A poem by Sharon Olds

The first thing to be said about this week's poem concerns the recording of poet Sharon Olds reading her poem, "The Worker", currently posted on Slate. The sound quality, as usual, is sexless, nasal, a suffocating voice with nostrils plugged up invoking verse from behind a cellar door, but there is something more this time, a listless spirit of languor and defeat, as Olds reads the lines , the succeeding details without a hint or pretense of inflection.

The writing, to be sure, wants to get the feeling at being at a psychic remove while one watches a parent processed and disposed of in death, yet Olds makes us feeling nothing at all, there is no drama in her reading, no momentum, just a list without a lilt.That is because the poem is in essence a run on sentence, and the lack of emphasis or portent is conspicuous by its absence. Even in reading the poem several times I don't know what it was Olds was trying to get at. The problem with writing poems that lack stanzas is that unless one creates an image or a flurry of lyric combinations that underscore a narrative point, as shifts in tempo and harmonic structure would in a musical piece, one is more or less stuck with someone who is in a state of shock, verbalizing each unassimilated instance in a grueling circumstance. This claustrophobic, clustered, a sense of out of body experience in all, but given the fairly flat,almost clinical language Olds proffers, her writing would have benefited from the breathing space stanzas provide, hence making the poem more in line with a black out experience--one surreal barrage following, unconnected, from the other--that this line of boxcars racing down the mountain side:

Nothing had been burned with my mother,
even the tiny, blue snowflakes
of her cotton hospital gown the floor-nurse took
back, and kept.

The rows of tongues of
flame inside the mortuary
incinerator were given bone,
flesh, blood, wedding ring
and hair.

Suddenly I'm glad I do not
have that job mother after
mother after father after
father, a child, baby, to scrape
out of the firebox into the urethane
urn.

I always forget the worker,
the one instead of me who picked that
dewy, rigid corpse up,
and slid it in the body-sack and zipped it to;
the one who lifted it out of the bag
and put it in its tray on the conveyor belt;
the one who pushed the button to move her
into the enclosure; the one who flipped the
switch to fire the jets.

For a moment,
I almost see it, my mother's body
made of a feeding frenzy of fire,
and then the scraper scrapes her—and a few
ashes of the one before, and a grain
of the one before that, and the one before that—
into the box, and the secretary
labels it, and puts it in the ball-bearing
file drawer, by her desk, and the little
carton of my mom abides, the office
calendar page of April is torn,
May, June, July, August,
out she rolls,

I do my amateur
teamster featherbedding, the minister
does his work of magic respect,
taking the heat of the eternal
for the rest of us whose
fingertips and nails break into the
harsh, purplish, Molokai sand
and convey a handful out over the rail and
give her to the wind and sea,
roughage for the fishes' work of
seeding the deep,

we give her to the
hard-laboring moon, we give her
leave, and permanent furlough.

The white space gives you pause to refresh yourself and perhaps constructing a cadence which would give these flatline phrases rhythmic verve. Even with the suggested director's seat, Olds veers wildly between many items: flames, paperwork,
consuming jet flames. This is a three year old with an 8mm camera.The key problem is that the poem has a warmed over feeling to it,like stale toast one tries to revivify in the microwave, as if this were the work of the Professional Poet who needed to compose something to keep their hand in the game and dredged up an overworked subject they most likely have had better success with in earlier years, in earlier books. This reads less as a poem and more as a journal entry or a post on any one of the millions of lonely blogs someone puts up in a spate of enthusiasm only to abandon after a few posts.

The internet is filled with billions of ghost home pages and blog offerings, and filled as well with billions of chapbooks and thin poetry collections filled with strained and pale expressions of real sorrow or joy; there is no compelling reason to return to them exactly because they are banal. A writer as well known and potentially potent as Sharon Olds ought to be able to make us care about this cremation, or relate to the detachment with stronger, more ironic language. This is a sad note to oneself or one's therapist, unleavened by art, which is a shame, since art is that quality that makes us care about whatever the poet might be trying to come to terms with.There remains the obligation to make this compelling to the reader; there is an argument to be made, there is a conversation to be started with writing, there is something to be given the reader who leaves the page with something they hadn't when they began to read.

