Making the World Safe for Jonathan Franzen

Ben Marcus, a writer and critic of ambitious genre-blurring novels that one might refer to lazily to as "difficult" or, god forbid, Postmodern, makes a good accounting of himself as he protects the good name of experimental fiction in the October 2005 issue of The Atlantic. Not on line, unfortunately, but the issue is worth seeking out for Marcus's essay, which amounts to a smack down of the self appointed protectors of readers against the gurning armies of avant-garders who've taken to writing novels in order to award millions of book buyers migraines. Marcus writes with a sure verbal slap at his avail, and it's a wonder of the intended target, Jonathan Franzen, will ever manage a response.

Jonathan Franzen is a gifted novelist whose last novel , The Corrections , could have used an editor who was unafraid to blue pencil the baggier prose that particular novel contained. Like others of his generation who are uncomfortable with providing what amounts to entertainment for a paying public, Franzen evidently equates length with worth, and thus filled his parody with the most minute things in the world of this horrible family. Everything was mocked relentlessly, continuously, endlessly, and each paragraph seemed to burst with more sarcasm and scorn until you wanted to use novel as a weapon against some defenseless thing. He had some ideas about American culture and what we're doing wrong to each other, so it's strange that his critical slings against William Gaddis and particularly his masterpiece The Recognitions. Gaddis is, from all appearances, the model from which Franzen formed his break through tale. Franzen is a worry wart at heart, one who loves to fret about his own comfort, and it's too his credit that he's a splendid enough writer, most of the time , to make us care about the status of his nerves colliding with the world. His essay collection, How To Be Alone is fine in this regard. It's when he attempts to diagnose the ills of American literature and assign blame (if not a cure) where he becomes a whiner, a sniveler, a sayer of absurd declarations. I am with Ben Marcus on this matter, which is to say that the novel is in relatively good shape and that the point of concern, regardless of style or ideology, needs to be on a writer's talent.These debates about the absolute state of writing have been going on in my life for years, and the result has been to make me , perhaps, a bit of a social retard, one who sees life from a sadly short sighted lens.

When I read Franzen's Strong Motion and The Corrections, there was no reason for me to assume that he was someone who wanted to be general reader's guardian against the legions of literary experimenters whose books he imagines are causing the destruction of coherence and common sense. Franzen, a novelist of ideas no less than those he critiques as too heady and thereby dangerous --DeLillo, William Gaddis-- seemed to be one of the smart one of those writers who felt compelled to make the readers labor for the treasure embedded in his books. His writing is not composed of short sentences, his descriptions are not taciturn, his metaphors are not of the kitchen-sink variety. He seemed more than willing to be mistaken for William Gaddis Jr.

Now he renounces his love of Gaddis and re-introduces himself to America as the reader's best friend, a writer who has a"contract" with his readers with he he promises never to stray from the conventions of good form and so worry the expectations of readers soured on experiment and genre-blurring. It's a rant that gets resurrected every five years or so--Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Tom Wolfe have all taken their major shots at other writers in an effort to decry the decline of contemporary fiction at the hands of various invading goons, geeks and smarty pants stack mongers. The terms change, the cures vary, but the diagnosis is always the same, "novels today suck",and the death of the novel is always near. Franzen's fretting in his lengthy list of complaints seems more self-serving than anything else; the flap over the Oprah Book Club is something he feels , evidently, that he must recover from. But all this fawning over what he assumes are middle brow audience tastes is unseemly. I agree that it's absurd to demand that a novel be "difficult" or otherwise complicated in order to be considered great. It's just a foolish to insist that plain-speaking is the only way great ideas get addressed in fiction. More than anything the issue seems a dust up between very few writers who delight in tweaking each other at length over things that are finally so much energy spent going down the wrong road.It's a handy issue on which to hang a polemic, but it avoids the more difficult issue at hand, the discussion of style.

