Schadenfreude is bliss

There's been a bit of grousing about whether the Coen brothers have set themselves on cruise control since multi-Oscar wins  for No Country for Old Men,the current evidence being the new comedy, Burn After Reading. It's familiar character terrain for Coen fans, this time focused on a gaggle of Washington DC nitwits and imbeciles who try to get the upper hand when a canned CIA analyst's memoirs , on CD, is found by an attendant on the locker room of a local gym. What follows when the CD gets into the hands of two inordinately self-seeking body trainers, wonderfully kinked performed by Francis McDormand and Brad Pitt , is the sort of comedy the Coens excel in, a detached though acute view of a many characters operating agendas from myopic cocoons who are frantically pursuing their ends regardless of consequences. Theirs is a comedy of situations where nothing is thought-through by the characters, everyone is looking for the shortcut, and all the assumptions crash, burn and sometimes are fatal when the gravity of collected self-regard takes hold and takes over.Their genius is to make you laugh at all this no matter how unsympathetic the characters might be; the unsympathetic nature of the figures in Burn After Reading is the charge leveled against the brothers this time out, as well as some complaints that they're borrowing from their other movies, particularly Fargo and Oh Brother , but to the first challenge mostly I'd counter that being able to "relate" shouldn't be the sole basis to enter a film's narrative. What matters is how well matters are brought out, made compelling; Burn is compelling, if nothing else, but more so, it is a film by masters. They are  practioners of Hitchcock's techniques of voyeur-noir --their camera notices everything, notes each gesture, figure of speech, constructs different scenarios as to where the plot might go, and then allows a particularly fragile house of cards to collapse.Shallow as they be in life's purpose, their quirks, their world views are fully delineated and detailed. This has the sort of aesthetic remove that made Nabokov an effectively satiric novelist; wouldn't a Coen Brothers' version of Laughter in the Dark be an ideal match up of sensibilities? Nabokov, always in love with people's schemes , their rationalizations, and the erotic inflection when lust and avarice influence the chatter and buzz phrases, would like the Brother's merciless technique and distance; he'd appreciate the way their movies can get in close without embarrassment to expose a massive vacancy where something like a soul should be.

You remember that humorless Brian dePalma turned Tom Wolf's dyspeptic novel Bonfire of the Vanities into a fat, trudging monster that turned the author's flinty wit and lacerating details of New York greed and class where the wounds inflicted were secondary to everyone being manic and mirthless for all the tortured reasoning their obsessions required. There wasn't a laugh to be had, and you merely experienced unpleasant folks at the expense of the time you might have spent doing something more interesting. Had Joel and Ethan Coen helmed the screen adaptation, one would be singing their praises further for maintaining a balance between the audience's voyeur like interest in what is none of their affair and the nearly clinical portrayal Bad Faith as a quality no sympathetic spin. As is, however, Wolf's book suffered the fate of being another of dePalma inflated galleries of borrowed camera styles and Joel and Ethan have fared well enough without him. Duncan Shepard, film critic for the San Diego reader and one of the better essayists on film matters Coen has a punchy, succinct and on-target review of Burn After Reading here. It's significant, as Shepard is America's fussiest film critic; fair, and hard to please. Mostly, far beyond the aspect whether I find sympathy with a film character, is whether the project is fun. Art of any sort has to be fun , which isn't to say fun on the level of the playground, but more with whether I regret the time I spent engaged or not."Art" is massive set of aesthetic activities that accommodates plenty of agendas in its generalized practice, the practice of "having fun" not the least of them. "Fun" is that sense of something that engages and provokes in someway a facet of one's personalty that makes up the personalized and skewed way that one understands how the world works in fact. Whether Cage piano recitals, James Carter solos, Fassbinder film festivals, or whatever gamier, tackier sounds cleave to ones' pleasured ganglia, the quality of fun, that fleeting, momentary state that defines an activity, is why we're attracted to some kinds of music , and not others. It's a legitimate definition for an aesthetic response, but the problem comes in the description of the response, the articulate delineation of what made a set of sounds "fun".The point, of course, being that everything that is entertaining or distracting from the morbid sameness of daily life cannot be said to be exclusively in the domain of the willfully dumb, conceived in a massive expression of bad faith: what is entertaining, from whatever niche in the culture you're inspecting, is that activity that holds you attention and engages you the degree that you respond to it fully.