The Triumph of Simulacra: The Real World Turns 17

The Real World, MTV's pioneer reality show wherein, season after season, a half dozen or so young people fulfilling various stereotypes--the poet, the slut, the gay guy, the sensible minority member, the capitalist, the alkie--are given plush digs for six months, financial stipends, and are filmed as they flail about
in multi-tasking demonstrations of self-seeking, enters it's seventeenth season this year , and all I can think about is the seemingly irreversible atrophy of our collective common sense and good will. Barnum famously (and perhaps allegedly) remarked that no one lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people, and by extension MTV hasn't lost a dime producing The Real World. It was a neat trick with their variation, which was pawning stupid teens and young adults as objects of entertainment, and it's even a neater trick that they've been able to sell their demographic the same sack of crap for seventeen years. The conceit with the show is that audience derives the simple and pure sense of superiority over a house full of stereotypically shallow, vain,
whining and rudderless gatherings of unmotivated youth, a tawdry distinction that enables them to watch the episodic disasters with a smug remove. This
underscores the audience's willingness to settle for less and accept fathomless half hours of moping and doping as entertainment, some even going to the extent of discussing the events as if the ongoing seasons of selfish bad faith are instructive of some higher point. It's the willfully dumb watching the willfully numb, and it's the kind of convoluted narcissism, that view of the very familiar, that brings audiences back again and again and allows MTV to sell back a downgraded version of their lives at top dollar.

Why Was Edvard Munch so Morbid?

One looks at a reprint of Munch's most famous painting The Scream and then regards the subtler, more somber depressions of this painter's angst soaked paintings, such Girls On the Jetty, and wonder why he was such a glum Gus. The reason is more practical and less mysterious than some of our more mystical critics would insist.He was good at it. With all the impressionist swellings, swirling clouds, jaggedly mad crows, blurred lines and obscured faces moving about his canvases under the darkest, deepest shades and tones he could manage, what Munch saw in the world wasn't nice formations in pleasing shapes and arrangements, but rather as a thin film of appearance under which each and everyone of his dark moods and skewed perception pulsed, ached and persistently throbbed. Munch and his allies did a rather nice job of freeing the artist from having to make pretty pictures for dentist offices. Not that it was a bad mood alone that motivated his brush strokes. The desire to depict reality in a different way, to find a truth that hadn't yet been brought forward, is a permanent impulse among artists who are the least bit figurative, and Munch's penchant for gloom and depressed spaces were a perfect inspiration, it that's the word, to take the image of the world apart, tweak the essential elements, and reassemble it, askew, fuzzy, angular. Munch's genius was also his pathology, and the crazed energy in his head which drove him to relentless distraction was additionally his ugly gift to the world. It still commands our attention generations later.

Jay McInerney, Dozing Fat Boy

Jay McInerney, Brat Pack novelist, Manhattanite extraordinaire and famed party goer, got the urge to step up to the plate and write a Great American Novel, a work that would raise him finally from the middle rungs of the literary ladder and allow him to reach the top shelf where only the best scribes--Hemingway! Fitzgerald! Thomas Wolfe!-- sit and cast their long collective shadow over the fields of aspiring geniuses, furious scribblers all. McInerney has selected a large subject with which to make his reputation, the catastrope that was and remains 9/11. Acutely aware that the minor league satires and soft coming of age stories that made his name were less commanding than they had been because "9/11 changed everything" (a phrase destined to be the characterizing cliche of this age) he offers us The Good Life, a mixed bag of satiric thrusts, acute social observation, two dimensional characterizations
and wooden generalizations about the sagging state of society, of culture, of our ability to understand one another, locally and globally.

I agree that Jay McInerney is a better writer than he's been credit, but history will judge his novels as minor efforts at best. Witty and observant, yes he is, but the manner in which he conveys his best lines, his choicest bon mots have the thumbed-through feeling of a style borrowed. Fitzgerald, Capote and John Cheever are his heroes, true, but there's nothing in McInerney's writing that honors his influences with the achievement of a tone and personality that is entirely his own, an original knack of phrase making that makes a reader wonder aloud how such wonderful combinations of words are possible. His influences, alas, are visible and seem to be peering over his shoulder. Even what one would praise as sharp and elegant observations from his keyboard creaks not a little. The style sounds borrowed, and our author sounds much, much too dainty to make it really cling to the memory:

"The hairstylist was aiming a huge blow-dryer at his wife's skull, which was somewhat disconcertingly exposed and pink--memento mori--in the jet of hot air ... "

"He developed an interest in the arts as well as a taste for luxury and was never hence quite able to make the distinction between the two, so that his ambitions oscillated between the poles of creation and connoisseurship."

