Harlot's Ghost, a novel by Norman Mailer

This is a generational saga more than anything else, the story of Harry Hubbard and his relationship with his CIA mentor, the titular Harlot. It is, I think, a brilliant mess of a novel, not unlike the projects the Central Intelligence Agency has taken on covertly, unheard of and unspoken, in order to preserve the good graces and virtue of the United States. The main message, I think, is that one cannot fight evil unless they understand exactly what evil is and are willing to be evil , unprincipled, lacking in romanticized notions of goodness and fairness in order to combat any and all threats that approach our shores.  It is messy work, in other words, and there is a liturgy here, something approaching a theological world view that places the agency and its agents in a context that represents an over specialized class of professional attempting to rationalize the vileness of their work by allusively equating their violence, lies and disruptions as serving the greater good.What especially intrigues about this novel is the foul premise that one cannot effectively fight evil unless they are able to become evil themselves, which is to say that the agents in play, visiting various bits of expensive and furtive skulduggery against enemies present and invisible, have to pay grave  lip service to the virtues of American freedoms and the governing institutions that direct them, but who must be able to betray every moral principle they've sworn to uphold as a means of defending against the godless, the unbathed, the fearfully "other". Rather than have agents who are compartmentalized to the extent that they lie, cheat, steal and dispatch bad guys by day and watch TV and crosswords at night, we have instead characters who are at war with the lies they tell themselves.Within this is a paranoia that is made into a layered, convoluted, brooding world. Not a perfect novel, but a genuine work of literature none the less. I would venture that this is Mailer's best novel. 

"THE AVENGERS: Infinity Wars" three hours of frantic, distracted agitation

The Avengers The Infinity War is a big, fat, slobbering mess of a movie, a gluttonous rampage of straggling superheroes, thinly connected storylines that are incomprehensible if one hasn't seen most of the Marvel movies that have come out in the last ten years. It is a great looking film, colorful (for a change, as Marvel films have tended to have a bleached out effect for most of what they have done so far), the special effects, especially the special effects, are cast cleverly, and the set pieces are spectacular are satisfyingly effective. But to what purpose, to what effect? One can say that everything that has happened in the films over the last decade have led up to this moment, which I think is the problem; Infinity War cannot stand on its own, it cannot excite without the fan boy's obsession with the smallest bits of detail and information from random Marvel efforts. And it switches from one part of the earth to a sector of the Universe, another planet, a dimension, from Villain headquarters to intergalactic weapons foundry, constantly, disconcertingly. 

That is to say that the editing is such that the movie finally does not add up to anything you find quotable, revealing of grim intentions under the professed declarations. Thanos, the villain, does announce his intentions and fulfills his purpose by Movie's end, and the effect is, admittedly shocking and effectively deployed, but it's little more than a sequence of competent magic tricks by a competent trickster who has one amazing effect for his finale. After you go wow, spend some time yammering about what comes next, you realize there was only one spectacular effect that made the grade, and that it wasn't enough to bring the wild twines that form this movie's unsporting narrative together in a way that made more it more than quips and clashes. Mind you, I did like the movie. Very entertaining as a distraction, but like Marvell's Black Panther, epic-ally overrated as masterpieces of cinema. But standards Marvel helped established, they are mere, merely okay. 

Finally, it its race to tie up a decades worth of plot lines and themes from fifteen or so amazingly profitable movies, watching this film was not unlike watching cable TV with a meth-addled tweaker who had the remote control, unable to make up its mind whether to sit, shit, stand, watch the news, jerk off, take apart a bicycle or simply die. Even after all this time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe cannot transcend its self-created cliches. So what comes next? At this point, does it matter? Doubtless, they'll continue to show their technical mastery, but for narratives, ideas, surprises? That rut only gets deeper.

MONKEYS ON A STICK

Once upon a time, by which I mean 2006 , when I was habitual lurker and part time scold on Slate's now defunct poetry forum Poems Fray there was an especially obtuse and truth-challenged participant  who persisted in saying naive and empty headed things about poets and their poems no matter how severely he's ridiculed, corrected, verbally stomped. I won't go into details as to what this person did that was dishonest, incorrect,disingenuous or otherwise offensive . We would be here all day. Not actually , mind you, but let us say that the memory of what this fellow said and presented himself as, under the flimsiest of online disguises, makes my capacity for a catchier metaphor presently nonexistent. But first I might want to own my own conceits and venture a guess to this fellow's motivation to remain in the company of other poetasters who couldn't stand his presence; we were a smug bunch, in fact, despite no lack of brains or wit. Being intelligent is not an automatic gateway to a winning,accepting personality. Perhaps that was this creature's motivation to keep burrowing in under the self satisfying veneer of our discussions.  You know the sort, the little man with the steroid ego who for reasons only God or Homeland Security understand has a habit of internalizing every truism, cliche and new age adage they come across, creating a moldy stew of babble they might think they can get loose women with. It's crazy making.  He added this at an especially exasperating point:

To be a Poet, you must be a Dreamer, for Poetry is the product of our hopes and aspirations.