"Fun", in fewer words.

Out on a Lim

Slate writer Dennis Lim goes after film director Jason Reitman with a meat axe , and this a fervor that stumbles beyond criticism of a director's style or his aestheticized world view. Lim sounds like he's trying to settle a score, a slight Reitman may have given him, real or imagined. Or worse, it might be that he's  not talking about Up in the Air at all but is rather responding to friends who, perhaps, have talked about Reitman's nominated too often for to long as they engaged in their Oscar buzz. The piece reads like a resentful inventory of Last Words On The Subject he hasn't yet been able to lay down. He certainly wants to make Reitman the enemy of the good; his little tear against the alleged anti-abortion elements in Juno, for example, are a rather third-rate bit of leftist film criticism with it's glandular obsession with subtextual political messages. I frankly didn't sense any of that and assumed , like most others who were impressed with Reitman's light touch on the material that he was more interested in a story about a teenager who decides to keep the baby she discovers she's carrying.

Not every pregnant teenager decides to get an abortion, and there is no requirement that movies about them wind up with sad, violent, tragic consequences. It's a young girl making a decision to keep her child and becoming aware of the irony of realizing that what had you assumed about your life was based on received ideas; experience changes each paradigm one might have wanted to live in forever. It was to Reitman's credit that he could deal with these complications without resorting to the expected kick in the stomach and the blow to the head , metaphorically speaking; he found another way to tell this tale. He wasn't arguing one side or the other, but rather examining a character's response to a life changing event. I imagine Lim is Pro Choice and find it disquieting that he'd resort to such ramped up charges about some who made a decision on the matter. Had the girl opted for an abortion and Reitman in kind retained the ironic and fetching tone, would Lim had reacted with equal outrage?  Maybe, maybe not.

It didn't bother me that the terrain here was not believable--these are movies, fictions, made up narratives where we are have to willingly suspend our disbelief. The issue is whether within the style and rationale of the narrative style the story incidents are plausible. For this fable, the events are plausible enough. I believed these idealized characters would behave this way. The shame is that the subtlety of Reitman's movie made Lim steam and worked himself into a labored snit. He needs a sense of humor,he needs to lighten, he needs, perhaps, to get another job.High blood pressure isn't worth the effort to argue these petty grievences with such moral righteousness.

Garden variety fiefdom

Stare at a garden too much and too long the garden in turn will stare back at you, which will cause you sensibly self reflect and transmit your paradigms straight into the plumes, the foliage, the draping ribbons of grass and the rioting colors of the petals. Not a bad thing, if the result is Roseanna Warren's delightful and wry bit of anthropomorphizing "Hydrangea". The billow-bloomed plant is viewed as king, a tyrant, a vain and commanding lord overseeing the minute arrangements, tilled and incidental,of the plot of earth, assessing what he owns in his realm.

 Office Manager you know? Arrogant Shift Leader? Power drunk Lead Cashier? All manner of closed-system tyrant can be wedged into Warren's winsome ode, as this personality is the one that forgets that it has no real power in it's current existence, has no input as to the determined processes by imagining instead that it is King of All. This would a superb example of what it might be like if a self-flattering dolt happened into the Supreme Fiction of Wallace Steven's terrain of lyrically perfect Ideal Types. The most foolish of creatures assumes the credit reserved for God it cannot be:

The central path leads straight to him. Behind,

a stained mirror and mossy wall back up his power.

Thousands of crinkled, tiny, white ideas occur to him

with frilled and overlapping edges.

As with the best tended gardens, Warren shapes her phrases, tends to the placement of her words and select verbs; she gets to a vision of delusional grandeur as well as the snapshot of the same situation going about it's business unmindful, ultimately unconcerned with the royalistic projections of a preening ego.