McInerney is compared to Fitzgerald relentlessly since his career as a professional writer began, in so much he, like F.Scott, was bearing witness to a generation of conspicuous consumption and waste, but one notices that any random paragraph from The Great Gatsby
contains more melody by far. The writing genius of Fitzgerald, when he was writing at his absolute best,was his ability to make you forget the fact that you're reading elegant prose and have you become entranced by it. It was a means to put you in a different world altogether. It's this simple, really; you didn't see him writing, you didn't see him sweat. Able craftsman as well as peerless stylist when he was performing best, Fitzgerald's prose seemed natural, buoyant, unstrained. McInerney's writing reveals that strain, that slaving over phrase and clever remark,and often times the effect seems calculated.In his best moments, he rarely sheds the sophomore flash; after all these years our Manhattan golden boy still writes like the most gifted student in a Kansas City composition class. After all these years he is still trying to outrace the long shadows of those who brought him reading pleasure.

Three Irksome Phrases

What irks me without fail are people who ought to know better saying "uncomfortability" when they mean "discomfort". It seems that some folks think that an excess of syllables, even to the extent of using words that don't exist in nature, makes an expression of commonplace ideas and feelings sound more subtle, nuanced, educated.These are words for people who don't know what they want to say, let alone how to talk about it.

Likewise, the use of the world "potentiality" needs to be banned by law, punishable by cruel mocking in the public square. There is no advantage of using that ungainly pile-up that the shorter, unambiguous and more efficient "potential" can't get across clearer and faster.
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A couple of co workers are found of announcing that they're going "on lunch", a phrase that sounds as phony baloney as it gets. I realize it may be a regionalism , but here in San Diego the term grates the ear. Dude.
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Sorry to say, but there are still fields of self-help/recovery/New Age grope speak here in San Diego, and it's not unusual in the course of a day to hear someone describe a bad mood or other psychic malaise they have as being "being in a bad space." For me, a "bad space" is standing in front of moving traffic as it rushes towards you.

Related to this are folks who say that they need to take care of their own needs or else they "get to that place " where they become The Hulk. Funny , but I've never seen these "bad spaces" or dreaded "places" that make people become awful. Is there a map I can buy?

TV Makes Us Smarter?

All the McLuhan and Baudrillard fans who’ve spent their lives misconstruing both these thinkers’ circuitous thinking are cheering these days, as a current conceit circulating among some in cyber society has it that digital media, television in particular, has made us smarter than generations before. Smarter, more intelligent, more aware. Real people with fake lives watching TV shows full of fake people acting out real ones. Social anxiety disorder is a real condition, though we dispensed with the trend of making every discomfort a disease and just referred to sufferers as either existentially perplexed, or more simply, "neurotic".

Any good post-war philosopher knows the cure to the constant fretting and despair: GET A LIFE, or at least create one. In the current age, we begin with simply turning off the TV and getting a library card, for nothing makes you smarter as well has reading books , one page at a time, at pace where you're allowed, or rather compelled to develop sound thinking. TV has replaced the ability to abstract with the mere capacity to summarize, which is the difference between synthesizing information and formulating a solution to a problem under inspection, and the other merely a form of inventory taking, hardly more than putting everything in specimen jars, labeling them, and categorizing them in a method that renders the information inert, useless, and mere clutter. This is a time when citizens can know so much about so many things and yet understand absolutely none of it. Extreme, perhaps, but it feels that way as you make your way through phone conversations, exchanges at work, conversations in grocery stores and coffee houses and the bars where one might sit for awhile trying to regain their composure;  voices heated and voices calm citing this article, that website, that blog, this TV show as they sally forth with a world view that hasn’t changed much since they were a teenager. So much information absorbed for positively no effect. We fight wars and drop bombs for the old , ruined reasons dressed up with new terms and end notes. We are able to express the limits of what we perceive faster.

Real people with fake lives watching TV shows full of fake people acting out real ones. Social anxiety disorder is a real condition, though we dispensed with the trend of making every discomfort a disease and just referred to sufferers as either existentially perplexed, or more simply, "neurotic".Any good post-war philosopher knows the cure to the constant fretting and despair: GET A LIFE, or at least create one. In the current age, we begin with simply turning off the TV and getting a library card, for nothing makes you smarter as well has reading books , one page at a time, at pace where you're allowed, or rather compelled to develop sound thinking. TV has replaced the ability to abstract with the mere capacity to summarize, which is the difference between synthesizing information and formulating a solution to a problem under inspection, and the other merely a form of inventory taking, hardly more than putting everything in specimen jars, labeling them, and categorizing them in a method that renders the information inert, useless, and mere clutter.