Curious readers themselves have no difficulty reading so-called difficult writers like Don DeLillo or Salmon Rushdie and then switching without controversy to more conversational scribes like John Cheever or Lorrie Moore so long as the author displays a mastery of personal style that makes what the author is trying to do worth the read. Hemingway, I realized in college, was more than over-the-counter prose sans verbs , adjectives and metaphor and that his mastery of language, his crafted selection of words enabled him to get across(in his best writing) his notions of bravery, honor and personal code as felt experience without arm-waving or excessive bathos. Faulkner, contrarily, had a dense style beholden to cinematic flashbacks,William James' notion of the mind as stream-of-conscious in which the world is perceived through a plurality of associations,and a Bergsonian concepts of interior time ,all heady influences that might make a novel unwieldy and daunting, fiction that is rich less for straight forward morality plays and situation comedies that finally resolve themselves and affirm a vague faith in invisibly dispensed justice but more about the sheer rhythm, pace and texture of experience, the actual duration of time and thought between plot actions. It is daunting, of course, but there is the argument that exposure to and a taste for problematic fiction, fiction that does not rest on conventional expectation, helps a reader think through problems that have more symbolic complications than tactical ones. There is that hope that a reader lands somewhere on their feet after tackling the tides and and eddies of Faulkner's novels and recognizes that life isn't a series of problems to be solved as if it were a take home math test; empathy is the word here, and it is the story less revealing that would have us speak to one another a bit more richly as differences are covered and common ground cleared away. Faulkner's his ability for empathy and poetic description (again, in his best work) moves you along, experiencing something wholly other than the world one lives in.Individual style, how it's developed, and how a mastery of language through style makes a text, conventional or dense,interesting to the ideal reader is more difficult to discuss than the cleverly coined dismissals of ideas one doesn't like.

Nicolas Cage is Hollywood's Worst Actor

The Weather Man drew my attention when I heard what the film was about, but a disappointment and slight depression came on me like a foul wind when I read that Nicolas Cage was in the title role. A pity, since this would the ideal role for William H. Macy, who has made a career of finding the core loneliness at the center of characters who have to maintain public faces. Cage is a neon sign that is never off, buzzing with some circuits burned out or blinking madly in both daylight and night. It's a predictable set of histrionics he has assembled inside that little bag of factory tricks he owns for the defeated purpose of catching a viewer by surprise. He is as formulaic in his performances as Tony Scott is in his excessive jump cuts and jitter-cam pacing; neither can trust an understated moment, or let character and story develop in ways other than frequent bursts of problem-child energy. You dread being around the man at the end of Halloween night. It's certainly a smart idea to explore the eternal vacuum that one imagines occupies the minds of the relentlessly cheery sorts of who impanel the local news shows, but there's that sinking feeling when Nicolas Cage is selected to play the principal character. It's not that Cage lacks the demonstrative ticks and shticks to animate the sort who has no passion or life force beyond their presence in front of the camera, it's just that we've seen them again with little variety or invention since Honeymoon in Vegas, Face/Off or The Rock. Let us add Leaving Las Vegas to the odious list; it cut close to the bone here, but the film valorized the lead character's slow and purposeful suicide by alcohol, and we were made to endure an implicit propaganda that it was somehow a noble act to leave life in this way. This ass-ended wallow in Hemingway machismo dealt with the subject with an expectedly heavy hand--it's one of those films where every scene is weighted in increasing measures so that the gravity of the hits you hard. Not hit you, so much as falls from on high like Monty Python's sixteen-ton weight, a accumulation of gross bathos and animal logic that lack for no nothing except grace or a light touch from director Mike Newell. Cage is allowed all the space he needs to wallow, writhe, stumble, slur and fuck up as his death rattle impends, one of the most overplayed death scenes I remember coming upon. It's curious as well that Cage nabbed an Oscar for Best Actor this year; routine actors going berserk in generally undistinguished films are no strangers to Hollywood's highest honor. Cage and fellow Oscar winner Denzel Washington (Training Day) share that bit of fallow distinction.

Those likewise not convinced of Cage's greatness may insert their own examples of where this bogglingly blank method actor doesn't so much chew up the scenes he's in as much a takes a wrecking ball to them, mixing twitch, itch, tick, thousand-yard states, mumbling and inexplicable Elvis-isms in slight reshufflings, movie to movie, in a consistent display that an amassing of quirky mannerisms is the same as creating a character. In fairness, Cage has been in good motion pictures, specifically Raising Arizona and City of Angels, but these seem accidental or merely a case when directors knew what do with his alternating states of a catatonic slump and manic maneuvering. I recently paid good money to watch him in the political comedy Lord of War , due mainly to some artfully edited trailers but lo, instead of a black comedy along the lines of Catch 22 we're instead subjected to a two hour monologue from Cage’s drawling character, with no real point to make other than a conveniently easy irony aside. One or two lousy films from a good actor are forgivable and you hope for better work to come along soon, but Cage has been awful in bad films for so long that his name alone dampens that fleeting curiosity about the movie. For Weather Man, this ten dollars is staying in my wallet.