To be a poet, it helps if one stops making Absolute Statements about what a poet must be or what one thinks is required for a poem to be valid. Above remarks like that make you sorry that anyone spoke highly of Universal Literacy.All a poet needs is a talent for the craft, an interesting way wit the language, and an openness to let the poem they're writing assume a form that is not strained, or made to conform to some specious and dubious requisites ; poetry made to do so is often turgid, vapid, bombastic, myopic and finally gutless when it comes to delivering the goods that the results of good poetic art should, that sound of surprise, the unexpected perception, that inexpressible feeling caught in terms of the unforgettable.It helps as well if one who desires to write good poet not address themselves as Poets, with a capital "P",lest they mistake themselves for priests, seers, mystics, oracles and all other manor of shaman whose existence is of use only to comic book writers or fakes and layabouts who find the personage a handy way to circulate their malarkey for yet another go around.

Finally, it 's useful for a poet to remember that what one has actually experienced in the world and how one brings order, sense, and irony to their stories is better grounds for poetic inspiration than "hopes and aspirations alone" which, truth be told, tend to be more or less the same, with minor variations . The real work of poets is to bring their skill as writers to work through the contradictions, u-turns, diversions and unexpected changes they experience while on their way to achieve their ideal circumstances. Life is what happens when you're making other plans. The poet who wishes to be good needs to slough off dubious advice from poetasters and instead improve their writing. Otherwise, there poetry is more message than message, more arch than artful, a string of cliches executed with the precision only the dull witted and easily trained can manage.

The Meanest Things Vladimir Nabokov Said About Other Writers | Literary Hub

The Meanest Things Vladimir Nabokov Said About Other Writers | Literary Hub

Book reader website Literary Hub has a recent article that is a generous sampling of the awful things master novelist Vladimir Nabokov has written about other renowned writers.  Interesting and intriguing, as the man, an entitled misanthrope who's lack of empathy for any of  characters turned his wicked tongue into a writerly geiger counter that could capture the damning detail as his myriad of obsessed sycophants , witless housewives and firmly addled head Wasps and create a damning, hilarious, unexpectedly acute tragedies and comedies ; he was a witness to characters of no particular charm engineering the means of their eventual dissolution. But this article is weak in its examples, whcih is to say they suggest Nabokov to be more vain that on target.            One of the best stylist in the English language with regard to his novels is merely chatty and a hazelnut shade prolix in his under-seasoned dismissals of other writers held in critical high regard. The remarks are mean, of course, but lacking is the conspicuous example that exposes the supposed fraudulence. His thrusts do not stab, his parries do not cut , his volleys neither detonate nor decimate. He does not leave the wounds he intended to. This reduces Nabokov's stature, in my judgement. Still, VN remains a splendid , brilliant novelist.

THE OLD WEIRD AMERICA by Greil Marcus

An admirable facet of Greil Marcus's digressive form of criticism is that he's always attempting--essaying forth, essentially--to demonstrate the unities between the high, low, and middle portions of culture, insisting, with an impressive range of references and reading that the separations between are more argumentative than substantial. Linking mountain and southern music with Dadaism and neo-Marxist student rebellions with Religious bliss with rock and roll and performance art--an exciting project to stake one's career on, which is precisely what Marcus has done. Famously, though, Marcus, one of the first rock critics for the Rolling Stone publication, the author is given digression and historical anecdote, musing and abusing the privilege of making metaphor when proofs of his theory are required. Assuming that he had a theory, to begin with. Marcuse is clearly moving in the dialectical mode, maintaining that opposing forces arise in history that then clash inevitably in the violent synthesis and create a new period of existence with new rules and cultural distinctions, all of which create its opposite and will again clash in violent synthesis. 

