Boxes of old snap shots

We are here at a table
full of grown up things
from closets where boxes
are stacked with the hints
of history in receipts,
business cards, flashlights
without batteries.
There is nothing I can say
when there is a blank piece
of paper stapled to another
page from a memo pad
where "hurry" is written
in pencil jags desperate
enough to run off the page
and into another room.
From the kitchen you said
you could hear angels breathing
so slightly out of wind that their
wings move the branches from
the roof, swoop the leaves from the
longest branches, make a cloud
surrender its rain as we
go through the photos of
us gathered around baskets
of colored eggs on a Sunday
after dinner, the sun fading
on the sidewalk and a shadow
creeping over half the
house, all our clothes were
showing the disarray of
being worn all day, it was Easter
in 1963, the angels were there
even then.
Lights dim and go bright again,
a cell phone rings,
one of us steps outside and
chats on the porch and now
we can hear the low hiss of
tires rolling to a halt at the corner
where there are four stop signs
and only one car,
feathers fall from the sky
and makes the skin of
couples walking their dog
crawl like battalions of snakes
creeping their way to the
Irish sea, yes, I see you
holding up a 45 record,
no, I wasn't a musician
back then, I wasn't that old
but you are this beautiful
as yet another box is emptied,
how many cigarette lighters are
held in a bundle with a thick
red rubber band and
how many cigarettes and cigars
do you think they lit
at the bars where the parents
drank on Saturday nights
in the Summer, usually when
it rained and the aroma of
the State Fair would come over
the trees and fill the living rooms
full of farm smells, the world
was a soiled stack of straw.
Yes, that is my Dad,
that's my mom,
no, I don't know where they got
the fake beards
and vampire teeth,
they told me it was
a holiday for dead things
when only ghosts and their
pets walk the supermarket aisles
past cereal boxes and diet plans
before they drift into the parking lot
and float up to the moon’s white corona
to play nursery on the stars
on the stars and sleep
finally in the space between
the earth and the sky,
yes, that’s right,
my father was quite a storyteller,
he could do the impossible,
he stayed married to my mom, after all.

Smoke Alarms

Smoke alarms
in the center of the night
shift gravity with
the shovels full
of noise as the cat knocks
its plate of dried meat
off the balcony,
to the driveway below.

Helicopters scour the ground
with pools of light
that scurrying up alleys walls
and over parked cars,
there are cans rolling
into the streets,
shopping carts
slamming into mail boxes,
this is where everyone wants to be,
tight and napping at the beach
in a corner room,
over a dumpster,
next to chain smoking neighbors.


Nothing to but grumble,
shake my head,
seek your hand, mumble,
light a candle and
curse the darkness.


And just as the night
seemed to blink it's
last straining thoughts of fun
and give in too its darkness,
its warm, heartless interior.


Parties across the bay,
patios that hug shore line,
planks that stick out
like chins needing to be slugged
with a hand that closes and hardens
into the instant weapon that
comes in handy
as it reaches and unstrings
the paper lanterns lighting
hard sand with frantic,
dancing light, fireworks,
boats on the water, enjoying the music,
no one takes tickets in the
middle of the bay,
there are other things
we still aren't done talking about,
snore as we might, dream
where we may . . .


Your news of your mom
dying two years ago
after the phone was shut off
and mail gathered
at the front door,
in a pile, under the slot,
addresses of advertisers
selling shares in futures
no can see anymore,
You hold me
and kiss my hand
and wonder aloud
when the next set of fire works goes off
following the next thing
the cat knocks over
Complimenting a contrapuntal
Groan of guitar
from stereo on the patio
someone was just pushed from
to the hard, packed, cold sand below
why it seems to be still in
the apartment,
the air not moving,
the dark of the room
disturbed only by a television screen
that throbs with images of abstracted passions,
sleek icons wet with desire
that seems a burden in a time
when there is a good guess,
of how much time
there's left to play with
the toys you already have,

I wonder too,
and whistle something
that starts off as Charlie Parker
and winds up a Sousa March,


There are only so many
days left that really have nothing to do
with shopping, I say,


The cat grunts, spits something up,
the fire works stream across the bay,
flames burst from the explosion
and engulf the patio deck the rocket it,
screams from the balcony,
smoke alarms in the middle of the night,
screams, electronic bass and rap assuming
a burnt tinge that colors the holiday, I kiss you,
I wish I was kissing you, wherever you are,

There are lives that haven't touched me yet,
nothing breaks the calm waters,
and no oar violates the lake surface.

There is only noise, commotion,
a city consuming itself,
lurching into the next decade,
empty as a can.

JFK IS DEAD

Norman Mailer titled a 1963 essay collection The Presidential Papers, with it in mind to have the miscellaneous essays, asides, interviews, book reviews and poems serve as a set of metaphysical advisories for then President John F.Kennedy. Kennedy was assasinated the same year, however, and Mailer's book is a conspicous artifact of the hopes among true believers that more than Kennedy's body didn't die that fatal day.

Here we are again, in the early evening of November 22, 2005, hazily remembering and half-heartedly feeling bad about it being the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is one of those touchstone events with which we've come to mark our progress both as individuals with ideals ,and as democracy that attempts to overcome its worse habits and to ensure and protect freedom for all Americans. As usual, we come up short--I am constantly doing and saying things that run afoul of my professed liberalism on matters of civil rights and free speech, and as a country we come up short when we match ourselves against every grand themed speech given on patriotic holidays when our mandate from Heaven is declared, affirmed, praised. Coming away from these ridiculously steep points of comparison always lacking in ways one could be more "Christ like" or "Kennedyesque" and feeling horrible, sullen and cynical as a result, I have it in mind to ignore Kennedy's image, his body of work, his good deeds and grand speeches, his movie star looks, all those things that JFK supposedly meant to have America become had he lived long enough to work his reputed magic. It has become something like the worship of the dead, a yearning to mope and whine that our best nature and potential was stolen from us and now lies entombed in the dark sealed enclosure that contains the stilled embodiment of our last best chance to do good work.

It's whining, of course, and it comes across as a collective letting-ourselves-of-the-hook when we look around for who is responsible for the wrong turn History took. It's as if we have had ourselves driven from Eden after another, constantly cast out by ogres, terrorists, assassins, malcontents and psychopaths and insane dictators who have no desire to see the population of a great country re-assume command of their lives and extend our potential to- do- good- by- being -good have the effect of getting people off their knees in the worship of betrayed idealism and instead get engaged with their communities that still require the good graces we used to speak of. I am cranky at the moment and fairly disgusted with all the mewling melodies coming from the ain't-it-a-shame club. Once again, enough of this. Let's close the casket a last time and lower JFK into the ground and get on to doing just a little of those good works we've been wishing someone would inspire us to take on. We have to be our own heroes and move into a future determined to make it work.

The past is a lonely country because everyone who lives there is dead

Blue Balls

A sex drive that gets
20 miles to the gallon
is nothing to laugh at,

I used to wear pointy-toed shoes
that helped me cut a rug,

a ballet of carpet installers
would have fallen

at your feet, nailing
the red carpet into PLACE,


I’ve got everything I need, and it pisses me off

(only when I laugh, though, only when
the surf is good
and everybody talks
about it and I can’t relate
‘cause I talk and lust and write and read and
sing and have my confusion
compounded by the minute,no the
second no, no worse,
and all I want is really to
have
everything I need)

I need to keep finding out
what I already know, I have to decipher the lables on the drawers,
do you like me?

I am famished,
I am man,
Hear me roar

While I snap my suspenders.

David Brooks and the Gangsta Jihad

There's nothing like riots by malcontent Muslim youth in France to motivate a conservative American cultural critic to attack the source for all the World's fall from grace, the music. New York Times staff grump David Brooks was alert enough to realize that the old mainstay, rock and roll, has become a firm and honored part of the entertainment mainstreams, a series of bad boy poses made by professional entertainers. There's nothing menacing about that, and hardly anything in the lyrics to scare anyone, let alone push millions to the ramparts for a day of State Smashing. Brooks finds a new wrinkle and places the blame for the violence in France on hip-hop, where Muslim youth have become enamored of the music and have commenced to make their own kind of gangsta rhyme-busting. Brooks cites his evidence, lyrics from tunes made a near decade ago, and assumes the worse of it all. He has a sure fire image that's bound to be discussed in the circular dread clubs that comprise the Moral Majority; this is a generation of young Arab men who model themselves equally after the likes of bin Ladin and Tupac Shakur.Brooks' principal problem, though, is that scant little of his rhetoric contains a fresh or original bit of perspective or hard thinking. His column, in fact, is something of a used car that keeps getting reconditioned and resold. It runs, yes, but it leaks something awful.