No one else

deploys such Byzantine metaphysics. No one

can read his mind. Only he remembers

the children's secret fort by the cypress tree

among fraught weeds, rusted buckets, and dumped ash,

and how lost the grown-ups sounded, calling, as night came

The Byzantine reference can be puzzling, as it implies conspiracy with the other plants to conquer , rule and regulate this garden. Warren sees this in simpler terms.  this  being, rather, a projected image  of the  poet imaginings the vanity of the Hydrangea. It is the title flower's delusion that it is the lord of the loam that nourishes it. The above passage removes us from  the bloom's point of view and establishes that none of the other plants, the previously regarded "minions", haven't the former plant's frame of reference, as in "No one can read his mind." What is Byzantine here are the layered rationalizations that allow the Hydrangea to over-estimate it's importance in this small patch of the planet.The voice surely shifts from the pithy and fussy realm of the king Hyrdangea to the reality of the rest of the garden, it's rooted citizens, all involved in their own bits of business within the loam-filtered niche. Handily, smartly Warren doesn't disabuse us from viewing the garden as a sphere with human qualities--she rather sustains it as she debunks the assumptions of the title plant. There is a skillful sustaining of the metaphor while the slight lesson is made, suggesting a world with an unending line of cosmologies coexisting in the resonances of private thoughts. Closely observed, crisply described, thoroughly unpretentious.

Laugh

Political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow and his strip The Modern World has been a favorite for the way he relentlessly slams and lampoons the truth-challenged who comprise the Republican Echo Chamber; his drawings of snarling white men in suites rationalizing the destruction of the Public Good for the sake of Unrestrained Profit assures me that I'm not the only one who thinks something awful is going on. Tonight , though, was laugh out , in a strip called Too Much Crazy. Above is his depiction of a New York Times ombudsman trying to explain away some incongruities in a story they ran . The deadpan tone is perfect.

"Shutter Island": CLOSED FOR REPAIRS

It's heartening to think that there is a large audience that desires a major motion picture of substance, grace and  elegantly restrained craft , the sort of movie that director Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island" longs to be, but that's slim consolation for those who sat through the movie's two hours and eighteen minutes. One of things I like Martin Scorsese for is that he's an extreme movie fan--at his best he's what Quentin Tarantino wants to be, blessed with an observable genius--and one appreciates that he wanted to make something in the style of Val Lewton. Lewton's productions were distinct and elegant, but they were also taut, tight narrative lines leading to increasingly nerve racking results. As with Brian dePalma, who never learned that lesson for all his stylistic obsession with Hitchcock, Scorsese doesn't glean that from any of the suspense masters he 's viewed.

Lewton, though, didn't poke around his set ups nor erupt with gratuitous verve as Scorsese often does; his thrillers "I Walked With a Zombie", "Cat People" and "Body Snatcher" , though rife with a psychological nuance, were stylish and efficient engines of excitement. Ninety minutes, more or less, was what it took for the problematic results of a protagonist's plight to slam you up against the wall. Irony , effectively deployed , was essential to Lewton's artistry, a wrinkle, a turn, an unexpected result that could alter the entire tone of the film; Scorsese, too often arty and not at all artful, hasn't the slightest grasp of the ironic touch. The twist in "Shutter Island"--the man investigating a disappearance in an insane asylum is himself insane--startles no one; the audience is basically tipped off by the escalation of weird events. Believability has nothing to do with it; rather it's more plausibility, the extent to which you're willing to suspend disbelief to allow the genre to work it's distractions on you. 

The delusional nature of Leonardo DiCaprio's character was as unexpected as a phone bill. Another issue hampering the film's effectiveness is DiCaprio's youthful appearance; seasoned law enforcement officers don't look like they just got back from a shoot for Tiger Beat. He compensates , or tries to, by scrunching up his face in sustained series of prune faced close ups, but the effect is of a watching a man suffer through a bad headache, an unintended irony for the viewer waiting for the movie's quality to improve. Relief came, of course, in the form of the end credits.

on Dorianne Laux's poetry

I met Dorianne Laux twenty years go when she was a protege of San Diego area poet Steve Kowit. She gave a reading at the bookstore I worked at, and what I heard was one of the most accomplished young poets I've had the luck to listen to or read. Her language is straightforward without being plain, her imagery is made of everyday things that are made to glow or grow dark with the turns of human joy , sadness, or darker moods, her phrasing is artful , and she is among the very few one is likely to come across whose work is notable for its heart and its skewed readings of small things, intimate things.

Break

by Dorianne Laux

We put the puzzle together piece
by piece, loving how one curved
notch fits so sweetly with another.
A yellow smudge becomes
the brush of a broom, and two blue arms
fill in the last of the sky.
We patch together porch swings and autumn
trees, matching gold to gold. We hold
the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair
of brown shoes. We do this as the child
circles her room, impatient
with her blossoming, tired
of the neat house, the made bed,
the good food. We let her brood
as we shuffle through the pieces,
setting each one into place with a satisfied
tap, our backs turned for a few hours
to a world that is crumbling, a sky
that is falling, the pieces
we are required to return to.

