"I've Been Working on the Railroad" by Jeff Skinner

Prose poems are those strange paragraphs that makes one think of what Henry James once called the long novel, "loose baggy monsters", and as such it's a risk for the reader to enter a piece that tries to contain the associative leaps of the free verse poem with the rhetorical drive of a working paragraph. The results are often unsatisfactory, containing the merits of neither form.Jeff Skinner's "I've Been Working on the Railroad" impressed me less for its poetic acumen and more for his seeming knack to tell a shaggy dog story; when the mind is idle, there is nothing between to between tasks (either assigned by the boss or off a self-designed agenda) and there is nothing you either need to or want to discuss with your fellows, you retire into the recesses of the mind, mulling the gathered archive of collected impressions and stored obsessions, talking to oneself as if there was an other at arms length to soak in the ramble.It is the mind in the act of automatic writing, images and aromas and bits of old jokes and city scenes brought together with an alarming fluidity; there is less in this poem in terms of associative leaps and more in the general style of untrammeled, unfettered conscious spew; this is the mind producing it's own white noise to keep the mind sharp and fully aware of what it's habit of mind has accumulated over a few decades of one's senses bringing in the bother and bustle of a cantankerous existence.

I've always had trouble with the boss, even when I was self-employed.

Why do I have to sit there for eight hours when I can finish the day's

work in fifty-seven minutes? And there was a flaw on the face

of the office clock, a flyspeck or mole between five and six

where the eye went naturally, as if to the corner of an otherwise

impeccable woman's lips. I kissed that flaw in my mind, over and over,

because I had nothing else to do. The idea of work is fine, but

must we put every idea into practice? The trees, which I sometimes

catch waving to me, seem content in every weather, as if they

were continuously employed actors, and when the script calls for caress

the willow bends and draws its leaves delicately across the grass;

More than anything else, Skinner's poem hints at word salad, the talk of schizophrenics form whom the order of past, present and future has collapsed upon themselves and all incidents and all concerns , in their respective tenses, are merged, expressed at the same time. This lack of discretion, the failure to make distinctions or abide by circumscribed hierarchy gives this poem an explosive charge; this is stammering with all cylinders firing. The speaker tries to talk about everything at once.There's a resemblance to the bulging rampages favored by Albert Goldbarth, for whom the weight accumulation and each detailed dent and ding of experiential discomfort and annoyance sometimes results in an inspired rant, but Skinner pares his unanchored, rudderless ramble to the minimum. Goldbarth at least has script he sticks to, while Skinner's poem goes off the rails and becomes a suspended bit of verbal strangeness.What is appeals to me here is the way this piece approximates the stammering velocity of someone who is usually quiet and perceived as nerdy (or just plain old weird ) by his community, who, when given the chance to speak, or rather taking the chance to speak, cannot focus on what he wants to talk about, cannot organize his thoughts, cannot sound at ease with the ideas he's trying to express.

What gets to me is the way the poem suddenly stops. This is someone who hears himself talking too loudly at work, at a party, in a bar, in line for a movie, and just falls into a desperate quiet, hoping no one was paying attention.. The final line, which might be taken as poetic in the conventional sense, a metaphor intended to make the reader's heart rise or sink with the imagined rhythms of the poet's intention, strikes me rather as some mysterious sounding bit of pseudo profundity that is intended by the speaker to toss a blanket of bewilderment over the words that had just come out of his mouth.


Perhaps in the end all work

is equally forgotten, and the transmission of knowledge a long train crossing

Kansas at 3 a.m., a glowing tube full of dreaming passengers.


Dazzle ‘em with genius, or baffle ‘em with bullshit, as the T-shirt says. One over hears or indulges in the speaker's diatribe, expecting it to land somewhere, and is then handed this as a parting shot, a summation. I think Skinner has captured the style of the awkward orator, who's habit is tie up adrifting stream of conscious with a cryptic summation. And one is left standing there as they walk away, scratching their head , wondering what it was they were trying to talk about in the first place. I think this is a good poem.

Black Out in New Jersey: The Sopranos Finale.