I would be impressed if David Brooks understood and spoke French well enough to comprehend the accelerated rhyme schemes and themes of Gallic gangatisms, but what he cites and objects to sounds like it were handed to him by a young, research assistant.

I can imagine getting a handful of representative CDs , each with notes and hastily translated lyrics. Brooks' shtick is to be the light weight curmudgeon, the junior league Mencken, the mildly offended cultural conservative, and here serves up boiler plate outrage. It comes down to the curse of the columnist who is all writerly finess wrapped around a small store of ideas; the same complaints keep getting used over again, except aimed on another target. Brooks wanted his own foreign menace to hector the readership with, a pop-cultural variant on the Avian Flu. A musical hybrid is going to fuel the destruction of the West.

I've no doubt that Brooks actually believes this and will be able to convince others who are likewise perennially nervous that the threat is real, not metaphorical. Bad sociology or no, we have to remember that the FBI maintained a file on John Lennon. Brooks may be a fool, but it would be a mistake to laugh at him and leave it at that. His kind of aww-shucks conservatism is the kind of low-radar propaganda that helps gets the incompetent and the morally stupid elected.

A lot of middle aged white guys have good ideas and insights about cultural trends and phenomenons originating from places other than Leave-It-To-Beaverland.
I don't buy into the notion that a writer has to be a member of the tribe, so to speak , in order to speak with intelligence about another social group's aesthetic creations; in fact, depending on the wit and resources of the writer, being on the "outside" can be an advantage, since the hypothetical writer in question wouldn't be burdened with investments of identity with the form he (or she) might be trying to write about. A white guy's observations on hip-hop culture, sympathetic but honest to a fault, has potential for being a fun, intriguing, and contentious read.

David Brooks, though, is not one of those white guys, and reminds me that there some benefits to being alive a certain number of years. In this case it's the developing a long memory for what has been presented as sweeping and definitive critiques of popular culture over the decades and recognizing a rewording , a reworking, a laborious rephrasing of standard issue scare-mongering.

Jazz had been demonized, excoriated, condemned, denounced as that element that was the proof of Society collapsing into an amoral morass, rock and roll has been routinely and continuously pilloried as the grossest affront and threat to Morals and Values. And now Brooks dusts off these rickety tropes from the storehouse of Alarmist Invective and frets about how the dark hoards are going to rap and rhyme their way through the Continent intent on nothing less that the destruction of the West. Really, really, this has been said before, it's a routine conservative talking point, and for all the warnings against the influence of nonwhite music on middle class kids that have been issued through the decades, we've muddled on, progressed, survived our own stupidity and to make lives for ourselves.

Brooks is a mouthpiece of a bankrupt set of assumptions, and I can't help notice the timing of his objections to French-Muslim rap; the surfeit of bad news for the White House and the incredibly low poll ratings among Americans, we have the Culture Wars being revved up one more time to send everyone into a panic and tizzy. This time, though, it's not likely to work, as Americans are asking each other why it is things have gotten worse for us with Bush in office. Somehow hip hop, no matter who performs it, doesn't strike one as a compelling reason for why things aren't going right.

Look at that girl

Look at that girl
in the burned out Ford
screaming for burgers.

Stare at the guy
who’s feeling his leg
making sure the in-seam
is still dry.

Gape at the kid
suing his parents
for giving him clothes
instead of the back of their hand.

Check out the calico cat
in love with a bag
that falls apart
at the caress of paws and claws.

Chuckle at the cut
that reduced your stature
and humbled your spine.

Groan when
the hash is slung
on dishes with cracks
deep like rivers and regrets.

Brett Easton Ellis

Meghan O'Rourke makes an interesting case for Brett Easton Ellis and his body of work, but I doubt I'll read his newest novel, Lunar Park. Her defense, appearing in Slate, advances a smart and elegant defense made for Ellis and his fellow ‘80’s “Brat Packers” Jay McInerney, Mary Gaitskill, and Tama Janowitz, most tellingly in the collection Shopping in Space: Essays on America's Blank Generation edited by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney.British critics all, these American Studies specialists made the case that this “Blank Generation” set of then-young novelists were the most telling and single most important development of the Novel In English, forming a kind of permanent “High Postmodernist” tone through which fiction will give the lie to horrible flatness that is the truth when consumerism irrevocably replaces culture.

A grim determinist view, yes, estimating that inner life is no more than a vaguely self aware mirror that desperately wants to conform to the sheer appearance of beauty and lean design as it’s conveyed by cruel corporations and their marketing departments. It was the perfect line of defense to have in a decade where deconstruction and simulacra were prime subjects in every pedant’s droning mantra. O’Rourke reinvigorates the argument made then as a means of defending Ellis and his new book, and it’s admirable that she nearly had me convinced. What sinks the whole enterprise, however, is an unspoken insistence that graphic and precise descriptions and expositions of what shallow, drooling Pavlov dogs we can be do not suffice as literary art, an art that I would insist get inside situations and personalities rather than hover in godly fashion over the mess. It’s the difference between being in a traffic helicopter over the freeway and actually being behind the wheel, in the midst of it all.

The problem with making a case for a writer who has been on the outs with mainstream critics is that the plausible case gets passed up altogether and overstatement becomes the rule. Gigantism is one of Ellis's flaws, the mistake that accumulation equals worth, value and importance. Sometimes it works, yet even writers who have written long and brilliant books like Jonathan Franzen with Strong Motion will produce a long and profoundly under-edited dud like The Corrections. Franzen needed an honest and ruthless editor to give him back a blue-penciled manuscript with the instructions to make the novel work. Ellis would have benefited greatly from the same advice.

He has always struck me as someone who could be perfectly fine crime novelist, an edgy combination of James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard, if he weren't so busy gussying up his sensationalist subjects with the window dressing of eviscerated narcissism. Certainly his knowing jibes and dissections of ritual consumerism and attending worship of material accumulation have a spot in an America that is exhausting its credit cards to amass more and more of what they cannot take to heaven, but there are limits to how long a reader can gaze into an abyss, or listen to the limitless chatter of character minds that have lost a soul-giving personality. Crime fiction, a form predicated on supreme measures of reserve and clinical flatness, might have been an ideal medium for the rigor mortised humanity he loves to describe constructing the means of their own destruction. The procedural aspects would have imposed some properly ascribed limits on his story lines, and enabled him to write with greater aim.Mailer is exactly right on this point, which is to say that a novelist, even a satirist, needs to be more than a taker of inventories. American Psycho, after all was said and done with brand names, inane opinions on eighties bands, and hack-and-stab remedies for the extreme cases of ennui, is a rather over packed and hastily scribed effort that Ellis needed to finish to fulfill his contract with his publisher. Style and grace, the measures of comedic timing and the required component for wit to sting deeper , is absent from that book, and was in even sparser supply with Glamorama, a large house of a book with many, many unfurnished rooms.

Elements of Ellroy and Leonard are already present in Ellis's work--Ellroy's amoral universe meets Leonard's penchant for sharp observation and satire. The crime genre would have liberated Ellis from struggling to write through his themes under the crushing burden of art, the biggest drag on his effectiveness as a writer. Not that crime novels cannot be artful, as fans of Ellroy , Leonard, James Burke and Mark Costello can attest; the difference is that these writers are artful, describing a skilled application of craft, and not arty, Ellis’s vice, which conveys pose, pose, pose.

To me, Easton Ellis is a more stylized Hubert Selby Jr. Both are cataloging modes of spiritual deprivation.

An interesting comparison and one worth considering. Both are chroniclers of the ways New York will brutalize your soul and kill it, but I'm inclined to give the nod to Selby over Ellis because Hubert used the arc of tragedy to make the violence and desperations of Last Exit to Brooklyn's arresting. One by one, each fantasy and delusion is smashed. It's not a new trick, but it is hard to do believably, and I admire Selby's ability to delicately use a blatant literary device to achieve his drama. Drama is the word.
And I can't consider Ellis as "more stylized" than Selby. Ellis, in fact, is the more conservative prose writer of the two.

I think of Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French "new novelist" who wanted to strip all elements of convenient psychological convolutions, all tangible human feeling, and instead produce a novel of pure, unsullied description. In many ways, Ellis is a very French writer. Remember the last words in American Psycho: No Exit. The fact that Sartre's famous title appears on a sign introduces another tip of the hat to ideas that have seduced Ellis in college, semiotics.

