Bogus Jive, Brother Man

Cody Walker is a joker, it seems, given to giggles, giddiness and guffaws in the pursuit of cracking himself up on jokes perhaps only he and select coterie of friends and fellow travelers would get. His poem on the latest Slate , "Update",is an exercise in a man chortling loudly in the back row.And even if a reader was fortunate to "get" Walker's interior monologue of skipping rhymes and cross-referenced literary forms, it's my modest guess the number finding this bit humorous would be lesser still. No matter, since I am as well in the habit of cracking myself up, imagining lines of dialogue among unlikely characters and personalities in improbable circumstance, chewing the fat on absurd and discreetly vulgar subjects.

It would be something like a three year old playing with his toy cars, conjuring one automotive disaster after another on a strip of wood paneled floor quickly imagined to be a ten lane interstate, or a six year old, when the young mind grows out the crashing spectacle of accidents and now imagines characters, recognizably humanoid, with distinct personalities, representing abstract, if two dimensional virtues, with attending voices. All this fills a mind with busy talk and scenarios, in the casual preparation for engaging the real life imagination will help them , with prayers, survive and thrive in.

Later still, in the far throws of adulthood, there come the private totems, the hallowed reference points, the memorized conventions of morning cartoons, biographies of great poets and advertising jingles, conflated to essential absurdities one tears down and reconstructs and tears down again as the surging mood to distance oneself from the drudgery of work and obligations; one takes flight, throws water balloons at the canon, paints the icons in garish colors, makes unlikely partners of dissimilar virtues in order to reveal some space in one's consciousness where logic and hard rationale
haven't invaded and tamed. Then comes the "eureka" laugh, that fast, hard snort of being elevated above the physical place where you stand, momentarily transcendent, untouchable. I do this often enough alone, at home, whether writing or reading a book, and too often, perhaps, at work, where such outbursts
are evidence of a mind being on other things other than the bottom line, and it is for those seconds when all things are reduced in stature, made equal in
size. It doesn't last, of course, and soon enough the
euphoria evaporates into the hard facts in front of you. But it is nice when it happens.

I should also make it a point to relate that I just about never try to relate what it was I found so funny to anyone I'm around; the description defy anecdotal reiteration, most times seeming sketchy and bizarre when I do try. The punch lines are too private, the references mired in that roiling swamp of a consciousness that cannot be brought to public view without the mediation of
thoughtful consideration and editing. And even then it would be dubious whether an audience would find the reason for my fleeting giggle worth the effort to listen to me bray on.

Cody Walker has decided to bray on.Walker's poem isn't a great one by any means, and is such that you wonder once again what Pinsky's attraction to it was. The rhymes are trite, the subject attempting to lane change across style barriers with the worst kind of ham-handed self-reverentially readily found in the most grating post-modern poetry, and there is what can be a smug -knowingness that saturates this brief operation. We have a scenario where a bright boy , trying to regain his equilibrium after the departure of his girlfriend/wife/significant other, invests himself with the powers and abilities of his great heroes from comic books and the scant readings of top shelf authors. He becomesStar Trek:The Next Generation's Data ("I've also rerouted...
my neural pathways..." )and Superman , with a mention that he has also re-routed "fjords", an oblique reference to the opening of the fifties TV program where the Man of Steel is said to be able to "...change the course of mighty rivers..." 

And so it goes through this short poem, a desperate playfulness abounds, a growing hysteria mounts, a breakdown threatens, all this stewing while the narrator seeks the blessing of the over-cited Nietzsche guarantee , to paraphrase a paraphrase, that what what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. What Walker intends is unclear--that the social constructions that result from our innate need to have life have purpose and meaning are finally inadequate? That mistaking experience as merely the means with which we test the veracity of our philosophical models is to lose sight of actual value?-- but what there is here is minor, indeed, worth a laugh, perhaps, but worth a laugh in the sense that what's funny is a reader's belief this tightly packed box of a poem merits a close textual reading. Walker wrote this as a knock off, I suspect, something to be put deep inside a collection as an off key note, a character-giving bit of dissonance insanity.It makes my case that mental anguish does not necessarily result in good poetry.

Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be: Compelling and irritating - Slate Magazine

 Link



A few years ago a member of the Nobel committee charged with choosing who wins the august prize every year complained that American writers were collectively immature, self infatuated and generally provincial in the fiction they write. Granted , this was during the W years when few in the world had nice things to say about anything coming from the United States, let alone its literature, but this novel, as described, underscores the substance of the the committee member's complaint: even in sections some defend as a self aware joke, the trials and tribulations of a generation that is simultaneously over network and incapable of discourse that isn't cast as an ironic aside to their own sense of absurd specialness sounds less inviting than a forced tour of your own living room. It is a low grade egomania .