Balance of sentiment and rhetoric make her endlessly readable and quietly inspiring as she takes a small thing and makes it into something quite radiant. Laux's mastery of the believable tongue enables to make unexpected yet credible twists in conventional subject and to make emotions that have been talked to death by my estimation resonate with a true ring of recognition. This cunning rescues this poem, “Break” from sentimentality, and that gives us a clue to what makes this and her best work stand apart; she is in touch with her emotion, but she has the skill to get to the heart of them . This poem of she and her mate playing with the child is touching because it brings you into the moment and lets you be a witness instead of the reader lecturing the reader; Laux speaks with an intimate "we", meaning not just her husband but also any one of us who have set aside our agendas to raise children, enduring their tantrums, feeling heartened by their laughter, consoling them in sadness.

GRAVEYARD AT HURD'S GULCH

His grave is strewn with litter again,
crumpled napkins, a plastic spoon, white
styrofoam cup tipped on its side, bright
half-moon of lipstick on the rim.
I want to scold her for the mess she's left,
the flattened grass and squashed grapes,
but I've seen her walking toward the trees,
her hollow body receding, her shadow
following behind. I'm the intruder,
come not to mourn a specific body
but to rest under a tree, my finger tracing
the rows of glowing marble,
the cloud-covered hips of the hills.
I always take the same spot,
next to the sunken stone that says MOTHER,
the carved dates with the little dash between them,
a brief, deep cut, like a metaphor for life.
Does she whisper, I wonder, to the one
she loves, or simply eat and sleep, content
for an hour above the bed of his bones?
I think she brings him oranges and secrets,
her day's torn and intricate lace.
I have no one on this hill to dine with.
I'm blessed. Everyone I love is still alive.
I know there is no God, no afterlife,
but there is this peace, the granite angel
with the moss-covered wings whose face
I have grown to love, her sad smile
like that sadness we feel after sex,
those few delirious hours when we needed nothing
but breath and flesh, after we've flown back
into ourselves, our imperfect heavy bodies,
just before that terrible hunger returns.

This poem as well brings to bear an entire life into one stanza, physical details of plastic spoons, wrappers, Styrofoam cups crisply described in its obsolescence (“Styrofoam cup tipped on its side, bright /half-moon of lipstick on the rim.”) nonchalantly desecrating a site dedicated to the eternal memory of one’s mother; the irony is that the trash indicates in it’s a small way that life goes on and the bits and pieces of what we wrap our conveniences find a grave in the earth to. Laux contemplates that we proceed in death as well, in physical decomposition, and she offers up a lyric of death without transcendence, without migration to higher realms and yet entertains that death isn’t the end of it all, the period at the end of a long story. But she turns again to her life as it is, knowing this is goodbye and a final look at what remains of the woman who bore her and raised her; life, the narrator’s life, resides elsewhere. That is where Laux sharpest instinct as a poet lie, the ability to look back upon the significance of people , places, and things that have gone away through death, marriage or migration, and then returning to the life that she is within, affirmed and joyous to have a life that's worth living. She serves the situation with a fine, delicate balancing of the prosaic, the simple phrasing, and the higher allure of lyric speech, and allows neither to overwhelm the other. Her poems, often time presented to us in the guise of prose, has an intimacy rare among a generation of poets who maintain distance from their most volatile emotion; her poems have the power of revelation, of someone sorting through old photographs or a rediscovered journal who , while recounting their day, gets a high pitch in their voice as they realize something even they hadn't realized. Laux never forgets herself as a writer with a goal, fret not, there is a point she comes to, the pay off one expects to make the listing of a poet's personal world resonate in ways it otherwise wouldn't.

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

How It Will Happen, When

Dorianne Laux

There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch,

the floor, at the foot of the bed, anywhere you fall you fall down crying,

half amazed at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry

anymore. And there they are, his socks, his shirt, your underwear

and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile next to the bathroom door,

and you fall down again. Someday, years from now, things will be

different, the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows

shining, sun coming in easily now, sliding across the high shine of wax

on the wood floor. You'll be peeling an orange or watching a bird

spring from the edge of the rooftop next door, noticing how,

for an instant, its body is stopped on the air, only a moment before

gathering the will to fly into the ruff at its wings and then doing it:

flying. You'll be reading, and for a moment there will be a word

you don't understand, a simple word like now or what or is

and you'll ponder over it like a child discovering language.