One of Easton Ellis' favorite writers is Joan Didion, who began Play It As It Lays with the precept of writing " a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all....white space. Empty space...."

He admires Joan Didion, which is swell, but the reason he doesn't write like her is due to his awareness that cannot do what she is able do with her characters in her supremely crafted deadpan style. There is a humanity lurking around behind the eyes of her men and women, battered, shattered, horribly damaged with consumption, violence, money and drugs, but there are personalities, beautifully realized, that are imperfectly trying to make do in a world they no longer have faith in. This is a large part of what makes Didion compelling and worth the effort. Finding the moral vacuum in any age has never been a problem for novelists, it's what kind of witness you wind up being once you find it. Didion has that perhaps capacity to be curious about the humanity of her characters. It's a demonstration of narrative mastery that Ellis hasn't shown.

Even Mailer, when he finally came upon his real life White Negro in the form of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore (in The Executioner's Song, changed his style of writing, going from the high rhetoric and flighty philosophizing and fashioned instead a terse style in which his normally ubiquitous personality was absent, leaving only a complex and moving story to tell with every amount of craft he could muster and sustain. Mailer changed his music, his style and his thinking about his particular set of ideas through his five plus decades as a professional writer, which has made him someone worth returning to.

She is interested in what people are doing to themselves as they try to change the world, a curiosity that brings her to the front ranks of non-fiction writers as well. Ellis isn't able to write in any other way, and I suspect that he's fine with that limit, although he does wish to expand the few notes he can play into major orchestrations.

He admires Joan Didion, which is swell, but the reason he doesn't write like her is due to his awareness that cannot do what she is able do with her characters in her supremely crafted deadpan style. There is a humanity lurking around behind the eyes of her men and women ( Didion , among her other many virtues, makes you believe in interior lives among her characters that were formerly vital, but are now vitiated), battered, shattered, horribly damaged with consumption, violence, money and drugs, but there are personalities, beautifully realized, imperfectly trying to make do in a world they no longer have faith in. This is a large part of what makes Didion compelling and worth the effort.

She is interested in what people are doing to themselves as they try to change the world, a curiosity that brings her to the front ranks of non-fiction writers as well. Ellis isn't able to write in any other way, and I suspect that he's fine with that limit, although he does wish to expand the few notes he can play into major orchestrations. His longer books like Glamorama don't expand the style, refine the ideas he's already written. His writing is an Americanization of moldy existential poses.

The compression of crime fiction would have helped him turn his short comings into assets--he would've been in good company with the likes of George Pelicanos and Dennis Lehain--but it's too late for that, I suppose. Ellis will continue to bleat through his rusty trumpet. Ellis has very few pieces of music he knows how to play, which leaves him with some depressing choices when he strives to create yet again: play them louder, longer, faster, and after that, play them slower, softer, briefer. It is all the same stuff with hardly new idea or insight, matters we look for if we continue to read the same authors over time. We've seen a growth in Ellis as a writer, but it's tumorous rather than artistic. A writer's work ought to develop, as opposed to metastasizing

Making the World Safe for Jonathan Franzen

Ben Marcus, a writer and critic of ambitious genre-blurring novels that one might refer to lazily to as "difficult" or, god forbid, Postmodern, makes a good accounting of himself as he protects the good name of experimental fiction in the October 2005 issue of The Atlantic. Not on line, unfortunately, but the issue is worth seeking out for Marcus's essay, which amounts to a smack down of the self appointed protectors of readers against the gurning armies of avant-garders who've taken to writing novels in order to award millions of book buyers migraines. Marcus writes with a sure verbal slap at his avail, and it's a wonder of the intended target, Jonathan Franzen, will ever manage a response.

Jonathan Franzen is a gifted novelist whose last novel , The Corrections , could have used an editor who was unafraid to blue pencil the baggier prose that particular novel contained. Like others of his generation who are uncomfortable with providing what amounts to entertainment for a paying public, Franzen evidently equates length with worth, and thus filled his parody with the most minute things in the world of this horrible family. Everything was mocked relentlessly, continuously, endlessly, and each paragraph seemed to burst with more sarcasm and scorn until you wanted to use novel as a weapon against some defenseless thing. He had some ideas about American culture and what we're doing wrong to each other, so it's strange that his critical slings against William Gaddis and particularly his masterpiece The Recognitions. Gaddis is, from all appearances, the model from which Franzen formed his break through tale. Franzen is a worry wart at heart, one who loves to fret about his own comfort, and it's too his credit that he's a splendid enough writer, most of the time , to make us care about the status of his nerves colliding with the world. His essay collection, How To Be Alone is fine in this regard. It's when he attempts to diagnose the ills of American literature and assign blame (if not a cure) where he becomes a whiner, a sniveler, a sayer of absurd declarations. I am with Ben Marcus on this matter, which is to say that the novel is in relatively good shape and that the point of concern, regardless of style or ideology, needs to be on a writer's talent.These debates about the absolute state of writing have been going on in my life for years, and the result has been to make me , perhaps, a bit of a social retard, one who sees life from a sadly short sighted lens.

When I read Franzen's Strong Motion and The Corrections, there was no reason for me to assume that he was someone who wanted to be general reader's guardian against the legions of literary experimenters whose books he imagines are causing the destruction of coherence and common sense. Franzen, a novelist of ideas no less than those he critiques as too heady and thereby dangerous --DeLillo, William Gaddis-- seemed to be one of the smart one of those writers who felt compelled to make the readers labor for the treasure embedded in his books. His writing is not composed of short sentences, his descriptions are not taciturn, his metaphors are not of the kitchen-sink variety. He seemed more than willing to be mistaken for William Gaddis Jr.

Now he renounces his love of Gaddis and re-introduces himself to America as the reader's best friend, a writer who has a"contract" with his readers with he he promises never to stray from the conventions of good form and so worry the expectations of readers soured on experiment and genre-blurring. It's a rant that gets resurrected every five years or so--Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Tom Wolfe have all taken their major shots at other writers in an effort to decry the decline of contemporary fiction at the hands of various invading goons, geeks and smarty pants stack mongers. The terms change, the cures vary, but the diagnosis is always the same, "novels today suck",and the death of the novel is always near. Franzen's fretting in his lengthy list of complaints seems more self-serving than anything else; the flap over the Oprah Book Club is something he feels , evidently, that he must recover from. But all this fawning over what he assumes are middle brow audience tastes is unseemly. I agree that it's absurd to demand that a novel be "difficult" or otherwise complicated in order to be considered great. It's just a foolish to insist that plain-speaking is the only way great ideas get addressed in fiction. More than anything the issue seems a dust up between very few writers who delight in tweaking each other at length over things that are finally so much energy spent going down the wrong road.It's a handy issue on which to hang a polemic, but it avoids the more difficult issue at hand, the discussion of style.

Curious readers themselves have no difficulty reading so-called difficult writers like Don DeLillo or Salmon Rushdie and then switching without controversy to more conversational scribes like John Cheever or Lorrie Moore so long as the author displays a mastery of personal style that makes what the author is trying to do worth the read. Hemingway, I realized in college, was more than over-the-counter prose sans verbs , adjectives and metaphor and that his mastery of language, his crafted selection of words enabled him to get across(in his best writing) his notions of bravery, honor and personal code as felt experience without arm-waving or excessive bathos. Faulkner, contrarily, had a dense style beholden to cinematic flashbacks,William James' notion of the mind as stream-of-conscious in which the world is perceived through a plurality of associations,and a Bergsonian concepts of interior time ,all heady influences that might make a novel unwieldy and daunting, fiction that is rich less for straight forward morality plays and situation comedies that finally resolve themselves and affirm a vague faith in invisibly dispensed justice but more about the sheer rhythm, pace and texture of experience, the actual duration of time and thought between plot actions. It is daunting, of course, but there is the argument that exposure to and a taste for problematic fiction, fiction that does not rest on conventional expectation, helps a reader think through problems that have more symbolic complications than tactical ones. There is that hope that a reader lands somewhere on their feet after tackling the tides and and eddies of Faulkner's novels and recognizes that life isn't a series of problems to be solved as if it were a take home math test; empathy is the word here, and it is the story less revealing that would have us speak to one another a bit more richly as differences are covered and common ground cleared away. Faulkner's his ability for empathy and poetic description (again, in his best work) moves you along, experiencing something wholly other than the world one lives in.Individual style, how it's developed, and how a mastery of language through style makes a text, conventional or dense,interesting to the ideal reader is more difficult to discuss than the cleverly coined dismissals of ideas one doesn't like.

