D.G. WILLS BOOKS LITERARY EVENT VIDEOS NOW ON YOUTUBE

D.G.Wills Books in LaJolla, California is a long time mecca for book lovers who crave a shop with a varied and deep selection literature, poetry and philosophy sections .Owner Dennis Wills, whom I've known (in full disclosure) since he opened his shop in 1979, has besides keeping his doors open , presented San Diego with an impressive roster of world-class literary events over the last few decades. Lucky for the rest of us that some of the most notable personalities were taped for future reference and are now available on D.G. Wills Books' own YouTube Channel, thanks to the curatorial efforts of bookstore associate and media specialist Bill Perrine. More of these remarkable events are being added. Meanwhile, enjoy the plenitude of what Wills hath wrought:Norman Mailer ,Allen Ginsberg,Oliver Stone, Billy Collins, Gore Vidal, Lawerence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder. I recommend checking back with channel from time to see who else has been added to this amazing and important archive of literary figures.

Pound or Frost?

I'm not a fan of either poet, but of Pound intrigues especially me . His fabled difficulty seems more willful than inspired , more determined than originating from a flash of an idea that would spark a firestorm in how poetry is read. His theories, his proclamations as to the duty of the writer to lead the race to a higher standard of perception, were the writings that galvanized and polarized a generation or so of writers who followed or argued with his lead; his poems, though, were stuck in an abstruse inertia. This is distinct from abstract, a quality where there is an actual idea being deployed and which, in turn, can be parsed by a reader with due diligence. There is no argument with how important Pound is to the reformation of literature and advancing the Modernist aesthetic, but some one who was so obsessed, in theory, with reconfiguring language arts so that a new generation of readers can have fresh perceptions of reality and discover means with which to change it, Pound seemed seduced by the legend he was making for himself and delved headlong into his admixture of projects without a sense of how his materials and sources would come to make a generalized sense of themselves.

It seems obvious to me that he reveled in the difficulty of his work. His innovations as poet, for me, are worth studying in line with his critical pieces, but beyond their importance in establishing a time line, the language , the style, the attitude has not traveled well through the decades. He seemed like the brilliant critic and tireless promoter of new talent who put himself in competition with his fellows, IE Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, et al. Pound believed art was the process through which a substitute priesthood of painters and poets can perceive the world, and it was the artist who could correctly provide the inspiration and spiritual means to change the way reality was constructed and lived in. He was attracted to strong leaders with pronounced visions of a Better Future, was attracted to the notion of violently blowing up the artifacts of the past in order to forge a new order from the ground up, and it was apparent to everyone that he aligned himself with such leaders. He desired to be considered among the scarce select who would show the way to the new dawn, whether they wanted to or not. Pound was fascinated by chaos, turbulence, severe intrusions of alien forms usurping dictions and definitions of older ideological husks and having them be transformed to some strange array of notions that are a vision of a Future not all of us will be able to live in. Frost , although over- estimated, is an acceptable minor poet and a canny careerist, neither of which are offensive to anyone who understands the need to make a living. He was content to be a passive witness to the state of things built by hand running down, subsuming a cynicism in a lyric version of sparely detailed plain-talk that could, at times,produce a stunning insight into the feeling of how the body aches as it ages.

Sourpuss Virtuosity

This week, Robert Pinsky's monthly discussion poem in Slate is Ben Jonson's poem "Ode to Himself," wherein we are to consider the artful side of complaining. Kvetching, though, is a limited art, and one who thinks they might wish to make a career of being the nag-as-truth teller should think of the monotony of the guise promises. There comes a time when you can no longer notice any shortcomings you haven't already mentioned in previous columns, plays, novels, essays, poems even, and the things you come to critique fall into template mode.

 You notice this quality sneaking into your writing. I call it" hearing yourself talk."That means that you find saying things you've said many times with utmost conviction, but now have noticed that your verve and sureness of position are badly flagging of late. You can predict the following clause and condition in a review you're composing--and the understandable is to make your language more elaborate, that Bloomian anxiety that makes one try harder to make their ideas unique. The uniqueness that a reader will notice, though, particularly readers a generation or so removed from your aspiring lifetime, will be the structure, the style, the antiquated rhetorical and vocabulary of your complaints against the way things happened in your period. All else become a matter of explication, a humbling thought when one considers that our quest to obey the critical rule of writing--be straightforward--will not likely withstand a few decades of changing lexical usage. For the Jonson poem, we have a reverse Whitman here, a savaging self-appraisal that might provoke you to punch another man had these exact words been spoken by him. 