But instead of a theory that one can read and argue with, I suppose, a script one can comprehend and modify as new evidence comes to light, Marcus is a more impulsive notion than theoretical rigor. It is the joy of reading him, as he seems to relish the chance to recreate some blessed moment in music history--the Sex Pistols rehearsing "Johnny B. Goode" (in his book Lipstick Traces)  or the tension on the stage at the Newport Fok Festival when Dylan, assuming the stage with an electric band, was booed and called names by a crowd of stalwart folkies. Just when you think he's ready to provide the skeleton key to his musings, the punchline, the point he's taking a good while to get to, Marcus recedes into the mystified murk of his own grandiloquence. That is the joy and the aggravation of reading this writer.   I read Greil Marcus because I love the way he writes and admits that his prose has influenced the way I take fingertips to the keyboard. This is a problematic love of the man's love for five decades. Lately, though, it's been more prolix than persuasion, as his ongoing effort to make Bob Dylan the central factor of the 20th century hasn't struck a believable insightful note in decades. 

The Old Weird America is an extended reflection on the songs on Dylan's famous 'Basement Tapes", which strives to provide the secret history behind the songs. In matters of the cross-pollination of cultures, racial justice, the mashing together of folk authenticity, rock and roll, and Symbolist poetry, Marcus essentially argues that all roads lead to Dylan and lead through him as well. As criticism, it is more an act of imagination than a weighing of elements; Well read and as well listened to as he is across a great spectrum of literature and music types, what is lacking here are the dual duties of establishing how the songs and artists within the folk tradition influenced Dylan and how Dylan assimilated the music who's expressive brilliance he could never equal and yet was motivated by to create his own means and create new criteria by which to discuss the success or failure of the work. Dylan is less the artist to Marcus than a saint or something greater, and, even though there is a pleasure to ride the waves, cadences and well-crafted metaphors and similes of the writer's prose, The Old Weird America is a shaggy dog story at heart. Marcus began this habit of epic digression with Lipstick Traces, a tome not without its pleasures--his connection thereof the efforts of Cabaret Voltaire, the Dadaists, Punk Rock and the Situationist provocations of Guy Debord was especially tightly argued-- but now it seems little else than a practiced spiel that's trotted out and exclaimed, regardless of the topic, not unlike an old timer's AA share that is memorized not just by them but by the entire meeting that has heard them deliver for decades. I am saying that Marcus is writing the same book with diminishing degrees of enthusiasm. His fascination with the idea that there is a Secret History of American culture, where ideas High, Middle, and Low meet and create odd examples of genius and odd, clarifying perceptions to the exact set of ironies that both inspire and hobble us as a collective society striving for imperfectly stated Ideals has gone from an intriguing and seductive conceit where equally obsessed readers, hoping there is more to rock and roll and blues and country music than guitar chords and drunken hard times, can share the idea that there is a metaphysical aspect to the lovingly embraced sounds that defined the childhood of millions of citizens. 

This makes for the diffusion of argument on Marcus's case and leaves us more with the bold assertion that is no longer the poetic effusions of a critic inspired toward a degree of inspiring interpretation; this is the point where the eloquence no longer rings, soars, or makes you want to turn up the volume and study a lyric sheet while scrutinizing the tunes of Dylan, the Stones or the century's end disruptions of Hip Artists and those after them. Rock has its own Harold Bloom, likewise an esteemed critic of literary works who, of late, is an admitted Bardolator who has written some books concerning the essential genius of Shakespeare as being something much more vast and profound and, shall we say, "world creating" than even the wildest essayists have claimed in the centuries previously. Shakespeare, says Bloom, asserts Bloom, proclaims Bloom, created the Modern World, every inch of it, every concept, every psychological profile and alienated nuance we can think of. You can argue with his sweeping conclusions, but the book I'm thinking of, "Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human," is a critical delight. It may be that Bloom is luxuriating in the laziness of a higher caliber. The difference between them is that Bloom has a thesis that he's worked with for decades, a set of subtle arguments crystallized in his landmark book "The Anxiety of Influence," a brief but trenchant discussion where the Professor posits that Shakespeare is the premier genius who casts a long and permanent shadow over the rest of world literature that came before him and that his influence is so pervasive that no poet or other literary artists cannot help but be influenced by him. Those great geniuses who've emerged after Bard's time have either engaged their influence from him and written great works extending, modifying, and altering the system of metaphor Shakespeare changed our collective consciousness with, or there is another genius who've emerged over the centuries who, being painfully aware of the Bard's embedded influence on how sentences about human experience have come to be written, write furiously in the other direction, against his style, assumptions, and rhetoric, experimenting, taking political risks, deconstructing, inverting, abstracting and de-familiarizing the artful language in ways only a new kind of genius would conceive and execute. 