Nicolas Cage is Hollywood's Worst Actor

The Weather Man drew my attention when I heard what the film was about, but a disappointment and slight depression came on me like a foul wind when I read that Nicolas Cage was in the title role. A pity, since this would the ideal role for William H. Macy, who has made a career of finding the core loneliness at the center of characters who have to maintain public faces. Cage is a neon sign that is never off, buzzing with some circuits burned out or blinking madly in both daylight and night. It's a predictable set of histrionics he has assembled inside that little bag of factory tricks he owns for the defeated purpose of catching a viewer by surprise. He is as formulaic in his performances as Tony Scott is in his excessive jump cuts and jitter-cam pacing; neither can trust an understated moment, or let character and story develop in ways other than frequent bursts of problem-child energy. You dread being around the man at the end of Halloween night. It's certainly a smart idea to explore the eternal vacuum that one imagines occupies the minds of the relentlessly cheery sorts of who impanel the local news shows, but there's that sinking feeling when Nicolas Cage is selected to play the principal character. It's not that Cage lacks the demonstrative ticks and shticks to animate the sort who has no passion or life force beyond their presence in front of the camera, it's just that we've seen them again with little variety or invention since Honeymoon in Vegas, Face/Off or The Rock. Let us add Leaving Las Vegas to the odious list; it cut close to the bone here, but the film valorized the lead character's slow and purposeful suicide by alcohol, and we were made to endure an implicit propaganda that it was somehow a noble act to leave life in this way. This ass-ended wallow in Hemingway machismo dealt with the subject with an expectedly heavy hand--it's one of those films where every scene is weighted in increasing measures so that the gravity of the hits you hard. Not hit you, so much as falls from on high like Monty Python's sixteen-ton weight, a accumulation of gross bathos and animal logic that lack for no nothing except grace or a light touch from director Mike Newell. Cage is allowed all the space he needs to wallow, writhe, stumble, slur and fuck up as his death rattle impends, one of the most overplayed death scenes I remember coming upon. It's curious as well that Cage nabbed an Oscar for Best Actor this year; routine actors going berserk in generally undistinguished films are no strangers to Hollywood's highest honor. Cage and fellow Oscar winner Denzel Washington (Training Day) share that bit of fallow distinction.

Those likewise not convinced of Cage's greatness may insert their own examples of where this bogglingly blank method actor doesn't so much chew up the scenes he's in as much a takes a wrecking ball to them, mixing twitch, itch, tick, thousand-yard states, mumbling and inexplicable Elvis-isms in slight reshufflings, movie to movie, in a consistent display that an amassing of quirky mannerisms is the same as creating a character. In fairness, Cage has been in good motion pictures, specifically Raising Arizona and City of Angels, but these seem accidental or merely a case when directors knew what do with his alternating states of a catatonic slump and manic maneuvering. I recently paid good money to watch him in the political comedy Lord of War , due mainly to some artfully edited trailers but lo, instead of a black comedy along the lines of Catch 22 we're instead subjected to a two hour monologue from Cage’s drawling character, with no real point to make other than a conveniently easy irony aside. One or two lousy films from a good actor are forgivable and you hope for better work to come along soon, but Cage has been awful in bad films for so long that his name alone dampens that fleeting curiosity about the movie. For Weather Man, this ten dollars is staying in my wallet.

I am not Billy Collins

Billy Collins does not live on my street
nor do his poems come to mind
when I hum a line from an Art Tatum solo
when getting the mail under whatever
the color the sky happens to be,

I would think he fears bills
and invitations
as I do, prefers tenor saxophone
to reedy alto flights,
finds solace in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
when his computer breaks down
as I do when things fail
and I scramble for a passage I copied to a business card
from a description I read of someone else’s review,

There is no house with picket fences
nor apartments set off from the street
by grand trees and high hedges,
there are only parked cars blocking
the sidewalk as they impose their tires
on the curb, tattooed monsters drinking beer
and girls sobbing into cell phones
about what they wore on their worst night ever,
and me, dressed to leave as if forever to be gone
but staring at the computer trying to
fill this page with words,

Instead of a house mate singing,
there leaf blowers roaring
up and down the walk
scattering clipped grass from one
door way to another,
there is only ginger ale for
vodka martini fatalist,

Billy Collins would
find some clever things
to write in the absence or presence
of anything interesting
occurring in the place where
his feet are actually planted,
some planet or star or
an old Movie Poster
would rouse from his
seat and send on a mission
to get some inane thing
done because so much of
Western Culture hinged
on his having yet more
epiphanies and eurekas
as he sorts his bills, licks stamps,
contemplates dinner
and how large the portions,
Mozart and Wallace Stevens
ride in his backseat
as he drives to the market
where he meets Charlie Parker
and Thomas Carlyle
in the desert line, eating snack samples
made of cheese and crackers
from a lady in a tunic red as roses
on the slipperiest anniversary,
and then it’ll be home, a poem,
a cool round of music
and settled bills,
a world at rest after a hard day of being.

At this moment my dog
would bark if
I had a dog
but my feet hurt
all the same
walking for blocks past
Radio Shacks and taco stands
dragging a plastic bag of used paper backs
and canned food
for what is another night
of Law and Order reruns
and a final thought
in passing that

I wish I was Billy Collins
for a half hour just to see
what it’s like to live
in a world where
every thing I do ends up
perfectly measured and clever
in the form of a sentence
in a perfectly poised poem
that makes me laugh
or cry and leaves me
somewhere in between
as if dumped on an empty highway
from a fast car after being wooed
by the sleaziest bastard in my little town.

The death of small towns

Strange habits of brew overkill
studs the patter like
buttons on the coat sleeve
that cut the nostrils
in a full winter climes’
descending scale
of hot items.

All the things about
how needed surgery
destroyed her capacity
to get the words in the right order
without sounding as if she’d
been riding to another water shed
with another boy
named Jason or John or Jake
as it maybe who had
a hobby of spearing rats
with his buck knife and
skinning them for wallets
he’d sew together and sell
at the drug store on Sundays,
after Church.

Seeking some kind of refuge
with the regulars who been
irregular for many twisted years,
seeking an easy place to sit
and read the paper,

there I was,

Drinking ‘though not
thirsty at all
as the sun set and the
light in the bay window
dimmed until the room
was gold toned, then sepia?
and then a fine dark ash
that was perfect for
falling asleep in or
breathing your last
as a final memory crowds
out every deadline I might fail to meet,
or merely continue for hours
drinking in the dark
in the same old chair
listening to faint music
and the late hiss of tires
on the street roll by
until it seems that
there are no doors
or windows in the room
and things are exactly as they always will be,
alone and lost in themselves
in various suggestions of dark vapor.

i am not a crow on a power line

there are so many dimes
in the universe that want
to leave my palm and fall
into empty soda cups
held by grizzly men
in need of a shower and a steak.

there are so many grizzly women
leaving pennies on the sidewalk
because there is nothing
less to settle for, nothing more
to stoop to.

stoops full of scrubbed
and shaved men glistening
with soap, pink as rug burns,
cracking their knuckles
and rubbing their necks.

plastic cups with traces
of orange juice along the bottom
litter the street in front
of what was once a hotel
when rooms were rented
until check out time
the next morning.

stacks of Tiffany lamp shades
fill the back of the truck
and block the skyline
that tries to reach higher
that the loftiest power line
in the city where every lazy crow
comes to rest in the daylight
just to watch us cross streets,
go into buildings, write checks,
cry in the chair that faces
the street,
getting up again
and rubbing our grizzly chins
and the back of our necks
as if we knew what we were doing.

Shoes on a wire

Shoes on a wire
Originally uploaded by Ted Burke.

i am not Bob Dylan

nothing jangles except
keys in my pocket,

there are no
ghosts around
the light switches
in my kitchen,

they cannot read
my passport
at the border
as it drips with
Farmer Brown's paint,

i was under
the yellow sun
today dreading
avian flu,

why are my sheets
covered with
with chalk crop circles,

my friends from
medical school
won't tell me
what's in my mailbox,

even my girl friend
tells me what
my wife couldn't admit,
i am not bob dylan.

Four Scenes Set to Country Music

1.

Too long after the sun
has set do you dare me to tackle
something that sends
you running through the French doors
holding your nose,
there's something about the phone
bill
I wanted to ask you about, but
then I'm distracted by you on the patio,
back turned,
waving your hands, shaking your wrists,
an orchestra of flowers
below your feet
to do your bidding.

2.

