to what he was getting at, and nearly quit, thinking I wasn't paid enough to have a moron take a dump on me like that.

The next week , following a nightmarish Sunday morning checkout, the same manager asked me to step inside his office and to close the door behind me. I sat down while he sat on the edge of his desk, looking down at me, his glasses pushed like flight goggles around his forehead.

"Ted, I get the feeling that you're happy working here" he started, but I didn't let him proceed to what he wanted to discuss. He could save the speech for the next wage slave.

"I'm not" I said,"and you can take my name off the schedule right now. I don't work here anymore..."

I punched out and went home and eventually found work as a bookseller, a trade I never strayed from since the mid eighties. I still don't make that much money, but at least it has benefits that pleases the soul, if not the bank account or health plan.

Nabokov gets burned

There was a today about three years ago as to whether the estate of novelist Vladimir Nabokov should publish his last, unfinished novel posthumously. After a bit of hustle and heat in the literary press and blogosphere, the publication of that manuscript,The Original of Laura, has appeared between covers. It's a rare instance where I will skip a new book by a favorite author. From the description supplied by Amazon.com, I have no desire to see this esteemed master of English prose reduced to flash cards. I said three years ago that they should burn the manuscript and be done with it. I wish they had. I’m not a fan of posthumous for the simple reason that most of what surfaces after a famed scribe’s death suffer in the goriest possible terms. 

After the fact manuscripts by Elizabeth Bishop, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson and (most grotesquely) Ernest Hemingway are less than the respective geniuses. who commanded our attention in the first place. Their genius, that is, and the insistence of English teachers and professors of literature. Rough drafts, juvenilia, awkward early writings where one was working toward a mature style, and copious late-career self-parodies are all things I‘d have preferred to remain in the drawer, or in the box; it’s embarrassing to have a book in your hand who’s publication wasn’t approved by the author in which there’s writing that falls below the superlative standards the author set for himself or herself. 

Hemingway’s reputation as a stylist diminished in the view of critics of critics and readers with the surfeit of previously unpublished manuscripts. Mailer fanatic that I am, there’s no thirst on my part to read incomplete and unpolished prose from the late writer set between book covers; it seems immoral to let the less tidy writings be presented as “unpublished gems” , or “lost masterpieces”. It’s a dishonest cheat, a fraud laid upon the readership. Nabokov was painstaking in his craft, and it’s his judgment I trust if he deemed the manuscript unpublished. Burn it and allow us a genius unspoiled by erring scholars and eager publishers.

What gets me about what's been done with the unpublished work of dead writers is the way in which they're presented; one is nearly always promised that what we have in our hands is a "lost masterpiece" . In any case, the marketing promises writing on a level of these writers’s best work, but this seldom the case. There are exceptions, though, as with the publication of The First Man, the posthumous novel by the brilliant Albert Camus. Critical consensus is it's the equal of his best novels, and I agree. Honesty in these publications would ease by dis-easae with the matter, perhaps, if the emphasis discussed were more historical than aesthetic. The fact remains, though, that there are thousands who want to get a thrill equal to the jag they felt when they read Miller, Thompson, Hemingway, et al, the first time, and it remains a good bet that readers will disguise their disappointment with posthumous efforts with a further elaboration of the mythology--all the cant, clichés and truisms that clog up a cult writer's reputation--which will make this phenomenon a permanent vex.
  
My  friend Barry Alfonso brought up the pertinent example of Max Brod, who published Kafka's unpublished manuscripts against the author's explicit dying wishes.



It  be a challenge, but I suspect I would have done as Max Brod did and published Kafka's work. Brod claims to have told his dying friend that he would not carryout the last request of publishing the manuscripts. True or not, it is known that Brod had encouraged Kafka to publish during his lifetime, to little avail .Being an editor , publisher, author in his own right, he likely couldn't stand the thought of having what he thought as a major body of writing going up in smoke, unread. It was a matter of establishing a deserved reputation for greatness for a writer who wasn't able to judge his own validity; Nabokov had a major reputation and publications at the time of his death, and was, I think, using sound judgement when he requested the last manucript to be burned. It was a practice run, a series of notes, not a book. I think Nabokov was the best critic of his own work.