The problem, though, is that these words aren't told but written, and they rhyme. They clamor and clash and ring in harmony when the author's skill is so determined. They are an elaborate construction whose rhetorical infrastructure has traveled, to my ear, not well at all. The saying goes that no one can insult us to the diminishing degree that we're able to run the same number on our egos, as our own stories are the ones we needn't research; it's an intimacy with which one can elaborate upon at length, with examples of personal unworth becoming expressed in evermore clever disguises and unexpected twists in one's trail of self-criticism. What is left, through the decades, through the revolutions, assassinations, changes in convention and tastes, is a museum piece, a textbook example, an intricate, well preserved yet lifeless husk whose meaning has to be explicated, which is to say that it cannot be felt due to the brilliant configuration Jonson brought to bear on his attempt to lower his ego's profile.

 The poem is more evidence of the playwright's fabled assholism. It does much the same thing as the title character in Edmond Rostand's Cyrano De Bergerac, when the hero, blessed with a big nose, responds to a weak insult to his beak with a series of sweetly stinging jabs of his own, at his own expense. This is a particularly effective little device of plain-spoken, self-directed invective that reveals a purposeful defense. If you're going to insult my nose, your barbs had better be this sharp... One might also consider that Rostand's story gets underway without a conceit-cluttered obstacle course slowing the traction and that the bittersweet ironies surrounding De Bergerac's temperamental genius--poet, wit, swordsman--doesn't get caged inside a fanciful virtuosity of the tongue. This is something akin to a grand statue one sees erected in town squares all over America and Europe, baroque creations that are admirable for their scale and technique, but whose existence is faintly ridiculous given that the passion of the inspiring event as ebbed from the collective memory. 

It's not just yesterday's Avant-Garde that ages poorly, but also proficiency that, in time, only outsmarts its topic. Jonson's ode is like those statues, grand, impressive against history's stacked bulwark, but tarnished, battered, dinged, and leaving you what audiences saw in work that was so busy trying to provide its own musical score as well as idea that could spark a debate among the readership (amongst themselves or with the author) that was beyond the vain convolutions.

Burroughs: yeah, thanks...

The alternative view of the holiday should be represented, and there's not a better voice for the embittered, the disenfranchised, the decrepit, the perverse, the sardonic, the brilliant, and the ecstatically marginalized than William Burroughs. While the rest of America, we assume, gives thanks for what they have in a world that demonstrably avails them nothing and is winnowing away any localized genius part to imagine and creatively act toward better, more interesting lives, Burroughs elevates sarcasm to the highest level, beyond nose bleeding to the peak wear strokes occur and tells us some grim truths in reversed salutations. It sticks in the craw, yes, but it ought to. To paraphrase Marx, in an instance where he happened to be right, the task isn't to thank God for the luck we've had, but rather to use the brains he gave us to use in order to change our luck. Happy Holiday. -tb


Thanksgiving Prayer
William S. Burroughs

To John Dillinger and hope he is still alive.
Thanksgiving Day November 28 1986"

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shat out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.


Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.


Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.


Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

Bad vibe

This is one of those situations where a boss can find fault with your failure for providing "a good vibe" although you may be hitting all the marks for civility.

I was in a job where where a control-freak hotel manager refused to let do the job he was nominally training me to do--he took over tasks I started, reduced the number of things on my checklist--and took me aside to tell me that he didn't like the tone in my voice when I said "Please", "Thank you" or "you're welcome" to our hotel guests. That was exasperating , of course, but I just nodded, contained my impulse to scream, and assured this guy that I would try harder to have less tension. I hadn't a clue to what he was getting at, and nearly quit, thinking I wasn't paid enough to have a moron take a dump on me like that.

The next week , following a nightmarish Sunday morning checkout, the same manager asked me to step inside his office and to close the door behind me. I sat down while he sat on the edge of his desk, looking down at me, his glasses pushed like flight goggles around his forehead.

"Ted, I get the feeling that you're happy working here" he started, but I didn't let him proceed to what he wanted to discuss. He could save the speech for the next wage slave.

"I'm not" I said,"and you can take my name off the schedule right now. I don't work here anymore..."

I punched out and went home and eventually found work as a bookseller, a trade I never strayed from since the mid eighties. I still don't make that much money, but at least it has benefits that pleases the soul, if not the bank account or health plan.

Nabokov gets burned

There was a today about three years ago as to whether the estate of novelist Vladimir Nabokov should publish his last, unfinished novel posthumously. After a bit of hustle and heat in the literary press and blogosphere, the publication of that manuscript,The Original of Laura, has appeared between covers. It's a rare instance where I will skip a new book by a favorite author. From the description supplied by Amazon.com, I have no desire to see this esteemed master of English prose reduced to flash cards. I said three years ago that they should burn the manuscript and be done with it. I wish they had. I’m not a fan of posthumous for the simple reason that most of what surfaces after a famed scribe’s death suffer in the goriest possible terms. 

After the fact manuscripts by Elizabeth Bishop, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson and (most grotesquely) Ernest Hemingway are less than the respective geniuses. who commanded our attention in the first place. Their genius, that is, and the insistence of English teachers and professors of literature. Rough drafts, juvenilia, awkward early writings where one was working toward a mature style, and copious late-career self-parodies are all things I‘d have preferred to remain in the drawer, or in the box; it’s embarrassing to have a book in your hand who’s publication wasn’t approved by the author in which there’s writing that falls below the superlative standards the author set for himself or herself. 