You unfolded the newspaper
to where you
found me on page three,
under the obituaries
and next to the ad
for the Sunday specials.
My mouth was open,
I was shaking my fist,
the world around me
was leaning to one side,
yet only my hat was flying
off in that direction.

3.

You want to die
and I want to dance.

I want to sleep
and you want to
talk something through
until natural light
fills the room.

You want to
get real
and I'm always
in the mood
for amore
or at the mechanics
of it all.

Both of us feel like
Chinese tonight
and neither of us
have asked
why there's a grotesque
onion loaf in the middle
of our table,
next to the flowers,
which are dying.

4.

Chances are that some
of the things that I might say
will save someones life,
provided, of course,
that this is a cartoon
we are living in.

Nights are cold in the canyon

Cross your arms when hearing
your wife and her phone calls
in the night on the porch,
sobs and crickets carrying on
until sunlight comes over the garage,

Bless yourself again
for having a family
whose eyes saw you falling,
whose arms caught you
and laid you in a bed
until another morning
came and the sun emerged
from behind night and morning low clouds,

Give a man a quarter
for what he needs to drink,
nights are cold in the canyons
where you lost flashlights
and pocket change,

Stop speaking of
former loves
and open every window
and listen to noise
that does not come
from inside your cranium
buzzing like electric shorts
in an old house at the end of
an ugly, washed out street,

Kneel when BB King
plays his guitar
or someone reads
a Frank O'Hara poem
about being stunned
because the lights have changed
and the whole city waits for him
to cross the street
and have his breath taken away,

Play your harmonica
until your lips start to bleed
at which time you'll be ready
to kiss all the invisible gifts.">Slate Magazine: "Nights are cold in the canyons

Cross your arms when hearing
your wife and her phone calls
in the night on the porch,
sobs and crickets carrying on
until sunlight comes over the garage,

Bless yourself again
for having a family
whose eyes saw you falling,
whose arms caught you
and laid you in a bed
until another morning
came and the sun emerged
from behind night and morning low clouds,

Give a man a quarter
for what he needs to drink,
nights are cold in the canyons
where you lost flashlights
and pocket change,

Stop speaking of
former loves
and open every window
and listen to noise
that does not come
from inside your cranium
buzzing like electric shorts
in an old house at the end of
an ugly, washed out street,

Kneel when BB King
plays his guitar
or someone reads
a Frank O'Hara poem
about being stunned
because the lights have changed
and the whole city waits for him
to cross the street
and have his breath taken away,

Play your
harmonica
until your lips
start to bleed
at which time
you'll be ready
to kiss all the invisible gifts."

cafe_windows

cafe_windows
Originally uploaded by Ted Burke.

I am not Jack Kerouac

I am not Jack Kerouac
when my thumb lifts over the curb
and into on coming traffic,

Every tree I see is not
Big Sur with its endless groves
and shacks in the clearing,
smoke rising from chimneys
made of twigs and old tin cans,

Every abandoned car
reminds me of paradise
under harsh gleam of
bay side moon when
every spoon and pair of dice
glitters with impossible radiance
as the stars form a grin,
a full set of teeth
for the man in the moon,

I am not Jack Kerouac
and I won't have a drink
as I type,

I am as sober
as the judge
who laughs at hangings,
straight as managers
of franchise shoe stores,
square like new ice
when it hits the bottom of a glass,

Yet I dream
again of delerium and sin
and states of the union
where the grunion run on
the beaches under the clouds
covering the
acne scars of the man in the moon,

Don't let me speak too soon
nor too late,
Kerouac is dead and
in such a state
that he cannot spend
a dime of the money he made,

I am not Jack Kerouac
and this dollar is mine
to buy a Red Bull with
for those wings that keep
the city humming along,
singing a song
for pennies a day.

I Am Not Wallace Stevens

I told her to step back from the microphone
and speak slowly, to not tap the roof of
her mouth with the tip of her tongue that
need not click and pop in amplified echoes
while reading her poem by Wallace Stevens
about his crows, staring down on him from
wires stretched over new roads cutting
through the palm trees lining the edge of earth.

She read quickly, clipped, skipping over
troubling icons and isolated flora, the man
scratches his head, rubs his chin, tilts his head
and is stunned as wing spans throw shadows
over his face and spoil his perfect profile
on the side walk he walks upon in a white suit and cane,
she breaths steadily, readily, swaying with the fronds
and her blue eyes, like ponds, grow calm as cut grass
as the sentences become longer and the words
veer into beautiful cities and magic forests
described in pages of secret novels
that is read aloud behind the backdrop
of each tailored turn we take in day of getting through.

She reads and comes to an end
where the music doesn’t stop
and even the silence is full of notes
that are scored and played in deferred crescendos,
applause fills the air, one hand, two hands,
four hands, five and more fill the air,
for the moment dulling the screams of cash registers
or the coffee grinders pulverizing beans
to fine, black essence of legal tweak and tattered,

I go to kiss her after dinner
and she withdraws
to her corner of the front seat,
opening the door,
standing over the window
while I rattle my car keys,

“You’re not Wallace Stevens”
she says before she turns
and walks up the stairs to her bungalow,
her eyes full of moonlight
the color of ice cream.

I am not Frank OHara

I am not Frank O’Hara
nor am I a blank slate or canvas
yearning for thick chunks of chalk
or coarse ugly brushes
to write and configure upon
all the materials that not like each other
and the friends they remind you of.

I am not Frank O’Hara
but that is me
on my knees in these old photos
I was going to throwing away,
you see me looking for a cassette tape
of our favorite Human League album
that flew my hand when you
tried to grab it in some lunge of love
or wrestling hold,
it went sailing behind a bookshelf
shoved against the wall,
tall and heavy, weighted with
art books and newspaper piles,
you snapped the photo
to use against me
in some future scenario when
my dignity would be an issue
and to prove, after all, that
I am not Frank O’Hara.

I am not Frank O’Hara
nor am I concert musician
nor an old Russian man playing chess
on a side street in Brooklyn,
I am in California
under the eye of an unforgiving sun
and the second hand smoke
of fires that burn closer to the beach
every day the weather remains dry as Algonquin wit,
I am waiting for you to come home
or for the avian flu to perch on my roof,
and yes, this long and wonderful day
is done and for all the phone calls,
emergencies, angry customers and
friends who will not take your advice
I am glad I am not Frank O’Hara
because I am breathing
and reading his poems that make
me want to pick up a pen
or stroke the keyboard
for words to fill the monitor
in wondrous rhymes about
the odd turns and twist of
every spoken word and gesture
of finger and hand to faces
that will not lie about how
the heart feels,

I am not Frank O’Hara
and dune buggies
are my greatest fear.

How Sad

Talking to myself
about the lines
crossing old railroad ties.

So many gloves
for one hand.

Seldom to the East,
nature never leans.

Factories
dot the matrix.

This sentence is about
itself complaining
about it's circular nature.

Well known map.

How much target practice
shall we demand
for our first date?

She swore it was all true.

I saw you last night
sitting next to
Charlie Weaver,
who was napping
when circle got the square.

She swore it was all
true , that our talent
were different
from the average bear
and that any attempt
to unite them

Would change the course of
mighty rivers,
unhinge doors,

Make us desire to
bend steel in our bear hands.

Cups rattle right off
the shelf.

False diction is all there is.

Moonlight on bath tub water.

ANIMAL RIGHTS

So the laughter takes us all
to another day that is after
the latest worse day to grace
the pages of diaries whose
ink runs and blots on the page
in the rain,
where you were writing,

So spins another day laughing
at the runs in the stockings of
pretty women for whom legs
are a religion of length and shape.

So laughter is not the cure for all that
ails the soul in the unnamed center of night,
but it is song that’s barked like the glee
of seals in a circus act performing
Bach on so many tricycle horns.

So the shoe horn one brings to the jam session
can only play sole music is enough to
make us laugh again by the rise of the sun
when it comes over the hills
and gutted mansions that
ruin the view of the coast line
loops along the curve of the continent
that grows redder than lobsters
in a hungry man’s trap,

So the leather that was wasted on the sidewalk
is gone but the feet survive all the blisters
sweet potato blues could provide in a stretch of
giving some one else a hand for merely showing up
in not just a nick of time, but the whole block of wood as well.

So there is no peace under the stars
when we laugh at the sins of the fathers
that visit us in any hometown that can be hidden in.

So there’s a sign up ahead.

So who’s laughing now?

