Twitter replaces literary criticism

Jonathan Franzen's problem is that he's been typecast as Jonathan Franzen, Serious Novelist, and the burden of having that media-installed millstone around your neck is that discussions about you generally cease to be about your actual work , nor even about your reputation. Rather, what people will talk about is your celebrity and whether you're worthy of possessing this dubious gift. Jodi Picoult has a real beef about the media's slant toward white male writers, but her response to the focus on Franzen is sour grapes --she , already a famous, best selling novelist-- is essentially complaining that  she is not famous enough.

One wonders how egregious Picoult considers the over-estimation of Franzen to be. In the not so distant past, critics and novelists between projects would vent their gripes against their fellow fabulators in long, detailed essays and cranky squibs--Mailer, Vidal, Dale Peck , et al, named names, staked their territory, and at least provided readers with a series of elegant resentments they could argue with.

 Picoult hadn't the time for a major essay , nor the patience  to write a half way literate blog post. Instead, she succumbed to instant gratification and communicated her resentment on Twitter. While she did create a buzz, her argument exists as a bumper sticker , not an indictment. It's a midcult expression of a very real inequity. She comes off as someone who is not so much against Franzen and male writers as much as books where the prose is a step above the diffuse, swooning  romances she prefers to construct. 

Brimhall's brimstone

"Through A Glass Darkly"  is a title suggeting a tour of dark, depressed places is upon you, and poet Traci Brimhall does an effective job of bringing on the bleakness.This poem is effectively hermetic, an evocation of a consciousness that is incapable of dealing with the external world. The world is treated as if were nothing but a continuing series of loud, violent sounds coming from the other side of a lock, if infirm door; there is nothing described here that is actually seen or observed, with Traci Brimhall's slippery similes giving evidence to a mind that cannot stop processing the sounds it hears, the odors it detects, the shadows it forces into murky configurations. We might say this brain cannot turn itself off, to cease speculating and reinterpretation the world beyond practicality and arrive at the common agreement we collectively and loosely refer to as "reality". As the world does not settle in and reveal itself, the paranoia rises. Brimhall does a quite a good job of making this seem as if the universe this person habit-ates is in continuing conspiracy, constructing a plot that is infinitely complex and geared to singularly sinister purpose.

The last time I visited,
............you said you trapped a dead woman in your room

who told you to starve yourself to make room for God,
............so I let them give your body enough electricity

to calm it. Don't be afraid. The future is not disguised
............as sleep. It is a tango. It is a waterfall between


two countries, the river that tried to drown you.
............It is a city where men speak a language

you can fake if you must. It's the hands of children
............thieving your empty pockets. It's bicycles
with bells ringing through the streets at midnight.

You could say that Brimhall goes a simile too far to invoke this series of nightmare, similar to an old comedians adage not to do three jokes in a row on the same subject. Twice is placing a stressing emphasis on a conceit, an idea that might otherwise get lost, three times becomes a lecture; in this sense, the final analogy Brimhall deploys, the bicycle bells chiming through the streets at midnight, nearly derails the poem's half-awake surrealism. Beware the additional flourish, the needless decoration, the detail too many, especially if your writing prior to that moment was tight, concise, effective. Quite beyond the readership getting the point, one risks revealing a straining for effect.

Still, what the poet does here is admirable and there's much to be said for the decision to tell the patient's tale through the accounting of a witness who themselves can only relate the narrative scheme based on what they've seen, what they've heard, what they've been told by the patient. The narrator can only relate with the information that is at hand, the intimate details that have had time to play on the senses and resonate in larger pools of association; there is a sense of the narrator attempting to comprehend the interior life of the patient being visited, as if a key will appear if the imagination cleaves with the right set of references and provides a clarity that would other wise not be known. The tragedy of the poem, though, is that language itself , alone , cannot provide clarity, liberty, the full balance of self-actualized well being, as there are those things and issues, schizophrenia among them, that cannot be changed by linguistic wit. Metaphors only generate more metaphors, and the only thing that changes are the nature of the metaphors themselves.

What Walt Whitman did

Loathe him or not, Walt Whitman heightened our sense of the spoken word and prepared the ground of poetry that would slough off the tired, oppressive, once-revolutionary techniques of generations past. Whitman's reputation rests on perhaps a few dozen poems from the thousands he wrote , butand it is those few dozen poems that galvanized generations after him to set their own terms, standards, conditions. it is that latter tradition that got my attention, and it is the one that recognized the musical power of a cadence not so contrived in it's elevated aspiration. I can understand an appreciation of the old masters --Shakespeare and Shelley knock me out each time I consider their work--but I prefer a poetry that is involved in the current zeitgeist and which conceives a sense of wonder (above and beyond what mere senses alone can convey) that is not merely a grandiloquent
nostalgia.