Bobby, Tony Soprano's brother in law, commented about the fabled bullet coming at you that maybe a guy wouldn't even here it coming. And now here we are, at the end of the Sopranos final episode, seeing Tony look up from a restaurant table where his entire family is seated, eating onion rings, and we're suddenly dumbfounded when the screen goes black and the credits roll after long seconds have ticked by. Did Tony see his daughter Meadow coming through the door, or was it something truly awful? Whatever you think, this is a finale we'll be debating for years.One of the things David Chase and his writers were good at was doing something that went against anyone's expectations; I like the cat too, and I loved the fact that the kitty was staring at Christopher's picture and later showed up outside the pork shop while Paulie sunned himself. I don't know if it could have ended any other way, since anything they did would have pissed fans off. How can you end a show that's been this amazing? So we're left in the lurch, wondering if Tony looked up to see his daughter coming through the door or if he saw a glimpse of a hood with a gun aiming straight to the middle of the head. Either way, it's an amazing send off of a fictional family into the netherland of endless reruns.

The Legacy and Anti Legacy of Sgt.Pepper's

Like it or love it, Sgt.Pepper is among the most important rock albums ever made, one of the most important albums period, and forty years after it's release, it is time to assess the album free of the globalizing hype and mythology it's biggest supporters have honored it with, and to veer away from the chronically negative reaction those less in love with the Beatles and the disc have made a religion out of. It is, in my view, important for any number of reasons, production and songwriting among them, and for me it's not just that Lennon and McCartney have set the standard on which such things would be judged against from now on, but that they've also given us the examples with which rock critics, paid and unpaid, by which we can tell who is being pretentious, phony, unfocused, incoherent, just plain bad.
Sure enough, the best songs have survived--"A Day In the Life, "Getting Better", "Good Morning, Good Morning", "Mr.Kite", but sure enough the less accomplished songs, all manner, pose, nervy and naive pseudo mysticism and intellectuality as in "Within You Without You" and "She's Leaving Home", are hardly played anywhere, by anyone, unless one tunes in an XM satellite station where the play list is all things Beatles, without discrimination.
What the Beatles did with the song craft, the central genius and downfall of much of Pepper's legacy, is that they've introduced thousands of forthcoming arty rockers to new levels of sophistication and fantastically dull pompousness. I love the Beatles, of course, that's the standard qualifier among us all, but this is the album with which rock criticism was finally created. Lovers and Haters of the disc finally had a rock and roll record that might sustain their liberal arts training. Sgt. Pepper also gave us brilliant and much less brilliant rock commentary. Here you may pick your own examples.

The reasons Beatle fans in general (rather than only) "hipsters" prefer Revolver to Sgt.Pepper is for the only reason that really matters when one is alone with their CD player or iPOD; the songwriter is consistently better, the production crisper, the lyrics succeed in being intriguingly poetic without the florid excess that capsized about half of Sgt.Pepper's songs, and one still perceived the Beatles as a band, guitar bass and drums, performing tunes with a signature sound that comes only after of years of the same musicians performing together.

It might be compared to Miles Davis when he was performing with his classic bands--John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock,Tony Williams, Ron Carter, et al-- with a long string of releases like Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue (name your favorite here) and when he turned to the jazz rock fusion of Bitches Brew and On the Corner, which featured the endeavors of Chick Corea, and John McLaughlin . The first mentioned releases are conspicuous examples of bands sensitive to each members nuances, strengths and weaknesses, quirks and signatures, combing with the material to offer adventurous improvisations as part of an ensemble effort, while with Bitches Brew Davis and his producers culled performances from hours of taped jam sessions where ideas and motifs were explored to produce albums that are, in effect, mosaics. a The general tone of the later releases was less the sparks that occur between musicians confronting each other in performance but rather something more theatrical; thought the musicianship is rather magnificent and often times bracing on the later electric releases, they seem more in service to Davis' cantankerous muse , performing as directed. As much as I admire and respect the accomplishment of both the Beatles and Davis in their late work, studio craft and all, a larger part of me would have preferred if the musicians had found a way to expand their horizons without abandoning their identities as bands. The Rolling Stones sought to produce their own version of Sgt.Pepper with the releases of the bloated and wasted Satanic Requests, and it's a fine thing to appreciate the Stones self critical response to bad notices (and perhaps some sober listening to the record, after the fact); they abandoned their attempts to compete with the Beatles on their new turf and returned , brilliantly, to riffy, rhythm and blues tinged rock and roll.