A hat in the sofa cracks

A hat in the
Cracks of ugly sofas
Ain’t nothing to
Brag about on Sundays,
Pally boy.

marry me during the commercial

the hands of my watch have stopped
dead in their track, frozen on the dial

and the spoon full of steaming soup
is an inch from my mouth, arrested.

the cat looks to be posing for cute posters of
cats knocking things over, like it's done tonight with

that drink that is stuck in mid air , in front of the TV
with the beer ad on where no can even lick their suds

because time has stopped for the time being because
you're out of the room, on a cell phone , smoking

a Camel as you probably conspire with a girl friend
to stuff me in burlap bag and leave me

on a corner in a bad neighborhood, thinking gypsies
or blues musicians will find me and give me something

to do besides moon over your image, holding my breath
until you come back into the room,

just like your doing now, coming through the door
reeking of filter tips , cell phone in your grip,

looking at me askance when you see me exhale,
blowing out candles in the process, oh yeah,

I mean it's okay, really, I'm just glad you're back
from the break you took in the middle of my proposal

which means that all the breakable things left in the air
in your absence can now come crashing down to the

hard tile floor , all the bric-a-brac and my world particularly
getting bruised, bent and shattered and breaking wide, wide open,

my heart is broken again
when it's time to swim

and there's nothing funny about this at all,
I mean,

you're kind of cute, the way you
reduce me to rubble
even in my finest
courtin' clothes.

The Drive Home

The boy whistles half a song
he heard half on the car radio
when he was half listening
with the other ear to his Dad
who was half asleep already
after the long party where Mom
took his keys and pulled him the coat sleeve.

“Please please me” the boy finally sings
in the middle of Dad’s story about
the time when he was ten and he swung a bat
and hit the ball so hard that it sailed all
over the globe and came back  that
where the game was played and broke
an apartment window that made
the old women scream
and the young men cry,
“Please please me, oh yeah….”
the boy sings,
Dad smiles,
Mom drives,

“Oh yeah what? asks Dad,
rose cheeked and  slurring
as Mom fires up a cigarette,
with the electric lighter,
“Please you what oh yeah?”

The boy looks at Mom
who is looking  straight ahead
as they drive the country road
back to the city at night,
billboards  for A&P and Ford dealerships
passing by until the sky brightens with
street lights and neon that makes
the snow on the grown look grey,
full of suit.

“Oh yeah what?:” Dad asks again
and the boy coughs from the cigarette smoke,
thinking that the car no longer smells like new leather.

“ Please please me, oh yeah and I love you”
he sings, his voice cracking as he reaches
for a note that miles beyond  his grasp.

“…AND I LOVE YOU” Dad proclaims
and now looks out the window,
silent now and soon snoring
as the boy notices that
there are more houses passing by
and less wooded groves,

“Dad is snoring” he tells his Mom,
who was singing “Tennessee Waltz”
with Patti Page on the radio and
every violin player on the planet,

“Yes he is” she says, turning
into their drive way,
“he  loves even when he’s sleeping”.

Larry Rivers History

Larry Rivers History LessonIn spite of everythingthat's hard and coveredin cigarette burnsThere's not a ghostof a chance thatthis exact world hasbeen here beforeI entered the museumto stare at statuesand rooms full of soaked canvas,Washington crosses the Delawareas though posing fora glossy magazine ad for whiskey or fabulous airlines,Manhattan is nestled inthe forests aroundGreat Lakes country,Those who fire firelong riflessee only the bloodtheir red coatsincite in the eyesof those whose farmsthey burn on sketchy grounds,History and advertisingoverlay each otherand leave their tracesas rough drawings wrestling for control of the wrist that holds the pencil,The world in outline,fading reds and bluesdrifting out of the lines of what the eyesees in one viewing,the easiest dimensionThat shimmers, blurs,stutters on viewing,repeats itself endlesslyalong with so many deathsand births that crowd thecalendar days,Damn I wouldwalk a mile for many a Cameleven thoughI smoked my last oneten years agothis fall.

A PILLOW BETWEEN OUR WORLDS

A PILLOW BETWEEN OUR WORLDS

I am sleeping
while I make the
eggs the way an army likes them,
guys with guns
and armor
who came by last night,
looking for a party,
finding religion instead,
the only thing to
do when there are no women
in the house and no war to
fight except a yawn
and some obscure itch
at the scalp line,
an army of scared rabbits,
a  receding hare line,
a joke the eggs me on
snoring as I flip
the eggs, scrambled ,
like an alphabet soup,
onto plates, snoring
and sawing logs with nostrils
flared like pants on a ballroom dance floor,
an army praying for women, just some one to pick a fight with,
I find myself chewing my tongue, head against the pillow, awake in the light that comes from the bathroom , there is water running, the sheets are wet with sweat and drool,
I see your mouth glisten with  lipstick,
your dress hangs on you
so right and precise as it molds itself lovingly over your breasts and
hips that it hurts me to say goodbye again, I know what you will say
when  you see me watching,
“You’re still asleep, friend, go back to the
other dream,
an  army waits for you
that could  use your knowledge about
things to do
when everything is done”,
so I close my eyes, a tail of your dress
whipping around a corner, through a door ,
and  there are dirty dishes,
guns and armor all over the carpet, tired men
with out wives or girlfriends
to love them
mediating on uniforms and regulations  in an age
when war is only dreamed of
in philosophy,
this world
fades, the shadow
at the end of each street
I  think I can enter into passing by
in cars and buses,
doors and windows looking onto other dreams
of armies naked in their
lack of  dreams, a religion of standing around,
waiting for a whisper,
this dream before the next one,
a pillow between our worlds.

Poem during the eleven o'clock news

Poem during the eleven o’clock news

A car backfires around
the block and the news
that night still comes to
nothing but the same old scores
and the same teams swing clubs,
throwing tethered balls, not a word
of who ran out of gas on the tracks
as the train appeared in a movie

Maybe, yeah, a movie
we were watching
about someone's stalled car
coughing for gas in the tail pipe
as a locomotive approached
around a dark, bend of the mountain
and a basketball bounced and rolled
off the playing floor to the showers where
the   towel boy dropped the phone
he'd just answered,
dropped the soap in a shower you were taking,
female and foamy and curved like the lines
of cello pressed between legs
of a musician who watched a foot ball game
with pork rinds on his breath,
the tips of his fingers,
you ask for a towel,
a new cake of soap,

I slip train tickets under your pillow,
think of the moon in low, stirring tones
of rich wood purring sounds that are
nothing like cries for help,
the TV is on in all these worlds
that are passed through.

I dream sports on tracks a planet
thriving  on humidity and cigar smoke,
you say "give me your money
and make a wish, please,
make a wish and don't tell me..."

Recent Fiction Less Than Five Years Old

Meet Me in the Parking Lot
Stories by Alexandra Leggat
  
Flannery O'Connor, Russell Banks and Jersey Kozinzky meet for coffee, hash browns and small talk about psychic exile and the best sort of knife edge to hack through a bothersome bit of bone. Odd, disturbing, violent material here--violence either explicit or always at the edge of the crystallized situations here--all of which are made more jarring with Alexandra Leggat's taste for terse sentences and abrupt endings.

It works, for the most part, and the arc through the stories, life inside cars, on dark streets, side roads, parking lots behind anonymous bars, presents us with any number of dazed, abused and high strung women and rattled, crazed, raging men enacting any number of strange movements and quirks. At best, these stories are an adrenaline jolt, speaking truly to the sort of flash that gives one the urge to leap in front of traffic, to challenge immensity of grave and incalculable danger. Fans of Joyce Carole Oates take note , as Leggat seems a likely and artful heir to her position as chronicler of the Imperiled Woman.

 

Still Holding
A novel by Bruce Wagner
 
There's something refreshingly unforgiving in Bruce Wagner's lacerating Hollywood satire; those readers who've had a love/hate relationship with the movie business, an attraction-repulsion dynamic that loves movies themselves and yet is sickened by the business culture that makes it possible, will find the nasty laughs here telling, truthful, and an overdue joy to read.

Anyone else who desire something redeeming to emerge from all the bad faith, a kind act or sacrifice arising from some forgotten reservoir of decency would be better off seeking less severe wit. Wagner mines the old joke about Hollywood that "underneath the tinsel there's more tinsel", and obviously appreciates Jean Baudrillard's theories on simulacra, where the slavish and stylized impression has replaced the real; set this heady abstraction on to the business of celebrity lookalikes and the community that arises among them, we get a twisting , fun house mirror of Hollywood , a parallel existence that mimes the worst and most inane features of the stars they imitate. Wagner, in addition, writes like a wizard who knows where all the bodies are buried and the garbage is dumped.