Hemingway’s reputation as a stylist diminished in the view of critics of critics and readers with the surfeit of previously unpublished manuscripts. Mailer fanatic that I am, there’s no thirst on my part to read incomplete and unpolished prose from the late writer set between book covers; it seems immoral to let the less tidy writings be presented as “unpublished gems” , or “lost masterpieces”. It’s a dishonest cheat, a fraud laid upon the readership. Nabokov was painstaking in his craft, and it’s his judgment I trust if he deemed the manuscript unpublished. Burn it and allow us a genius unspoiled by erring scholars and eager publishers.

What gets me about what's been done with the unpublished work of dead writers is the way in which they're presented; one is nearly always promised that what we have in our hands is a "lost masterpiece" . In any case, the marketing promises writing on a level of these writers’s best work, but this seldom the case. There are exceptions, though, as with the publication of The First Man, the posthumous novel by the brilliant Albert Camus. Critical consensus is it's the equal of his best novels, and I agree. Honesty in these publications would ease by dis-easae with the matter, perhaps, if the emphasis discussed were more historical than aesthetic. The fact remains, though, that there are thousands who want to get a thrill equal to the jag they felt when they read Miller, Thompson, Hemingway, et al, the first time, and it remains a good bet that readers will disguise their disappointment with posthumous efforts with a further elaboration of the mythology--all the cant, clichés and truisms that clog up a cult writer's reputation--which will make this phenomenon a permanent vex.
  
My  friend Barry Alfonso brought up the pertinent example of Max Brod, who published Kafka's unpublished manuscripts against the author's explicit dying wishes.



It  be a challenge, but I suspect I would have done as Max Brod did and published Kafka's work. Brod claims to have told his dying friend that he would not carryout the last request of publishing the manuscripts. True or not, it is known that Brod had encouraged Kafka to publish during his lifetime, to little avail .Being an editor , publisher, author in his own right, he likely couldn't stand the thought of having what he thought as a major body of writing going up in smoke, unread. It was a matter of establishing a deserved reputation for greatness for a writer who wasn't able to judge his own validity; Nabokov had a major reputation and publications at the time of his death, and was, I think, using sound judgement when he requested the last manucript to be burned. It was a practice run, a series of notes, not a book. I think Nabokov was the best critic of his own work.

Poetry and lying

Some time I posted a poem I wrote concerning a blurry childhood memory of my Mom sobbing over a stove, the conceit being that I'd first give hints that this was going to be a melancholic memoir and then reveal, through a clever alignment of detail, that her tears were not from a spat with Dad. It was revealed by the last stanza that she' chopped raw onions for what the meal . Someone asked in a response how the memory was so clear, and I explained that the story was not wholly true; I manufactured the narrative thread I couldn't recall, and produce an entity that had a punchline, not a grievous irony. The response was fairly psychotic; I was called a liar and worse with my method revealed, and the inconsolable assailant couldn't get it through his (or her) head that not every poem is factual, therapeutic, journalistic. My response was defensive, of course, and typical of the accused bard.It's called imaginative literature, after all.Not a good reading habit for someone who says they love poetry. No, my friend, I didn't lie to the readers, I just told them a story.Poetry is imaginative writing, my brother, and there are those who err in reading this as an attempt at autobiography. The offended party didn't seem to accept any of this and cranked the vitriole higher, at which time I stopped talking to her (or him),You wonder what they missed in grade school when reading and writing was taught ; poets are liars by habit of mind when it comes to their craft; they make stuff up when they feel the need. Critic John Hollander has a useful essay on the matter,The shadow of a lie: poetry, lying, and the truth of fictions. That should give us something to consider.This is a slippery slope, and what it underlines it your unwillingness to admit that poetry is the practice of writing in imaginative, figurative, fictional language. Writers employ metaphors, similes, and varied tropes at times to get to what one can call the "larger" truths,"greater", which is to say that writers, poets especially, try to get at matters a straight forward prose style can't get at. The hidden moral of the story, if you will.Part of this is creating scenarios that are not necessarily factual (autobiographical) or plausible in the conventional sense. Coleridge has a useful principle he calls the suspension of disbelief, which roughly means that a reader needs to leave their suppositions and stipulations at the door as they enter into reading a poem; you need to stop arguing that a poem is obliged to fulfill your personal requirements and instead read it as is, inspect what the writer does. Bandying about words like "lies" blocks us, meaning myself, from the sunshine of the spirit.An impatient man can't possibly get all that poets and their work have to offer. Exactly what they have to offer is debatable, but that's part of the pleasure of reading poetry,or writing it. It's better ,I think, to leave people wondering for themselves than to try to tell them the facts , Joe Friday style.