Poetry and lying

Some time I posted a poem I wrote concerning a blurry childhood memory of my Mom sobbing over a stove, the conceit being that I'd first give hints that this was going to be a melancholic memoir and then reveal, through a clever alignment of detail, that her tears were not from a spat with Dad. It was revealed by the last stanza that she' chopped raw onions for what the meal . Someone asked in a response how the memory was so clear, and I explained that the story was not wholly true; I manufactured the narrative thread I couldn't recall, and produce an entity that had a punchline, not a grievous irony. The response was fairly psychotic; I was called a liar and worse with my method revealed, and the inconsolable assailant couldn't get it through his (or her) head that not every poem is factual, therapeutic, journalistic. My response was defensive, of course, and typical of the accused bard.It's called imaginative literature, after all.Not a good reading habit for someone who says they love poetry. No, my friend, I didn't lie to the readers, I just told them a story.Poetry is imaginative writing, my brother, and there are those who err in reading this as an attempt at autobiography. The offended party didn't seem to accept any of this and cranked the vitriole higher, at which time I stopped talking to her (or him),You wonder what they missed in grade school when reading and writing was taught ; poets are liars by habit of mind when it comes to their craft; they make stuff up when they feel the need. Critic John Hollander has a useful essay on the matter,The shadow of a lie: poetry, lying, and the truth of fictions. That should give us something to consider.This is a slippery slope, and what it underlines it your unwillingness to admit that poetry is the practice of writing in imaginative, figurative, fictional language. Writers employ metaphors, similes, and varied tropes at times to get to what one can call the "larger" truths,"greater", which is to say that writers, poets especially, try to get at matters a straight forward prose style can't get at. The hidden moral of the story, if you will.Part of this is creating scenarios that are not necessarily factual (autobiographical) or plausible in the conventional sense. Coleridge has a useful principle he calls the suspension of disbelief, which roughly means that a reader needs to leave their suppositions and stipulations at the door as they enter into reading a poem; you need to stop arguing that a poem is obliged to fulfill your personal requirements and instead read it as is, inspect what the writer does. Bandying about words like "lies" blocks us, meaning myself, from the sunshine of the spirit.An impatient man can't possibly get all that poets and their work have to offer. Exactly what they have to offer is debatable, but that's part of the pleasure of reading poetry,or writing it. It's better ,I think, to leave people wondering for themselves than to try to tell them the facts , Joe Friday style.

Thomas Lux, the Poet Laureate of Unintended Results

There are those poets whose mastery is so inspiring that one feels a need to cease writing verse themselves lest the master comes across a slovenly stanza one has written and commence to laugh deeply, richly at the grammatical incompetence. Paranoia, I know, but that's the feeling I get sometimes after reading the poems of Thomas Lux. The ease with which he's able to merge plain speaking with unaffected turns of phrase, dark irony with darker humor, hard realism with lyric sweeps which make me pause in my own work and consider the next line I'll write harder than I normally would. Great poets inspire that. Lux is one of my favorite poets--I can't think of anyone else who crafts a free verse poem with better care and intriguing twists of perception that he does., He is exactly the poet people should read when they want more from comprehensible poems than Billy Collins' unceasing tours of his neighborhood. Lux is the Laureate of Unintended Results. He will show you how matters invade expectation and undermine a grand view of how one's life is working through the weeks.

CUCUMBER FIELDS CROSSED BY HIGH-TENSION WIRES.

The high-tension spires spike the sky

beneath which boys bend

to pick from prickly vines

the deep-sopped fruit, the rind's green

a green sunk

in green. They part the plants' leaves,

reach into the nest,

and pull out mother, father, fat Uncle Phil.

The smaller yellow-geren children stay,

for now the fruit goes

in baskets by the side of the row,

every thirty feet or so. By these bushels

the boys get paid, in cash,

at day's end, this summer

of the last days of the empire

that will become known as

the past, adios, then,

the ragged-edged beautiful blink.

An agrarian scene, we assume at first, made dense and surreal with Lux's painterly descriptions, but there is something subtler, deadlier underneath. This poem for me addresses invading armies, albeit disguised in fruity metaphor. Overwhelming forces invade homes, destroy homelands, cart off citizens and vital resources, and then are gone when use is exhausted, in a blink that Lux fuses with Yeat's "terrible beauty". This poem has more to do with the metaphorical devices nations and electorates will use to distance themselves from the real damage their country inflicts for some greater, glorious good. Suffering is discounted, and the blood on one's fingertips is said to taste like honey. This is a provocative poem from Lux. He is so skilled in his language that it gets scary. Of all the poets with a realist bent, Lux I think is the one who is truly subversive of his own and, by extension, his reader's assumptions of the world. It is a neat and meaningful leap for him to go from a narrative that mimics, shall we say parodies Hemingway's hunting persona that reveals , at the end, a bizarre twist in Papa's Romanticism masculinity, equating the resemblance of the monkey's small hands with those of children, and fantasizing in the last instance that monkeys "can be taught to smile."You smile, indeed, you chuckle, you get the joke and wonder how on earth he came up with this unexpected yet fruitful turn, and then there is the additional, delayed realization that what Lux has offered up is a brief and cutting critique of hunter mystique. Rousseau himself would shiver at what comes up with. Lux is one of our best.