Oblivion
Stories by David Foster Wallace
 
At his best, David Foster Wallace is an astute chronicler of the often needless (and fruitless) complications characters create for themselves. In these eight stories, he outlines the absurdity, sadness, and sheer comic reality of the outer-edge of consciousness. Fashion magazine editorial boards, consumer research companies, and paranoid office situations are among the areas fictionally explored where human activity fractures into dozens of frantic, nervous tangents. Oblivion is a dizzying, daring set of tales - a riveting virtuoso performance. Ironic, yes, that Wallace's exhausting "maximalist" style, which seems dedicated to fitting everything in sight into a sentence that contains everything else, works best in his shorter pieces: the humor hits harder, the stretches of associations don't have time to die on the vine.



The Body Artist
A novel by Don DeLillo
 
DeLillo is perhaps the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork  Underworld  made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a narrative voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age.
 
The Body Artist  has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnish meaning to grievous experience is preferred over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritualized , obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloian cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband. The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption , slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event.
 
DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously make the cottage on the cold , lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud.  A short, haunted masterwork.

Nights are cold in the canyons

Nights are cold in the canyons

Cross your arms when speaking
of your wives and their telephone calls
in the night, on the back porch,
sobs and crickets carrying on through
until sunlight comes over the garage,

Bless yourself again
for having a family
whose eyes saw you falling?
and whose arms caught
you and laid you in a bed
until another morning
came and the sun emerged
from behind
night and morning low clouds,

Give a man a quarter
for what he needs to drink,
nights are cold in the canyons
where you lost flashlights
and pocket change,

Stop speaking of
former loves
and open every window
and listen to noise
that does not come
from inside your cranium
buzzing like electric shorts
in an old house at the end of
an ugly, washed out street,

Kneel when BB King
plays his guitar
or someone reads
a Frank O’Hara poem
about being stunned
because the lights have changed
and the whole city waits for him
to cross the street
and have his breath taken away,

Play your harmonica
until your lips start to bleed
at which time you’ll be ready
to kiss all the invisible gifts
that makes this life worth sticking around for.

Poetry as Stiff Drink

Somewhere in space, the tempest of intellection vs. emotion in contemporary poetry ensues, participants more passionate than habitual losers at downbeat racetracks. No one walks away happy from these discussions, of course. Although common sense, the proper place for one or the other of those qualities lies in the middle, with a dominant tone depending on what is being composed, matters get sidetracked to issues that leave aesthetics behind and land somewhere in the swamp of Deeply Held Personal Beliefs. The outcome from that kind of morass, in the extreme, are crusades, jihads, and obsession with celebrity murder trials. Barry Goldensohn's poem "Reading Faust When Young" hasn't calmed me down, in any case. Sometimes it's harder to stay in the center of a discussion than on other occasions:

  Reading Faust When Young for David Mamet I remembers only the leap from the bridge into the turbulent river after knowledge, but not what special knowledge or what power ever came his way in the old story. I was young when I read it. Immortality meant art, and Faustus was never an artist. And as for girls, you didn't need the devil when you offered everything. What did he really need to know? What did she feel and could never say about the girl because she had no words for it? He had little to say to the Greats. Helen was a peep-show. And the stuff about his soul— well, that was religious and historical. Overreaching for me was natural. I wanted to know everything, to stay forever in school taking courses. God and the devil never figured in. With his snaky tail, the devil was too fanciful to explain the lines waiting for gas or a bullet and ditch and firebombs and carpet bombs and the icy rapture of ideologues shouting about who to kill and who to save. My fellow humans were real: their evil was sufficient. The sacred was love and art and the political dream. The world-drunk heart was what I took for the soul, which dulled the edge of Faustus' sacrifice, and god was never real enough to love or lose. ©2003 Barry Goldensohn

 All told, this is not a bad bit of remembering, though it seems a fanciful evocation of some delayed connecting of points whose effect, I think, ought to have less earth-shaking patios. There's a lot of throat-clearing harrummmmmphing going on in the lines as I read them where a slighter, more minuscule rhetoric could have prevailed. There's something to be said for distanced irony, the now-I-get-it school, but since the instances were fleeting, minor, gradients of perception building to a larger, if not earth riving sharpness, a voiceless swaggering in its couched self-loathing would fit the material better. It would seem a better idea if Goldensohn hadn't mentioned Faust or Jung at all but in the title, and instead placed us smack dab in the action of his past thinking, the incidents as he vividly recalls doing them in his earnest, youthful practice of applying his hormone-fused enthusiasms upon his world. The mention of the big names and their ideas, though nicely arranged and phrased, are too precious for me to take this as anything more than an occasional poem that would normally find its way to the bottom of a drawer: it fairly gloats with its knowingness, and the author sounds too close to thinking that his eventual lesson learned is something to glory in. 

Look at me. I am wrong on a higher plane. The piece is overloaded with references and glancing mentions of religion and myth; the poet's voice aside, this poem reads like an abstract of a freshman's ill-crafted term paper. One may ask Isn't a lyric poem supposed to be about emotion? Yes, a lyric poem is the verbal equivalent of a musical evocation of intense feeling that defies the logic of words to express adequately. Thus, the looping chains of association, the constant comparisons of unlike things, including the sounds of the words creating euphony. Intense emotion colors the entire world, cast in all engrossing tints. The world to the perceiver makes a certain kind of sense, though the sense eludes them more often than not; there is even an element of paranoia that can come to play here, as in the notion that everything in the world, be it people, places, things, institutions, weather, are all somehow connected to the internal transformation. The irony alone isn't an emotion, but because it has something to do with an individual's perception, whether the poem's speaker or the reader, it can become a key determining factor in how hot emotion might boil or cool off, whatever the case may be. Irony concerns the incongruity between what is said and what actually is the case. Since a lyric poem operates on the transcendent level where emotion bypasses logical argument in pursuit of impossible language, capturing the inexpressible conflicts, disjunctions, distortions, and contradictions between myth and fact, action and deed are likely to happen as default conditions. They will ratchet up the energy a lyric swoon requires. I do think that my own work and explications regarding verse aim toward a Dionysian expansion. Still, unlike a host of others before me who pursued that expansion into sheer incomprehensibility --Kerouac, late John Ashbery, Pound, Language poets who never stopped being enamored of their ability to type non-sequiturs--I think the image, lines, and music need to be reined in, operate within strictures, Jazz is hardly a formless expulsion sans melodic infrastructure, since the quality of the best sets of spontaneous composition requires suitable composed materials to contextualize the extrapolation; the form of the melody being extrapolated upon gives shape to the musician's improvisations. There's a point in the kind of poetry I find appealing and the poets I think do interesting work where they have to acknowledge something a real subject set in the material world, the physical world, and that there is a need to link the most fanciful forays and high-flying linguistic maneuvering to real emotion, producing something at the end resembling whatever effect the writer thinks he's working for. It's a dialectical process, for want of another term, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Simply because something is transcendent about existence does not imply that it is illogical or incomprehensible. Exactly. I think there are many instances, occasions, events, emotions, all sorts of confounding affairs that are absolute without meaning as we understand based on the equation of binary oppositions, i.e., something that is not this must therefore be that. 

Still, I believe that there are ways of understanding that instances require an acute use of intuition and instinct.I am not opposed to intellection coming into works of emotional duration, but something needs to connect with the reader as a felt experience. Otherwise, it's a waste of time reading a work composed solely for the novelty of showing off what one remembers from undergraduate survey classes. don't mind, and even encourage a poet to intellectualize as they write their lines, but the issue is about proportions and ratio. Goldensohn's intellection is strained for the amount of memory he's actually working on; the epiphany is too slight for the evocation of top-heavy names like Faust. Faust, of course, could have been used effectively as a reference serving a satisfying conclusion, but the hand is heavy here when the name and its cache is played. Irony trumps everything, as the saying goes, but it can also kill everything that's going on in work, and the willingness to abstract compulsively here makes for a small work that is all over the map. It's an over-packed suitcase. 