Is you'll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that's

when you'll say it, for the first time, out loud: He's dead. He's not

coming back. And it will be the first time you believe it.

This speaker is talking about spending an period of her life trying to talk herself into accepting the loss of her dearly departed, and goes on from there to talk about a life that seems detached , dream like; there is an unreal calm in this world as she struggles to push on. She is emotionally numb, so far as I can tell, until it hits hurt, triggered by what some small matter, acutely detailed to her, when the artifice comes apart and the fact of her friend's absence hits hard, almost like being struck. Laux isn't contradicting herself, but instead talking about the transition from merely mouthing the conventional platitudes of acceptance of a loss and the eventual , inevitable realization that her friend's absence is permanent.Artifice includes ritual, which would be the sort of compulsive house cleaning one occupies their time with while trying to pretend that they are moving on with their life after the death of a loved one; the activity and the manic obsession with the details of these tasks are , for me, a conspicuous clue that there is something the person would rather not deal with.There's an intuitive leap here, and I think the power of the poem is the quick but not illogical insertion of the final remark, that instance when you realize a loved one isn't returning; what Laux does here is shown that a feeling like this is like a sudden attack, coming from seeming nowhere, leaving you in a what I could only describe as a state of shock. This is not a formal argument she is making; this has that eliding quality few poets capture well, the revelation expressed as if we're witnessing the thought coming to the narrator as she speaks. The “clean house” Laux mentions, with everything neatly arranged and placed in their place, every trace of the person gone or tucked in some burnished-over corner:

the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows

shining, sun coming in easily now, skimming across
the thin glaze of wax on the wood floor. (...)

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

You’ll be reading, and for a moment you’ll see a word

you don’t recognize, a simple words like cup or gate or wisp

and you’ll ponder like a child discovering language.

Cup, you’ll say over and over until it begins to make sense,

and that’s when you’ll say it, for the first time, out loud: He’s dead.

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

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

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

Too smart to be read?

Some readers think of them as too thick headed to enjoy reading a novel by Don DeLillo; it’s a case where a writer’s reputation for heady lyricism repulses rather than attracts. The author’s difficulty, though, is overstated. You’re not a drone for not being drawn to Delilah; he either appeals to you or he doesn't, as is the case with any other serious (or less serious) writer who wants to get your attention. The charges that DeLillo is tedious, wordy and pretentious, not necessarily in that order, are they tedious and, it seems, levied by a folks who either haven't read much of the author, more likely, put forward by a host of soreheads who use DeLillo as a representative of a kind of fiction writing they dismiss wholesale.

I'm not an easy sell when it comes to being seduced by writer's reputations--my friends accuse me of being too picky, too "critical"--but I've read most of DeLillo's fifteen novels since I discovered him in the early Seventies; if I didn't find his writing brilliant and vibrant or found his narrative ruminations on the frayed American spirit engaging, I'd not have bothered with him. DeLillo is a serious writer, but he is not pompous. Not in my estimation, anyway.

There is a block of otherwise smart people who distrust and actively dislike anything that suggests elegant or lyric prose writing. John Updike, who I think was perhaps the most consistently brilliant and resourceful American novelists up until his death, was routinely pilloried for the seamless flow of his perfectly telling details. If one cares to do a survey, I suspect they'd find the same caustic template levied at other writers who are noted for their ability to detail the worlds they imagine in ways that make the mundane take on a new resonance. Nabokov, DeLillo, Henry James, Richard Powers have all been assessed by a noisy few as being "too wordy". The sourpusses seem to forget that this fiction, not journalism, that this literature, no police reports. The secret, I think, is that a writer possessed of a fluid style manages to link their mastery of the language with the firm outlining of the collective personalities of the characters, both major and minor. The elegance is in service to a psychological dimension that otherwise might not be available. The thinking among the anti-elegance crowd is that writing must be grunts, groans and monosyllabic bleats, a perversion of the modernist notion that words are objects to use as materials to get to the essential nature of the material world. Lucky for us that no one convincingly defined what "essential nature" was, leaving those readers who love a run on sentence with more recent examples of the word drunk in progress.