Summer reading 3

The Women
by T.C. Boyle

We enter the world of Frank Lloyd Wright and the cult of personality that surrounded him at his compound Taliesin and find the iconic and inconsistently brilliant architect as the center who spent much of his time managing his reputation, manipulating his followers, student architects and engineers, into doing the grungy and tedious work of preparing his various projects, attempting to borrow money or extend his exhausted credit lines and, as the title suggests, wooing women and then betraying them. 

The upshot is that Wright is less than the Frank Lloyd Wright cult would have us believe, that he was without flaws; T.C.Boyle relishes the chance to exhibit the man as a self-creating blowhard, more persona than center, who was by historical accounts not the most thorough of architects. It wouldn't unfair to say that as an architect he may have been a splendid designer--his buildings have a majesty and grace only the truly touched seem to render with ease--but in technical aspects he was resoundingly incompetent, given to short cuts , half measures, and shoddy workmanship on the smaller , essential things, like safe and certified electrical work. 

To this day his buildings are crumbling, and the novel shows us the grandness that is his home, Taliesen, burning to the ground because the Maestro couldn't be bothered with a thorough inspection of the work that bore his signature. This is a fine comic novel, the latest in Boyle's ongoing series of historical fictions revealing the fun and folly of scorched earth originality. Imperfect humans are the creators of otherwise beautiful and useful things. 

One does wish that Boyle would finesse his sentences and paragraphs a bit more--he is a good prose stylist when he chooses to be, but too often and for too long his writing sounds rushed, which is ironic, really , considering that a main point of this novel, a group portrait of the lovers and sycophants surrounding Wright, is that Wright was a splendid and artful draftsman who didn't see to the smaller details of his designs. So to Boyle does not lift his passages from the mere , pleasurable hum they are and lift them to a richer music.

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Unmanageable

He wouldn't change his mind

so I mailed him a brick and a rose

postage due, of course,

because the wind had gone from my sails

and I was stranded at the bus stop

with no token, after dark,

falling asleep to the barking of dogs

behind a fence.

I wouldn't apologize

so she sold my books

and record collection

to a man who specialized

in another decade's glory,

I cried under her window,

I sang her a song

written in schemes that rhymed

and plots that didn't,

I cannot be sorry

for invisible gestures

committed while I spoke on the phone, I explained,

hooking my thumb on a belt loop

when I mentioned nothing

what you thought it might

when I mentioned

"cake" and "bombast" in the same sentence,

but you gather my hats all the same

and toss them to the oak tree

that hangs over your roof,

one hat per limb,

one duck bill spinning toward the gutter

where leaves burn, as if on cue,

or my, what shall I do?

The government wouldn't straighten its spine

and walk a straight line

nor speak something without qualification,

so we held our breath

and took on horrible lovers

who would take our money from our wallets and purse

after we are asleep ,

we buy things we don't want

on the basis of a cute photos of grand kids on cell phone galleries,

we get in the car we stole

and drive to the edge of the map

after which there is only the tile of the floor below us,

checkerboard pattern and spread out newspapers

where the cat takes his craps,

this world

gets so much larger

the more we complain,

the biggest box

Distinct purposes

There are times in the middle of the afternoon after I've finished what I think is an inspired poem when I have the momentary sensation--fleet! is the world--that all those wonderful metaphors and inverted oppositions were given to me by God Himself. I've been sober for twenty four years, though, and I have a strong feeling that if I ever heard God speak, he'd tell me to go ahead and have a shot of hooch. Faith I have, but not to the degree that I think a higher power uses me as a mouthpiece for his left over tropes. The feeling passes, and I disabuse myself that poems and prayer are linked in degrees more bountiful than rare. I think the distinctions between the two things are clear and crucial, as both modes of address are for distinct purposes.