Refrigerator, 1957

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out

and on the shelves: not a lot,

and what there is (a boiled potato

in a bag, a chicken carcass

under foil) looking dispirited,

drained, mugged. This is not

a place to go in hope or hunger.

But, just to the right of the middle

of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,

heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,

shining red in their liquid, exotic,

aloof, slumming

in such company: a jar

of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters

full, fiery globes, like strippers

at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,

the only foreign word I knew. Not once

did I see these cherries employed: not

in a drink, nor on top

of a glob of ice cream,

or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.

The same jar there through an entire

childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,

pocked peas and, see above,

boiled potatoes. Maybe

they came over from the old country,

family heirlooms, or were status symbols

bought with a piece of the first paycheck

from a sweatshop,

which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,

handed down from my grandparents

to my parents

to be someday mine,

then my child's?

They were beautiful

and, if I never ate one,

it was because I knew it might be missed

or because I knew it would not be replaced

and because you do not eat

that which rips your heart with joy.

Like Don DeLillo in his novels, Lux gives the history of a consumer culture's love affair with the objects they purchase and attach their happiness to, only to fall out of love when a wire is too frayed, a motor stops running, or a newer, sleeker design replete with more gadgets hits the showroom floor; so much history, family is contained within this refrigerator, memories that grow faint as children grow, parents die, people move to places out of town. A poignant picture this is, a deserted refrigerator on the back porch for years, something you pass daily, perhaps, knowing there are history and stories attached to its existence as a working machine, all of it unknown and unrecoverable like singular drops of rain into a stream."So You Put the Dog to Sleep" is one my incidental favorite poems of the last ten years. In it Lux categorizes within a routine, if excruciating ritual of middle-class life, the skewed habits of mind, suggesting here the weirdness John Cheever could get at with his tragi-comic stories about New York suburbs. He additionally subtly indicates how we handle the minor tragedies in our lives.

SO YOU PUT THE DOG TO SLEEP

Thomas Lux

"I have no dog, but must be

Somewhere there's one belongs to me."

--John Kendrick Bangs

You love your dog and carve his steaks

(marbled, tgender, aged) in the shape of hearts.

You let him on your lap at will

and call him by a lover's name:Liebschen,

pooch-o-mine, lamby, honey tart,

and you fill your voice with tenderness, woo.

He loves you too, that's his only job,

it's how he pays his room and board.

Behind his devotion, though, his dopey looks,

he might be a beast who wants your house,

your wife; who in fact loathes you, his lord.

His jaws snapping while you sleep means dreams

of eating your face: nose, lips, eyebrows, ears...

But soon your dog gets old, his legs

go bad, he's nearly blind, you puree his meat

and feed him with a spoon. It's hard to say

who hates whom more. He will not beg.

So you put the dog to sleep, Bad dog.

Cheever might be the best writer to compare Lux with, as the two of them have established the elegant yet clear-eyed tone of a narrator who can affectionately, intimately describe the conditions and contexts of the scenarios and yet remain seemingly detached , uncommitted, reserved if only to not break into laughter or tears as to the outcome. With "Dog" the situation begins with love, affection, an owner's dutiful care for his pet in exchange for the animal's unqualified love and loyalty. Later, as the dog grows older, his love and loyalty turns into dependence as he ages and becomes infirm, while the owner's affections sour into resentment. It constructs how thinking is geared to allow us to dodge guilt. As with farts, missing homework and soiled carpets, blame the dog for his own demise.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles


Stars glisten over the alley
after we pay the bill,
dim white glow on cracked brick
and every twine of a rainbow.


You say there’s nothing to cry about ever again,you say, I am dry as the gulch
that runs between my heart
and the trembling mouth
I might feed and die
the grievous wounds.

These hands stay
in my pocket,

this wallet is closed,
each old dollar sheds a tear.


I like blues guitar and
walks along the river, I respond,
but only at dusk so the broken windows gleam
like gold teeth under a jeweler’s lens,

static smoke stacks looming
over the oily wakes
freighters leave for
the shoreline rocks
is my idea of perfect harmony
and balance in the cosmos.
Little else feels
as fine as seeing
a planet behind exhausted
one fossil at a time.

In the car
radio voices argue
about stats and gun control,
the skyline recedes,

we’re on the freeway,
concrete corridors
as far as these keys
can take us.