We realize , however that the author in question, Sheila Heti, is actually Canadian, although born in England , and that the committee member was referring to his pained experience with writers born in the United States, The remarks remain a useful analog, however ,  so lets amend  my original remark (not that there is anything truly original about it; bright Canadians who think they are geniuses, even in an ironic sense, are about as annoying as stupid United States citizens who haven't a clue that they are inappropriate, chest thumping galoots.

While I don't disagree that the Nobel judge was demonstrating his bit of provincialism by accusing American writers , as a whole, of being immature and self-infatuated. His basic gripe, though, it dovetails  with a slew of youngish, bright and utterly uninteresting writers who cannot write fiction that even pretends to see beyond the vanity of being young . 

There is a time in most people's lives when what later seems like obvious truisms seem so profound; many of us for a time, think they are profound and true because we assume that we're the only ones who who have had these ideas. Further, some of us take longer than others to realize that what we think are special insights and ironic readings of the world are mannerisms that have been borrowed from movies and books and that they've been practiced in the mirror too often for too long. Sheila Heti sounds like that kind of writer. The problem with being the center of the universe is that if, after a while, you don't lighten up, the gravity will crush you. 

Oakie doakie

There are only big words
describing small things
when the vapor clears,

like, does it really matter
who left their
styrofoam coffee cup
in the microwave,

who is suffering because
my belt came from  a cow
on the wrong side of the planet,

does your bank      account
actually throb with desire
when you shop online for
midget harmonicas
like they used to
play in  movies
you watched when young
late night
in the basement
of a Michigan home?

?
?

I kissed you thirty years ago
before the music stopped
and I've been dancing   ever since
although
decades and many miles
keep us apart,

I remember every punch line
but forget the jokes they go to,
your dog
in the photos you mailed me
is beautiful
and missing all the same.

No, I   will not die my hair,
please
leave  your chin as it is,

let us use knives to cut out our food
and live
a little longer
in the playground.

Marilyn and Tru sitting in a tree...

"Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote Dance" By Patrick Ryan Frank. - Slate Magazine:

This is intended to be a lyric of sweet imagining, a tale of what if the tragic likes of Monroe and Capote solace, at least briefly, in each other's arms. Of course it would during a dance, a room full of sweeping music, the senses lulled , seduced and distracted from the grimmer things that lurk for both of them outside the room, with one of the two speaking that now is the moment to be in, that nothing else really matters nor should bother them, not as long as one of them leads and the other follows in time to the music. 

Just a dance— just sweet, like everybody sweetly else, a man and woman sweetly moved. I know no one forgets the ugly things they’ve known, and yes, I know that love, for us, is sweat and panic and some cameras, but it’s still love, and we’ve done nothing wrong. So let them laugh and then forget it all: those drinks and pills, hands wet, that man who, grinning, made us dance so here we are, we’re dancing. Let’s just pretend that one of us—who would remember who?— slipped through the grand and glittered dark and said, Hello, fella. Hello and take my hand. 

 
Poet Patrick Ryan Frank does a fine of sustaining a tone that keeps the poem's speaker anonymous--it appears that neither the personas of Monroe or Capote are speaking, issues of gender and sexuality are handily avoided, or at least obscured to the extent that it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that both dancers are speaking as one. Still, this is something you find in a paperback novel that purports to reveal some inside secrets of the famous, powerful and tragic that reduces their stature to the mere sentimentality . The references to drugs, to media, to a world in general that seeks them out and in order to both adore and destroy them , are to be expected in a piece that cannot re-imagine these iconic figures beyond an interesting premise.


 This fails both as poetry and barely qualifies as gossip, albeit a well-intentioned gossip. This might have been a poem that speculated about a what sort of plausible but unexpected set of things these two might have discussed in such close embrace,the irony and tension might have been subtly and intensely expressed without reference to their real world celebrity, but Frank has done otherwise. Rather than imagine what was inside the magic space between them, that mutual private time where titles, professions and other signifieds fell from them, it becomes merely tacky, an episode of "Dallas". Why would be interested with such trivia this poem offers? 

Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 review by Matt Taibbi. - Slate Magazine

Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 review by Matt Taibbi. - Slate Magazine:

In celebration of the  40th Anniversary edition of Hunter Thompson's gonzo masterpiece of political writing "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail", Slate writer Matt Taibbi writes an extensive essay on  why  HST still matters in our  current climate of  dread and drudgery.It is a nice commemoration, but I'm not persuaded that we could have learned anything more than      we already have from the late writer; what newer readers would learn is what we did, after time, that HST  could be wildly entertaining and then dependably repetitive in his subjects, his insults, his tone.  Truthfully, Thompson's reputation as a writer is based on a very small body of quality  work. I am willing to cede that Hunter Thompson succeeded , momentarily, at being a Great Writer for a couple of books, but the bitter truth was that while he was long on rage , he was short on other elements that keep a writer interesting over a career. Those qualities are insight, nuance, a curiosity about people and their circumstances beyond what mere appearances. 

Mere appearence, though, sufficed too often for Thompson, as his conceit, dove-tailing tellingly with his appetite for high powered stimulants, was that he could walk into the room full of characters and size the situation quickly. His concern was pacing over all, the attempt to simulate the down hill careen of a waiter carrying too many hot dishes from the kitchen. For all the energy and paranoid genius Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and his Campaign Trail book contained, it amounted to the best expression of the limited set of riffs Thompson. 

He was not especially engrossing as a political thinker--we read him for his vitriol. His attraction for invective , I imagine, was because it was easy and that it was a convenient means to get to the bottom of one typewritten page after another; the rhythm of the constructed persona of being the most wasted man alive bravely inveighing against the stupidities and inequities and the  utter  mendacity of the world in which he finds himself would go into hyperdrive. 

For some this suggested automatic writing, the idea that HST  was channeling some Truth hidden behind the barriers of bullshit and pretense, a voice greater than his own. Perhaps, but for me it was the writing of someone who was working what became a tired set of rhetorical ploys. Thompson plainly never had the chance to transcend his moment of transcendent genius, as had, say, Norman Mailer, himself an egotist with a certainity that only he could get to the disguised truth of things. Mailer settled in for the long haul, abandoned much of his writerly eccentricity and produced a series of brilliant books of fiction and nonfiction in his late career; there are other things to discuss about Mailer than his antics.

There are many who would like to consider Thompson our generations H.L.Mencken, but I would say the departed Hunter comes up short: even a writer as caustic as Mencken would , often enough, vary his tone and write about matters that didn't need to be vilified, crucified or witlessly mocked. Thompson never had the chance to try anything truly different.

HOSPITAL by Charles Webb

The poem "Hospital " by Charles Webb is a perfected bit of crafted babble, a three note mantra spoken and sung by someone doped up and being wheeled through institution corridors, from one room to the other, meeting employees in variations of the same work clothes running tests, taking samples, adjusting lights and dials on machines, writing items on clipboards and inputting data into computer stations, smiling, whistling pop tunes under their shallow breathing. It is a delirium and the mind, of course, is not out to lunch but aware of and making note of everything that is going on--the curse of it all is that the mind cannot finish a sentence, complete a thought, find a frame or a metaphor to contextualize an experience that is sufficiently unreal and dreamlike. The mind, though, can sustain a rhyming, punning set of extrapolations on what the deeper mind registers and finds dreadful.

Charles Webb manages to maintain that balance between an indecipherable cleverness, nearly falling with great weight and speed into resolute incoherence, but this, as I take it, being the record of a drugged up mind or perhaps a mind suffering an organic derangement, this is the struggle to remain at or near the surface of consciousness. This made me think of those many times I had in the hospital while younger, about to go under the knife, after the needles and the ether had been applied--the world was recast as one fish eyed lens and the soundtrack was such that it reminded me of slowing down a turntable and then increasing the speed again quickly.

“ Hospital “ as a swaying, visceral rhythm that is not always pleasant--panic, giddiness, elation, more panic follow one another quickly, seamlessly, without pause or explanation. This poem is an achievement, a successful evocation of sensory overload.

The Supreme Court surprised everyone by upholding most of the  contentious Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and needlessly to say Democrats are ecstatic and harshly conservative Republicans are  popping their veins and turning red in the face with the kind of raging mania you thought only comic book villians could muster. It is a lot of work to stay that angry and so blind sightedly dedicated to depriving millions to affordable health care as matter of dubious principle.  That dedication suggests mental illness more than rationally applied principles; I never thought it made economic sense to to allow people to get sick and land in emergency rooms where the rest of us have to pay  for their visit with higher insurance premiums. I would guess that  conservatives, at least those who  know have the natioanl megaphone,  consider Meaness as a sport they excel at.  My hope, our collective hope, is that voters see through all the malarkey and smoke that is being blown our way and that we deprive them of their arena.