What hasn't been mentioned here is that Frank Zappa released his first Mothers of Invention album Freak Out on June 27, 1966, a full month before the Beatles released Revolver in August of that year. Zappa was an erratic, quizzical, quarrelsome presence, but he achieved things with that album that neither the Beatles nor the Stones came close to; both those bands were more influential in the pop music sphere, where their separate approaches to including cross genre and avant gard gestures made for pleasant and easily appreciated (and imitated)music for a large record buying public. Zappa, though, with his solid chops as composer, producer, guitarist, satirist and multi media maven, was miles further up the road and around the bend with respect to advancing the primitive ways of rock and roll into an art form. A good amount of Zappa's early music remains challenging to this day, which is another way of saying that it's hard to sit through and that it's downright ugly. The ugliness, though, wasn't merely my limited aesthetic; Zappa cultivated it, advanced it, and gloried in it. Now that's integrity.

Tilted Arc

There's a fine slideshow/essay available on Slate about the MOMA retrospective of the career of sculptor Richard Serra. Serra, a former literature major taken with the writings of Herman Melville and Charles Olson who has made his famed , site specific buffed steel formations take on and suggest the movement of waves, ships and motion, is an intriguing subject whose progression from minimalist (one whose ideas and materials scorn ornamentation and leave the problematics of "meaning" at the side road) to maximalist (sizes matters as means of forcing viewers to renegotiate their familiar public areas) is one of the more interesting transformations in contemporary art. The article deals mostly with his successes (which are many and considerable), and talks about his most notable disaster, Tilted Arc.


Those I'd spoke to who had a chance to take a long gander at the Tilted Arc installation before it was dismantled, most of whom instinctually desired to protect artist's rights, in control of content and how it's handled after the work is completed and delivered, found themselves sympathetic with the grousing over the monolithic presence. A large conceit on the part of site-specific artists and architects is to act as philosopher-teachers and ersatz gods of a kind in their percieved need to force people to relate to their landscape or cityscape in different ways; bolstered by soggy progressive notions that the mass of us are encased and buffeted by material objects and the desire to garner more material things before they die, Serra, at turns brilliant and magnificently literate, falls in line with an elitist notion that we need to shaken up and made to see things as they actually are, according to his script.

Often times this succeeds, and a community experiences the marvelous, if somewhat puzzling experience of seeing familiar spaces transformed into something else altogether; hardly so with Tilted Arc, which transforms it's original space for sure, but at the sacrifice of wonder or the desired revolutionizing of the senses.It was an intrusion, an obstacle of arrogant mass, impeding rather than improving the city space it sat upon. Immensity alone, sheer volume of scale, seemed enough for Serra to deliver his metaphor with. It actually diminished one's capacity , whether they be worker or visitor, to enjoy the city scape, as winds got sharper, colder, shadows were longer, the work rested in became darker longer, sooner.

Snowed In

John Hodgen's poem ,"Driving Back From Crotched Mountain, Winter Storm, New Year's Eve" is itself snowed in by all those subordinate clauses, all those asides, all those artful digressions from the image of the angry man waving his arms in the snow storm. The trick with this kind of poem is to begin with an image and then riff upon it at some length, seizing anything from language to memory that would elaborate on the initial image and provide the appearance of a thesis, and then return to the same image at the end of it all, that image being in tact save for the accumulated associations we now associate with it. In this instance, the man in front of his own driveway is supposed to be resonating with a gathered meloncholy that comes out as mute rage.

All sorts of associations are supposed to rear their heads in the collective memory of the reader and we're supposed to feel the slight tug of sadness the image suggests to our under attended sentimentality. Everything is here except the craft, as it reads as if we'd gotten our hands on Hodgen's notebook instead of the finished poem.

The man in front of me—what's he doing?—pulls over, no signal,
********to the side of the road,

gets out, begins sloughing his way, stooped and bent against the wind,
********to what I presume

is his driveway winding up and around the small box of a cabin
********that is his home.