Summer reading 2

 THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT
by Norman Mailer

Anyone who has had difficulty with Norman Mailer's militant ego-- or just plain irritated with the prospect of a writer declaring himself the best scribe in the land simply because he was the only one with the temerity to reach for the crown vacated by Hemingway--won't find relief here in his award winning book 'The Armies of the Night'. Too bad for them, I say, because even though Mailer's self regard is legendary and obnoxious without redemption in lesser pundits, Mailer shrewdly uses the persona, the third person referenced 'Mailer', to engage the the collision of forces that made up the political sensibility of the 60s ; the counter culture, anti-war activist, avowed Marxist revolutionaries, feminists, black nationalists , yippees, hippees, crazies of all sorts converged on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam and what was seen by many alternative life stylers as the fatally erring trajectory America had taken; all the sins of capitalism, white racism, imperialism and the like were now returning to the soil from which they came, demanding the bill be paid and the interest collected in full.

Mailer, someone who had announced early in his career, in his introduction to 'Advertisements for Myself', that he was obsessed with radically transforming the way his country came to see itself in the strange and terrifying world that was emerging in the post war period, comes off as the smartest guy in the room, someone conducting a running commentary on the tensions and contradictions that were coming from the estranged forces that composed the American Left. Much of the fun, though, certainly has to be the adventures of the swaggering, blustery, drinking and drunk Mailer as he wades through the issues and the worries that accompany movements that want to seize the future. There is an apt awareness of his own absurdity and celebrity, there is a realization that even his imagination cannot single handedly stop an a congery of policy evils already in place and being executed. What he could do, though, was maintain his sublime sense of irony and report, comment, opine and theorize with the quick witted verve that only the best stylists maintain.

This is a worthy read, an important document from a period of American which to this day refuses to be understood in retrospect. The

Summer reading

AMERICAN PSYCHO
by Brett Easton Ellis
I would be willing to accept the defense that Ellis’s quickie squib is in fact a satire of consumerism, a literary bit of photo realism if there was compelling art here. There isn't, however, and the defense falls apart. Ellis writes as if he had to submit this against a deadline, and he'd wasted his considerable lead time by living off his hefty advance. Ellis does a good job of diagnosing the narcissism of the eighties, but that by itself does nothing for either our understanding or empathy.
The emotionally neutered stretches of hacking, slicing, stabbing and bashing , juxtaposed against descriptions of material things that may as well have been photocopied from catalogues, is an interesting effect and achieves an ironic value soon on, but just as soon the effect is spent. And yet the detail goes on, as does the singularly flat line narration. Even the gross out factor wears thin and grows tedious; as with pornography, the power Ellis brings to the subject of hyper-violence isn't aesthetic, certainly. This reminds you of nothing else so much as someone taking pointlessly large doses of drugs in the vain hope of finding the rush and thrill of their first encounter. What Ellis has done is written a bad book who's only distinguishing element is that is all symptom. It does not deaden the reader to the horrors of psychotic violence, as most readers I encounter are sufficently offended and aghast at the amount of disheartening imagination Ellis can cast. Perhaps the ideal readership was supposed to folks like him, already deadened.


 THE DIAGNOSIS
by Alan Lightman

Out of the DeLillo playbook, a business commuter gradually loses the use of his limbs, and his confronted with medical experts who disguise their inability to treat him and render a diagnosis by having him submit to yet more tests. A novel full of comic moments and sleights of hand-- the father's relationship with his son is sad stuff, two-hankie time-- but there is strong feeling of what the world would be like if all the things that we plug into stopped giving us the illusion of information and clarity and instead added to our anxiety, increased oh-so-slowly another ten or twenty degrees. Lightman isn't the most graceful writer, but this novel works rather well. One will note the shared concern with DeLillo, who wrote a kind blurb for this novel: nominally intelligent citizens who realize too late their trust in the priesthoods of specialists and jargon masters have not only not aided them in their real or imagined crisis, but in fact made their lives worse.

1987

Behind a garage someone is sleeping with the candy wrappers and empty cans. I try and think of the earth finally giving up its secrets in moments when there's nothing on the mind except panic.
In a kitchen a girl drops the coffee pot while her father reaches for a belt, whether one to take or one to strap on she doesn't know. I have slept in a dumpster on a night when none of the coffee worked
and I was wearing the legacy  of dirt that are any man's bed to make.