 Stevens's strategies are better, in so far that his work is about the experience, at the moment, in the intelligence of a perceiver who is in witness to things that will not yield their essence in the metaphysical sense. Though not overtly emotional, Stevens crafts a supreme fiction he often spoke of to take the place of the secrets that are forever unknown, a dramatized system of perception that acknowledges the world as its own adequate symbol. Stevens was entering the world, and to have the world he experiences shape and forms his readings and writings; I think he wrote as a man who was in that legendary state of constant becoming. Goldensohn sounds lost at best, though I am sure he can write a decent poem. This isn't one of his better ones. Stevens believes in the adage that there ought to be "no ideas but in things..." (concisely phrased and explained by William Carlos Williams). Stevens, with compatriots Williams, Eliot, et al., were, in their varied ways, obsessed with making language a hard, malleable material no less than clay or steel, and they wanted to write and elaborate upon images that didn't obscure the fantastic qualities of the world their language was supposed to be writing about. Perception is a dominant concern for this generation of modernist poets. I believe Stevens followed the loose dictates brilliantly and developed a methodology of processing the world that could capture in it many of its amazing juxtapositions. What is amazing about Stevens' work is that he develops a philosophy of perceptual imagination from the world as it already is. 

 As for supreme fiction, well, it's Stevens' term, and it is a brilliant shorthand for his unique compositional practice. The work isn't about methodology and philosophy, it's about the world Stevens experiences as a human being and the ideas these experiences brought to him when he came to write about them.  Any good writer gets a set of ideas they work on throughout their careers as artists, and Stevens is no different. I don't call it blabbing, however, since I think his work grew deeper and more refined, and his voice became more refined and musical as he aged, all in the service of developing his subjects and the ideas they inspired. Eliot, Shakespeare, Whitman, Rilke, Goethe, O'Hara, Dickens; each developed a set of ideas they wrote about continuously, though hardly as a matter of adhering to some doctrine they were locked into. The result is work worth reading and digging into, though one makes allowances for individual preference.

Cooking pork chops yakking on the phone

There’s nothing for us here but
what the smoke leaves on the wallpaper
in the aftermath of the grease fire
that raged a minute too long,

All that remains of the fish tank
is broken glass and the pots
you through at it,

All I asked was whether you
borrowed a Penthouse
and lost it somewhere under
all that smelly laundry
that gets higher in the hallway,

You weren’t really hungry
is what you say now?
but I can already hear your stomach growling,

Remind me, please, to not
argue with you
about my porno and beer cans
when you’re cooking pork chops.
yakking on the phone,
tore up on speed.

Stellar Conditions

Stellar Conditions
Under west coast umbrellas
you rain on parades
that don't float your fleet
of boats whose hulls bulge
with your endlessly paired desires,
your presence lets the air of my tires
and calls my mother on the phone
to say that I've beena bad boy
with the lunch money
and the guest houseyonder back,
just beyond the golf course.

Why do I love you so much
that every day of
my fifty plus yearsis gone
like vapor escaping
a covered pot of boiling water,
my resume is shredded,
my works are undone,
every line in my faceand ache
in my bones means nothing
when I'm in the center of the street
or alone in the house
as you walk away,
a teen age boygassed
up on hormones
and jack rabbit guitar solos,
grinding my teethand yelling your name
from a hurt that
is deep and full
of colors turned inside out,

There are lines of menand womenup
and down each side of the main
street drenched from a constant rain,
ashen under lunar light
in the middle of the night when
all should be having dreams of their plans
for the next day's obligations,
but your negations change that,
fisher of men,
collector of women,seducer of secrets,
black scarab love,we glow under neon signs
for Budweiser and One Hour Photo,
muttering your nameas streetcars spark past on their rails,
we chant your nameas you open a magazinewhen the plane turns
over the ocean,we call your nameas
you order headphones for the in flight movie
that you'll watch under stellar conditionsas long as there is fuel
and credit cardsto cross the county line with.

A Fearful Tale

A Fearful Tale

Strange as the rain they didn’t predict I was there staring across the when the phone rang.
The phone was black as arrest warrant ink, a quality that was more ominous by the sound of the bell, which was shrill like the cry of man bobbing on the line where the sky meets the lake.
Mary turned her head from the mirror where she was watching herself undo a ribbon around her neck as I stood in the middle of the room, counting the rings with the tap of ay big left toe.
“Silly” she said, walking to the phone, two strands of ribbon blowing over her shoulder in what seemed like a wind, “your games amuse me, but really, someone might be trying to get through to us.”
She stopped just short of the n1.ght table the phone rested on and picked up the receiver from the cradle with an arch of the back and a swoop of the arm that seemed professional, very profess
The phone seemed to leap into her hand through attractions unspoken of in the city. though by some natural attraction, L paper clips soaring to the north and south poles of a horse—shoe magnet.
Mary said a few words, nodding, cradling the phone between her Mar and shoulder as she finished untying the knot around her neck.
The ribbon floated to the floor as Mary took the phone from her ear and pointed it my direction,
“It’s for you” she said, “it’s Andy
The walk across the room took along time.
“Hi Ted, this is Andy. I wanted to see if you’d gotten those poems I dropped off?”
His breathing was a gurgling, grating rustle of congestion and worse. The black holes of the receiver appeared to vibrate, pulse in time to his rasping. The receiver felt clammy felt clammy, and the wallpaper, which I hadn’t noticed before, was suddenly bright and screaming with reds, yellows, pinks, and punishes blacks. This was all wrong. My scalp felt as though my hairline had been stapled into position as a guard against a long and blustering wind from the desert.

“Well?” asked Andy, “Whattaya think of the poems”.
“Yer poetry sucks and yer mama dresses you funny, Andy…”
“I see…”
“Kerouac was a weenie and you gotta leave that shit alone”.
“Gotcha. What else?”
“You spell like a muthafuckah!”
“Oh yeah? Well, you suck”.
“Fair enough” I said, “Lunch tomorrow?”
“I’m there” said Andy, “My treat this time…”
“You’re on…”
“Fuck off. Later.”

And the phone went dead. And then the sun exploded.
In heaven I was seated on a café on a cloud over looking planet debris. Monkeys were at every table, tossing silver ware and plates across an endless expanse.

Waking up is hard to do

The depth of sleep
digs its nails into the wall
that separates you from
a planet that is awake
from the tallest peak to the
smallest crack in the concrete,
slumber pulls you deeper
into the lake where
nothing moves.

Waking up is hard to do.

You’re forever confused
about the change to leave
on the table after coffee,
and who’s smiling and why any
of it should matter.

There are so many time
I wanted to say
I love you ‘though
I didn’t sleep at all last night.

Lets just say that
the art of evasion
is the occasion to rise to
when the drinks get honest
and nothing else seemed to matter.

We shall find our places
and assume our positions
of surrender and on waking
shower and dress and comment
on the drive to work that
there seem to be more and more
mattresses tossed out of homes,
leaning against dumpsters
like working girls reclining
against streetlights and payphones.





1•

Talking about the weather

Talking about the weather

So little time left
in a day that's already done with
by the time the sun
rises in the East
over the warm water oceans,

Microphones and men
with expensive hair
scream into camera lenses
to where the world is dark again
and ready for strong drinks
and toasts to sorry bastards everywhere
they don't happen to be,
unless, of course,
the water in their drink
is brown from the tap
and reeks of limitless amounts
of DNA recombined and
recycled in every form fit
for a natural disaster,
it's then time to drop the drinks
and microphones and head for
high ground, the tops of buildings
that no longer seem so tall,

Bad news travels fast
with the best seats
on the plane
as cities full of lost citizens
ask their politicians
what just happened
when the storm clouds gathered
and squeezed out the light
that shone over the land,

Politicians scratching their
heads until their
fingernails are encrusted with
dandruff and blood
as they look up to the sky
with their mouths awed and gaping,
waiting for God to answer their
demands about
what just happened
all while it rains,
and they drown where they stand,
dumb as turkeys
around a rain barrel.

spin cycle

she was hours ahead of schedule
so she sat down while the clothes
did their spin cycle thing and in an instant
was in the backseat of a limousine
that moved up a long black avenue
to where the skyline became a spire
like hands pressed together in prayer
under lights of the night that makes the
windows of the soul fall sad expressions
down to where the holes in the street
are deep with where the rain
gathers in songs about closing time
as drinks stick to coasters on bars
burned with matches and gouged with
penknives where names are carved over names
called from payphones one checks
for returned coins as they walk with baskets
full of socks which she collects and mends
and sells between shifts at the Woolworths
where she stands at a register under a cardboard
poster of orphans with wide eyes who look as cute
as they starve themselves
to becomecreatures so beautifully
taut on their boney frame
that they cease to breathe
but now her watch beeps
just as a buzzer sounds
and clothes stop rotating
and all the dreaming stops
suddenly, suddenly,
hard like brakes
screaming in the distance
just as you drift into a sleep
that is now stolen from you.