He is waving me around, annoyed somehow, his left arm swooping low
********above the snow

in a way no man younger than himself would wave someone around,
********as if he'd been a soldier

or farmer all his life, as if he lived a little closer to the ground, his arm
********a sweeping scythe,

as if it were his holy job to wave the world to go around, as if he were
********my father, consigned

instead of hell to Peterborough, New Hampshire, where it turns out
********it always snows

These are notes, sketches, single sentence epiphanies that would work effectively had they been given an architecture ; the poem , rather than being a work where Hodgen's sparks speak, is more like a blathering . The subordinating clauses usurp Hodgen's intent and add only bloat, not momentum. The tone of it all reminded me of Russell Bank's thoroughly dispiriting novel "Affliction", where sons and alkie Dad muddle up their mottled affairs the more they try to talk about them. I thought the initial image, a man waving his arms angrily in the snow, was wonderfully suggestive, but what dilutes it and and finally kills it were the parade of similes attached to it. This suggests strongly that Hodgen thought the image, in itself, was inadequate. The effect of the digressions, linked so obviously to the defining trope, is explication rather than poetry. I don't mind drift in poems if what's being included can stand alone as poetic material and not didactic buttressing.None of the items in the above stream really have linkage; the effect is that these are the rattlings of meth head sweating out an ugly detox. The "as if's" are arbitrary and tyrannical. It would be interesting to have this piece work shopped and handed back to Hodgen for revision, with specific instructions (well, suggestions) that the diversions be given the gravity of experienced context, items drawn from memory. The aim would be to have the differences between what's been forced together in the same sentence provide a tone, a clue to what is perceived and how it's assimilated into larger, deeper memory. Overall, though, I think it's one of the many lost chances we see here when there's a good idea for a poem that is instead writ by a writer who has an eye on the clock and another on the exit.

Sgt.Pepper and the Terminal Ennui of Gina Arnold

June 1st marked the 40th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club album , and not missing a beat to raise the hackles of both baby boomers and subsequent generations of rock and pop music fans, Salon has decided to spark a debate whether the epochal album is The Most Important Album Ever Made or not. Or even if the disc was all that epochal. It's a cheap and easy way to get readers to focus for the few minutes it takes to scan the column, and I can't say I wouldn't have the same had I been the editor; the relative worth of Sgt. Pepper's forty years hence, and it might well be time for the album to go through a reappraisal. This, however, is not what Salon has set out to do, and goes the route of the cranky and formulaically contrarian anthology of anti-canon rock reviews Kill Your Idols 

, a snotty collection of reviews where younger critics eviscerate many of what many older reviewers consider the core discs of rock and pop music history. For the book,

it's a blown opportunity for genuine revisionism, and one suspects the writers misunderstood editor Jim DeRogatis' instructions to write an alternative version of rock and roll critical thinking. The writers busied themselves with being young, loud and snotty and leveled the typical charges against the Beatles, The Beach Boys, the MC5, Joni Mitchell; they're boring, they're lame, they are over rated, they are old. Not much more elevated a dissent than what members of the typical Bakersfield Greyhound station might offer if so queried about what tunes they'd like to never hear again.

Salon brings in Gina Arnold , a nitwit hypothesizer and unfocused rambler who's idea of evaluating the worth of a band or its albums is by how often they slammed dope, how many band members died stupidly, and what were the cut of designer rags they wore when either playing in concert/discovered by a maid, dead in the bathroom, wrapped around the toiler, a needle or an empty vial shattered or spilled on the tile. "Sgt.Pepper" doesn't rate because it lacked all topical references and wasn't hug-gable enough, blistering enough, "real" enough. These are vague particulars, and Arnold, who writes as airily about music as Greil Marcus minus Marcus's elegance or occasional genius for making the far flung connections across historical periods and art movements, has little to say about those remarks should matter to us. She seems unable to talk about the music, the performances, the quality of the songwriting, elements that any music discussion comes down to, regardless of one's variety of nonconformist opinionating.