Any man's bed to sleep in when it's a house that's been burning because pet food is historically cheaper than grub shaped to your tastes and because  the price of laundry is the erasure of the past that's
looking over the back yard fence when you're looking at the contorted swing set  and its uneven lengths of chain, dreaming of a higher class of bad luck, rotten wood decks, sliding swimming pools, gardens that get baked under desert winds,  wife swapping in the Seventies.

I crack my knuckles in a rustle of joints and light another Camel in the dark of another August afternoon. There is only traffic going to bars and homes and somewhere a cat is yowling at an empty dish,

somewhere dog scratches at a screen door, some times instinct is all I know and that's not even thinking, it's hunger on the naked face. The culture of the beach buries itself in the foam caused by Asian Freighters.

There's a table full of  friends  every winter night who blow smoke rings at the moon that makes its hesitant escape.  There are days you can't give away in laundry mats when there's a homeless man leaning against the spin cycle who won't explain why there the cut across his forehead but does reveal hours of banter as he deconstructs the meanings of the lives he says he's been because there are no year books for the liars club.

All our agendas are face down in the dirt; we see the surface of the soil, ants carrying ten times their weight, too much free time~ on loose change in our lives. A young girl leaves her kitchen to talk to her brother in the living room where he watches literature curl up and die as the screen writhes in a spasm of images from all over the globe to seduce the vision of one pair of eyes that hasn't learned to imagine the face of God or blue coat  calvary and their horses in the banks of clouds that are over him every day of his life.

THE SADNESS THAT REMAINS AMY WINEHOUSE

This is too sad for words, all the talent that Amy Winehouse had  now silenced because she couldn't muster up the strength to confront what was killing her.  Her song "Rehab"  showed she had an ironic awareness of her drug use , but this shows, again, that self-knowledge unaccompanied by action is inadequate . The insidious thing about being an addict is that the thought of stopping what you know will silence you forever abate quickly after the craving takes over and the first FIX of the day becomes all that matters at the moment. Self awareness vaporizes and you forget or ignore the truth of the matter and wallow in the nod and the eventual panic to get still more drugs. As talented and smart, even brilliant, as Winehouse was, she seemed more or less without a clue to the severity of her situation. Drugs make you stupid, they reduce your life to a banal statistic despite whatever genius potential you began life with, they kill you and make you another deceased cipher. The real tragedy is less that a brilliant artist is silenced too young in her career, but that we are bound to keep reading variations of this sad scenario for the rest of our natural collective lives.

The moral of this tale is simple: Save your own life.
This is a nicely written tribute by NY Times culture monger Guy Trebay on how the recently deceased Amy Winehouse will last, but it presents what I think will be the article that will dominate the flux of Winewhouse postmortems to come: more concern with what she looked like rather than how she sounded. It's a paradox that on the one hand the host of articles are yet to come will praise what were he conspicuous gifts, that unique voice (a combination of Billie Holiday and Diana Ross) and a surreal grit as a lyricist, and yet have the conversation drift, as if directed by gravity, to the matter of her appearance. I sympathize with Trebay, who was required to write so many snappy column inches with so little actual Amy Winehouse music to refer to. It's not as if there was something to surmount in her art as there was in Sinatra's skill set when his voice deepened and grew coarser, darker; he changed the way he sang and selected different songwriters to write for him, to brilliant effect. It's not like she's had an evolution as a lyricist, like Joni Mitchell or Elvis Costello, both of whom started out as an awesomely gifted who, with time, transcended their skills and became pretentious and pedantic. No, there is only a very slight bit of studio work in her brief stay with us, enjoyable , full of promise and , alas, she's dead.  This isn't unusual for an icon who didn't release many studio albums during her lifetime. It was a mere two for Winehouse, and basing a discussion of her work solely goes static before long. The valid conclusion is for us to ponder what might have been and then give a sigh, but since we're not yet finished wringing our hands over her passing, we have pundits applying a slipshod semiotics... to her sense of style , dealing in tortuously strained metaphors to wrench more cultural significance from her departed presence. It strains credulity, and it insults her fans and it insults her.