Power Lunch

Lets meet each other

between the pauses

and stammers of our speech,

reach across a stable table

we've yet to spill drinks upon,

all these years we've been

walking in and out of
each other's dreams

and we still can't see

the moon nor the sun
we we most need them,

we can't argue with a map,

we cannot shake a finger at a class ring,

we shouldn't discuss the soup we cannot reheat,

I will put down my phone

and walk five hundred miles

If you lay down your laptop

and sing like you used to, 

 it will a bag lunch over the expressway,

soda and pocket pitas on  a pedestrian bridge
enclosed in steel netting,
old times and short laughs
watching cars drive to smoke stacks around the bend.

"Pocket" by Matthew Zapruder

This seems to be more chatter than literature, more posing than poetry, seeming to be an appealing cross between Billy Collins and John Ashbery. I mention Collins because there is the inordinate concern from the author with his position among a set of everyday items he finds himself among, and Ashbery adds the spice of indecisiveness; the narrator's mention of a hard , tangible thing introduces a new thought.


That new thought circumvents a monologue on the previous set of particulars that might have been interrogated by the poet's wit, and so forth. Pocket, in essence, is an effective, if not so tidy metaphor for what a pocket actually contains--the wallet, the rubber bands, the loose coins and alien scraps of paper and mystery material, the lighters, the keys, the cell phones, the comb with the clumps of matted hair; all are things that have only one thing in common, a pocket they've been crammed into and retrieved from, an accident of unpurposed circumstance. Poets, however, are the culture's engines for meaning creation, making a connection through narrative invention the as-yet unperceived connections between things that otherwise haven't a relation other than location and ownership.


Zapruder approaches this subject not as a treatise on the pocket, but rather an impressionistic evocation of it being a negative space, a black hole of a kind, a place where stray things get crammed until a further determination is made, a fate that usually winds up being the loose change dish, the file cabinet, the desk drawer, or the trash can. This winds up being a clever, chatty analogy for human consciousness itself; our waking lives are operated as a place where experience is crammed , willy nilly, into an infinite closet where what we've done, tasted, gone is all stored in no discernible pattern but who's culminating weight eventually demands witness and explanation. Zapruder's bemused pocket philosopher begins to speak of and muse about pockets and their contents, but his attention is distracted to something else he his reminded of, a sight or a sensation of scant relation to his starting premise.

I like the word pocket. It sounds a little safely
dangerous. Like knowing you once
bought a headlamp in case the lights go out
in a catastrophe. You will put it on your head
and your hands will still be free. Or
standing in a forest and staring at a picture
in a plant book while eating scary looking wild flowers.
Saying pocket makes me feel potentially
but not yet busy. I am getting ready to have
important thoughts. I am thinking about my pocket.
Which has its own particular geology.
Maybe you know what I mean. I mean
I basically know what's in there and can even
list the items but also there are other bits
and pieces made of stuff that might not
even have a name. Only a scientist could figure
it out. And why would a scientist do that?
He or she should be curing brain diseases
or making sure that asteroid doesn't hit us.
Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate
is 9.4%. I have no idea what that means.

I have no idea what that means, he says, and still he goes on to the point of exhaustion,  talking as the details of old thoughts and half memories occur to him; there is a Beckett-like element here, the need to speak and create in words the objects that no longer reflect the good graces of personality or resonate with one's history in a community. One's words, in essence, are bricks in a wall  against the yawning dread of being an anonymous cipher; in a way, this monologue is a way for one to announce that one has arrived, one has been here, one does not wish to be anonymous after decades of struggle and argument .What I enjoyed here is the notion is that the narrator is talking over himself, interrupting his own narrative. This is thinking unmoored and rudderless, without a sail in the stream of conscious. Where the focused writer excludes particular facts and associations on a subject and selects those materials that are germane to an argument that's already formed (or for which there is a formula one tries to follow), Zapruder's is stuck trying to talk about everything that comes to him before he fades himself; there is rather nice line at the end of the poem, of the black box beeping for attention at the bottom of the allegorical sea the airplane has crashed into.


some little of this work resembles the masterful associative drift of John Ashbery, but it would be another New York Poet, Frank O'Hara, that Zapruder has a closer kinship with. Like O'Hara, Zapruder's narrators are alert and lively in their being in the world; they share the same intention of responding to their experience as it unfolds. Zapruder,though, is more meditative, though, and figures less to form a a full fledged tale, as O'Hara was able to do, and instead produce a college effect , with elements both sublime, banal and even ridiculous finding a footing in the same sentences, a gesture made plausible by an internal punning. The names of things are parsed, the definitions are said aloud, something else comes to mind, a segue is created to keep the music going. There is an improvisational element in the poems, and and there is much to recommend to Zapruder's particular ear for assembling a nonlinear discourse with oddments that do not jar or clash without a satisfying effect. There is , I suppose, the need for some readers to demand conventional metrics, rhymes and devices as a means to have poems conform to a role of explaining or reaffirming an abstract and usually wistful notions of something Perfect and True behind the appearance of things.