For me and most I know, the album is good if over rated, about half good to great, the rest arch and pretentious; some of the songs and lyrics are among the best in the Beatles body of work while the rest is as pretentious as anything the Vanilla Fudge or Moody Blues would contrive. It;s an album whose importance is both musical and one of style blazing and it's obvious with time that the better songs have survived because their substance is solid as craft and imagination, while all the fashionable studio tricks come across as several shades of hokey; nothing ages worse than yesterday's avant gard.One could go along this line, taking songs apart and putting back together through any number of filters, and much would , I wager, be worth reading. It depends on who is doing the talking. Meghan O'Rourke and Louis Menand , both first rate culture critics, would have have understood the disconnection in the Beatles' work and parsed the mixed blessing the album unleashed upon the audience and other musicians. Arnold isn't able to make distinctions and speaks in moldy generalizations, and mulls over Beatles v Stones and opines that God is a creep because most of the Ramones are dead while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are still alive. Does one wonder if Arnold is even interested in the subject she's made a career writing about?

Arnold doesn't like the Sixties, she doesn't like rockers in their Sixties, she doesn't like to discuss music. But the obituaries. She's all over that with a ghoulish relish, and from what I'm able to determine from reading her in The San Diego Reader and Spin Magazines over the years is that she herself is that she's waiting for her own demise, perhaps a fantasy in which every album and CD she owns is cut up, snapped in two, smashed with a hammer into tiny pieces, all her books are in a pile, smoldering in a flame, and she sits there under a Kurt Cobain poster , waiting to at last to achieve what has yet to be done; to be bored to death.

Dave Eggers and the Crowded Language

It's been one of those weeks when there's little else to do after the laundry is done than to stare for long periods at the bookshelves and make provisional decisions about to keep on hand and at the ready and what to box up or bag and take to the local used bookshop for trade credit, which means trading in old used books with all my dog eared ages and marginalia for new used books, with dog earing and marginalia rendered by people I've probably never met.Sometimes the mind seems like nothing less than a noisy circular file, a recycling bin of metaphors that are parted out and tweaked to meet new situations which one's brain has to accommodate, lest the world unhinge and roll down some celestial bowling lane. The "maximalist" writers, authors who cannot tell you the time without addressing what's amiss in our insular cosmologies, have not fared well in these separations. Where minimalist , spawned by Papa Hemingway's tight, skinflint style and buoyed by Raymond Carver's art of of making the convolutions of alcoholic despair crisp and lean as polished steel rods, sought the fewest possible words to express the smallest though deepest wounds to the psyche, maximalist are intent on exhausting every observation, each crazy idea, pursuing every tangent and tributary as it marginally relates to what would loosely be termed a plot. There are no story arcs in these tellings, only the literary equivalent of urban sprawl. It is often times genius untouched by a good editor's sane blue pencil.

I exchanged the David Foster Wallace tome Infinite Jest last week for a half dozen John Updike and John Cheever used paperbacks, vainly staking my claim for writers of longish sentences who are actually revealing something hidden in human behavior rather than running away from it with the distractions rudderless prose potentially affords you. I prefer my shaggy dog stories confined to movies these days, which one can witness in The Big Lebowski , written and directed by Rob and Ethan Coen. Wallace has his uses, and at times hits pay dirt (Oblivion, his recent collection of stories, gives one hope that he has abandoned the Exhausting Novel and is ready, just maybe, to use shorter sentences), but his books over all tend to rob the room of the air I need to read better books. Each book he's written since Genius has been variations on a jet stream of language, a set of gasping, agitated sentences that are all jabber and no communication. Incredibly, his writing seems to mimic the way many characterize the way many in his generation actually talk, rapidly, long word ribbons filled with undiscerning details, asides and anecdotes, all uttered at a pace and high-strung pitch that attempts to make you think that something incredible is about to happen. Or, more on point, that a point is about to be made,all of this, virtually all (no exaggeration) presented with an unmerciful and even arrogant lack of emphasis.Experience is spoken of as if everything regarding storyline depended solely on the present tense, all memories, history, details, relegated to the same junk pile of references that are never gone through or made to construct a nuanced effect or make a scene that achieves emotional complexity. There is, however, clutter, an amassed set of things brought together indiscriminately, pack rat like. Clutter, however, isn't the same as complexity, and the sorry state of Egger's writing is that there is no inner life in his characters--Genius, being a memoir, is that rare exception in his body of work--that gives you a sense of inner life and struggle on the character's part. Theodore Dreiser was a less adroit stylist, perhaps,but An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie particularly made up for the lack of grace with massive amounts of humanity that made us think about nagging notions of Destiny, Free Will and Duty . Dreiser's topics remain with us, and what he offered us remains part of that discussion. Eggers The suggestion that he read Tom Wolfe, pre-Bonfire of the Vanities,is well taken, since Wolfe in his journalism showed away to adjust and mold his style around the subject matter. A more recent model for Eggers to go to school on is Esquire writer Mike Sager's collection of magazine pieces Scary Monsters and Super Freaks, where the writer brings a wonderfully subtle literary personality to his portraits of spectacular American failures at the margins of the mainstream. Eggers writes well enough in short bits, patches, a paragraph hither and yon, but he does so without shining any light, nor casting any shades of darkness for that matter; what the world doesn't need is a political satire that cannot convince you that it's an exaggeration of the real thing.