But here's the rub: even for those great writers who've made great art with language that artfully contains the human impulse to go beyond mere descriptions of the world and peer at what is behind the veil of enumerated appearances, Shakespeare is present, his aesthetic, his metaphors, his language influencing new writers in one direction or the other. That is a rather crude summary of Bloom's basic premise, and there are dozens of other notions woven through his life's work. Still, the point is that his a set of ideas that make the ideas tangible and convincing once the initial "aha!"  of flashing insight wears off. It's not science, of course, but it is a craft, a profession, this kind of thinking, and what we have in Bloom who has taken his working theory and tested it against new ideas, new writers who write literature in cultures other than what is routinely aligned in the Western Canon. Bloom, who defended the existence of the canon and wrote a book on the issue, believes that there are permanent genius and masterpieces of Western Literature,  as he is a man who has made a career judging books with imposing standards. The standards are not fixed, though, and Bloom further asserts Test the Canon is a living thing, like the   American Constitution, a category of books and authors that must be continually revised as matters with human existence come to mean something different. 

 Marcus and impressionistic hot takes on matters of music, and culture, in general, have been brilliant at times. Still, the later work is regressive without a central premise or premises. Marcus hasn't put forth a thesis from which his notions can find a more compelling form of argument, a form that would aid others to avoid the frequent bush and thorny bramble that spreads in Marcus's many books and subject his scheme of rock music's claim to art to some respectful but rigorous interrogation. I frankly think he's lost in his thoughts but without a map. The point here isn't to go over Bloom's declarations in, say, Shakespeare and the Invention of Human or Hamlet: Endless Poem, but rather to mention that as in the case of Greil Marcus, we have a critic who has stared too long at the page, listened too long to the same old songs, two critics fixed on their respective catalog of ideas and conceits which are now not speaking to a readership, or at least no readership other than themselves. A pity, of course, since criticism, as practice, is to assert, offer proof of argument from the text scrutiny, and provoke discussion or at least some element of invigorated intellectualizing. 

I don't want to think about anything larger than what's for dinner after reading Bloom murmur through layers of verbal phlegm about the Absolute Appetites of Falstaff, nor do I desire to play air guitar or consider the sweet surrealist mannerisms of Tom Waits after Marcus intones multitudes of repetitively presented riffs, paragraph after paragraph. Instead, possibilities are exhausted in the critic's terms, not those of the book or the disc; I find that this kills enthusiasm for the art itself. Those familiar with how the author thinks on the page will note, also, the lack of real verve in the writing, skilled and flowing as it may be.

Terry Hertzler RIP

HOT TAKE!!Xiaolu Guo: ‘Dickens is sentimental, clumsy and lacks poetry’ | Books | The Guardian

Xiaolu Guo: ‘Dickens is sentimental, clumsy and lacks poetry’ | Books | The Guardian:

The Guardian posed as series of fast questions to writer Xiaolu Guo, and her answers result in harsh hot take on the writings of Charles Dickens. You can read the answers in full here .Her views on Dickens are so uninformed that I cannot take her seriously as a literary thinker. There is nothing in the article that makes me think that she is subtle and thorough writer, let alone possessing anything like the grace and poetry she maintains Dickens lack. This has nothing to do with gender preference: Dickens is simply a superb writer , a keen observer, a wonderful social critic, an amazing, astounding creator of complex characters from all the tiers of society. Dickens is the kind of social novelist that prolix neocon and former writerly whiz-kid Tom Wolfe extols as the kind of practitioner of the art that younger writers ought to be emulating. Wolfe, of course, goes on to , in his own fiction, imitate Dickens blatantly in several of his baggy monster novels, to paraphrase Henry James, and demonstrates the difficulty in doing what Dickens did with apparent ease; keen eye, sharp, character revealing dialogue, the skill and tact to characterize the privileged and the powerless humanely and fully without a (conspicuous) set of moral/political concerns undercutting the natural seeming flow of the author's many narrative strands.

 Dickens was an observer, which means he took in context, situations, conditions, and he listened as well, closely and intently no doubt, which seems a good way to make your characters complex, , believable and, to use a dread word, relevant. Of course Dickens wrote well and was capable of some the most immaculate and stirring lyric sentences written in English--does anyone doubt a 20th century maestro like William Gaddis didn't pay close attention to the Dickensian cadences as he aligned the many details we gather in Great Expectations, David Coppefield, Bleak House? As a matter of course, not uncommon for a professional, serializing writer like Dickens who wrote many novels and stories over many years, not everything he did was a home-run--neither is everything by Updike or Joyce Carol Oates for that matter. But let us end this rant by completing the metaphor and conclude that his lifetime batting average would make the other would be geniuses of the writerly sort seem farm league , forever up and coming, never arriving .