Paul Blackburn and the Hard Gaze

The late poet Paul Blackburn reads at times like a writer who could watch himself in action; he seems enthralled by what is said and the consequences that follow .A good bit of his writing grasps the contradictions of seduction and lust on the male psyche more effectively than most contemporary authors can handle. He didn't, for one, thing , attempt to atone for his lack of basic virtue; the appeal for me is that he isolates the hang up, and arranges the tension as a witnessing of a rationalization that rings tinny, even false. He catches himself in his own lie. In an especially good discussion of his poem "The Once Over" in her book Break, Blow Burn, Camille Paglia , for once not parading her own arrogance, gives an excellent analysis on Blackburn's skill in precisely evoking the Summary Gaze that judges women (or men) as potential sexual partners as they pass by one's view; a predatory behavior that gives into lust, with a guilty pall hanging over the nearly as soon as it passes.

 

 Blackburn can turn these cruel bits of revelry into hard, sharp lyrics, the theme, perhaps, being a man who desires the right things to do and the decent person to be who , none the less, is driven at odd hours by a leering intent. It is painfully masculine and heterosexual and contradictory in confounding ways, but it is something beautifully, honestly expressed. Like Mailer's obsession with the experience and meaning of male experience, the result is literary art. I might find it unnerving at a moral level, but I suspect I'd be a less interesting had I not discovered Mailer or Blackburn.

Ambivalence is the word for this poem, really, and it's not dated at all, considering that men and women continue to be complicated creatures who continue test given scenarios of gender-interaction and continue, as often as not, to end up with problematic results. Blackburn traces his own thinking on this encounter, attempting to enter into the mind of the woman who is with him, trying to disguise his hubris under some thinly offered assurances of gallantry and caring physicality--the male seems to be offering up some sort of Lawerence/Mellors version of Reichian sex technique the would bring both of them into some heightened awareness and effect a profound change in both of them. Blackburn, though, is too good a poet to take the ideology at face value and recognizes the delusional aspect of addressing a dis-satisfying experience in wholesome, all inclusive terms; depression sets in ,inevitably, and one is left with little else but to self-loathe, rationalize and second guess motives. The real world is what we start with here, setting the scene Blackburn's poem One Night Stand: An Approach to the Bridge gets even closer to the baser facts of someone who cannot relate to women without a poeticized rationalization to fuel his intentions.

Migod, a picture window,
both of us sitting there
on the too-narrow couch
variously unclothed
watching sky lighten over the city.

This is a quizzical stew of conflict that Blackburn's brooding male attempts to reconstruct the event, his motives, the second-guessed emotions of the unnamed woman. In the replay he minimizes her protests with assurances that the two of them would merge into one another and become one through the coupling. Fine, one would think, if one were in a tightly wound narrative where actions and larger consequences played out against a universe concretely, if discretely determined dramatic principles, but this is scene, for all the male's diffuse philosophizing, is composed of actions, not theories, and the awareness that one has entered into intimacy with improvised passion looms again. One is brought back to the world from which they started, depressed somewhat from the reveries. The world intrudes again, as it always will on the fantasies of otherwise sane people":

The coffee does not warm
there is an orange sun in the river
there are blue lights on the bridge
Animal tenderness and
sadness is all we salvage, is
all the picture window
mirrors and maintains.

This is a brave poem, an unblinking study of one's less-savory motivations and the mental convolutions one would employ to escape the guilt of behaving badly, perhaps criminally. Told sparely, concisely, with a wonderful grasp of how to join a finely honed image and a swift bit of lyric intellection , I enjoy the poem for it's honesty and lack of self pity. The detours Blackburn makes around the verbal equivocations one expects a poet to make use o is refreshing and a large part of why the poem packs the punch it does. There does exist  the wrong headed idea that stalling and expanse are the keys to ensure the impression the writer has sussed through his issues, topical and submerged, for a considered period and comes up, through naked honesty edified by craft, a poem of deep feeling. Poets with decades of favorable from critics who's praise influences the bequeathing of cash rewards do this more often than anyone , it seems, desires to be honest enough to admit. Blackburn here has a poem that casts you into a stammering response, a reaction actually, something akin, it seems, to being caught staring at an attractive too long and having to admit the conflicting tensions of lust and public courtesy. It's a hard jolt, a slap in the face, a pitcher of ice water poured over the head. It's a shock to the system that cannot be ignored , although, realistically, it can be rationalized away after the fact, minimized and justified with the reams of self-vindicating articulation the smartest and eloquent among us have practiced in the bleaker corners of our interior lives. One feels that Blackburn is telling secrets out of turn, revealing those things that is understand in the comfort of other males lusting after the objectified image  of a woman. He seems to be confessing why it is poets in particular read so beautifully on the issues of love, intimacy, great and abounding empathy for human suffering  and who themselves wind up being such emotionally neutral sorts in their waking lives and relationships. It is a brave poem indeed, one that reads as if it's goal is to destroy the disguise that being a poet provides the prowling author of superficially nuanced verse.