The pocket, the consciousness, the deep and limitless sea, all repositories of things that are crammed, stored, secreted away under cramped covers, limitless lost things with stories that have stories we imagine that we're required to tell. Poetry, chief among our narrative methods, can only tell so much until we become part of the accumulated backlog . We cannot tell these stories quickly enough, we don't have enough time nor people to listen to what we've done and what we think about it all. And our cell phones are beeping, people calling with news they just have to share with us, this moment, right now.

It's a gas, gas, gas

This is what you get when you give a Rolling Stones classic some real vocal fire power. Thelma Huston's gospel-edged rendering lifts the song from the back alley , saloon slurring that made Jagger's original a masterpiece of bottle cap fatalism; Houston's sonic wail is transcendence over tough details. Jagger seems stylishly situated in his droogy ways. Houston is empowered by her survival and goes onto the next level, someplace other than the neighborhood that did her ill. 

Her accelerated interpretration aligns her in spirit with the John D.Loudermilk song "Tobacco Road" (and the same named Erskine Caldwell novel) , where the narrator has become stronger for the travils visited upon her (or him) , that they will leave the place of their birth and brutalized upbringing in order to  make a fortune, and then return with a  wrecking ball and a blow torch. Houston might not be that vindictive, but she does seem just as motivated as the protagonist in the Loudermilk song.

The funny thing about 'Tobacco Road", though, is that best known versions, by the Nashville Teens and Edgar Winter's White Trash, undercut the emphatic rage of the lyrics. The Nashville Teens, from England,  sound like a bunch of mumbling , pre--droogy  proto slackers who radiate a slump shouldered uninterest in expressing their emotions, let alone articulating their desires of revenge . The Edgar Winter version highlights the band leader scat-screaming , weaving his histronic garble with the blues-bronchitis rasping of co-lead singer Jerry LaCroix; it's a drawn-out, in concert performance that is about as evocative as the typical drum solo by a third billed band at the Sports Arena during the Seventies.
Perhaps there's an unreleased Thelma Houston version of the song locked in a vault that might yet make the light of day. It should be said here that I prefer Houston's version of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" to Aretha Franklin's version, recorded some years later.  The dancer in this video, of course, are absurd and unfunky.

THELMA HOUSTON - JUMPIN' JACK FLASH

www.youtube.com

Thelma Houston appearing on the British television show "The Price of Fame" sings "Jumpin' Jack Flash", which she recorded on her classic album "Sunshower". The album was produced and arranged by Jimmy Webb and released on Dunhill Records in 1969. This was Thelma's first solo album before signing wi...

2 movies, 1 song

Following --directed by Christopher Nolan

The first film by Christopher Nolan, this has the out-of-sequence narrative style of "Momento", detailing, in a notably shattered way, the intensely strange relationship between a would-be writer, desperate for things to write about, and a professional burgler. While the viewer has a task assembling a linear storyline from the piecemeal details offered, the movie is compulsively watchable, and there is a sense of a the "normal" everyman being seduced by a bad influence and used as means to achieve dishonorable ends. Well done.

______

Apocalypse Now Redux --directed by Francis Ford Coppola 

This is one of the most problematic of American movies, a long, grandiose piece of pseudo-philosophy imposed on a concise, lyrically morality tale by Joseph Conrad Despite the flaws, the gaping gaps in narrative logic, this film displays much brilliance;while the film doesn't hang together as a coherent narrative, it does have more memorable, quotable set pieces than any film released in the last fifty years. The release of the "Redux" version got my attention because one of my college professors, Jean Pierre Gorin, worked on a particular section of the film, not used in the first release, concerning a French plantation who's owners considered their land French soil. As featured in "Redux" it was flat and talky, really nothing more than a long monologue on the history of Western interference in South Asian affairs, an erstwhile defense of Imperialism; the cast, eating dinner while the owner prates on, looks dumbfounded and without the slightest idea of what they're doing. Additional footage with the Playboy Bunnies offer up some callow laughs, but the gaiety , I think, is more from relief the added tedium ; I think Coppola and his editors came as close to the best version of the acknowledged mess they had to deal with as anyone has a right to expect.

___________


Dirty Work
Steely Dan


This is the song that says everything you wanted to say at the end of a relationship that ends poorly, what you would have said had you thought of it at the time.Nothing inspires like a love affair gone sour; Elvis Costello and Amiee Mann are examples of writers who do terrific work when an ex puts the hurt on them. It makes for more memorable tunes than what Joni Mitchell does, who's relationships, according to her career narrative, just kind of end for no reason just as her songs just seem to go on, with no justification.It's an experience everyone has, and it's a condition that transcends differences. When it comes to getting your heart broken, we all have a story to tell.