Jonathan Franzen, another mad bomber of the language whose weighty and over worded The Corrections won praise and best seller status for a turgid family comedy that everything going for it except the niceties of heart and editing, is presently at the top of the next stack of titles that will find their way to the used book dealer, to be either sold, traded in donated outright. Franzen, remember, isn't a bad writer, but he is an under edited one, since their are sentences and even whole paragraphs in The Corrections that just give up in the middle, or wrecked like speeding cars meeting head on as he tries to manage one metaphor after another with which he attempts, over and over, to contain the perversions and anomalies of American family life in as short a space as possible. Not graceful stuff, this, and an astute editor would have blue penciled the offending pages out of the final book, reducing its bulk by at least a fourth. How to Be Alone, a fine collection of essays he published two years ago about the reading life, fares better at sentence management and poise, but one wonders of what kind of writer Franzen turns out to be if what he composes remain congested fiction or essays essentially praising himself and those few like him for being introverted, geeky and bookish. It's an act that gets old, a voice that wears out. I intend to trade him in for some Tom Robbins, a novelist who can have fun with his convolutions, although he is not without risk. The cutie-pie , Zap Comix surrealism and the far flung similies (here's a writer still in competition with Raymond Chandler!) will often times crowd out development; as a friend once remarked about The Grateful Dead, sometimes his writing amounts to "what the fuck"? In one instance it can be something spirtual along the lines of uttering "let go and let God", meaning that one needs to pick their battles wisely, but on the other hand, the other hand being huge palm upraised as if asking for a five spot, is that it simply amounts to defeat
by way of being too spaced out. Robbins likes to drive the car only so far, and is likely to take his hands off the wheel and listen to the radio with his eyes closed just as his vehicle is merging with freeway traffic. Not good.

Fellow maximalist David Eggers little better in the sorting and prioritizing. Out the books go . A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , a memoir of his assuming the parenting role for his younger brother Toph after the back-to-back deaths of their parents, is a bit of masterpiece of the hurried voice; a stammering and rushing narrative of someone having to shed the remains of teenage slackertude and learn adult behavior in a hurry, Eggers' style was appropriate to the subject. Given circumstances that made his reality seem to collapse upon itself, Eggers could do nothing else except move forward, as if running up the hall from a burning house, instinctually moving toward the daylight coming from a door at the end. AHWOSG , breathless, impatient, agitated and at times staggering, as it were, in it's balancing act of grace and wit and awkward locutions and shotgunned transitions, remains a real document of a writer having to leave his cozy assumptions of living the bohemian life and take on the weight as family head.
The desperation was real, and was interesting for the way the author didn't assume the disguise of narrative know-it-all. Beguiling as that was, one would have thought he would have changed his style, suitable to idea and subject, but he has not. It's about the hurry, the haste, the speed of writing coming as quickly as the speed of perception. It is the speed of the Internet generation, and the result is broad banded mediocrity. Every book he's done up until now has been a set of gasping, agitated sentences that are all jabber and no communication. Incredibly, his writing seems to mimic the way many characterize of his generation actually talk, rapidly, long streams of sentences, filled with undiscerning details, asides and anecdotes, all uttered at a pace and high-strung pitch that attempts to make you think that something incredible is about to happen.