I am not Billy Collins

Billy Collins does not live on my street
nor do his poems come to mind
when I hum a line from an Art Tatum solo
when getting the mail under whatever
the color the sky happens to be,

I would think he fears bills
and invitations
as I do, prefers tenor saxophone
to reedy alto flights,
finds solace in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
when his computer breaks down
as I do when things fail
and I scramble for a passage I copied to a business card
from a description I read of someone else’s review,

There is no house with picket fences
nor apartments set off from the street
by grand trees and high hedges,
there are only parked cars blocking
the sidewalk as they impose their tires
on the curb, tattooed monsters drinking beer
and girls sobbing into cell phones
about what they wore on their worst night ever,
and me, dressed to leave as if forever to be gone
but staring at the computer trying to
fill this page with words,

Instead of a house mate singing,
there leaf blowers roaring
up and down the walk
scattering clipped grass from one
door way to another,
there is only ginger ale for
vodka martini fatalist,

Billy Collins would
find some clever things
to write in the absence or presence
of anything interesting
occurring in the place where
his feet are actually planted,
some planet or star or
an old Movie Poster
would rouse from his
seat and send on a mission
to get some inane thing
done because so much of
Western Culture hinged
on his having yet more
epiphanies and eurekas
as he sorts his bills, licks stamps,
contemplates dinner
and how large the portions,
Mozart and Wallace Stevens
ride in his backseat
as he drives to the market
where he meets Charlie Parker
and Thomas Carlyle
in the desert line, eating snack samples
made of cheese and crackers
from a lady in a tunic red as roses
on the slipperiest anniversary,
and then it’ll be home, a poem,
a cool round of music
and settled bills,
a world at rest after a hard day of being.

At this moment my dog
would bark if
I had a dog
but my feet hurt
all the same
walking for blocks past
Radio Shacks and taco stands
dragging a plastic bag of used paper backs
and canned food
for what is another night
of Law and Order reruns
and a final thought
in passing that

I wish I was Billy Collins
for a half hour just to see
what it’s like to live
in a world where
every thing I do ends up
perfectly measured and clever
in the form of a sentence
in a perfectly poised poem
that makes me laugh
or cry and leaves me
somewhere in between
as if dumped on an empty highway
from a fast car after being wooed
by the sleaziest bastard in my little town.

The death of small towns

Strange habits of brew overkill
studs the patter like
buttons on the coat sleeve
that cut the nostrils
in a full winter climes’
descending scale
of hot items.

All the things about
how needed surgery
destroyed her capacity
to get the words in the right order
without sounding as if she’d
been riding to another water shed
with another boy
named Jason or John or Jake
as it maybe who had
a hobby of spearing rats
with his buck knife and
skinning them for wallets
he’d sew together and sell
at the drug store on Sundays,
after Church.

Seeking some kind of refuge
with the regulars who been
irregular for many twisted years,
seeking an easy place to sit
and read the paper,

there I was,

Drinking ‘though not
thirsty at all
as the sun set and the
light in the bay window
dimmed until the room
was gold toned, then sepia?
and then a fine dark ash
that was perfect for
falling asleep in or
breathing your last
as a final memory crowds
out every deadline I might fail to meet,
or merely continue for hours
drinking in the dark
in the same old chair
listening to faint music
and the late hiss of tires
on the street roll by
until it seems that
there are no doors
or windows in the room
and things are exactly as they always will be,
alone and lost in themselves
in various suggestions of dark vapor.

i am not a crow on a power line

there are so many dimes
in the universe that want
to leave my palm and fall
into empty soda cups
held by grizzly men
in need of a shower and a steak.

there are so many grizzly women
leaving pennies on the sidewalk
because there is nothing
less to settle for, nothing more
to stoop to.

stoops full of scrubbed
and shaved men glistening
with soap, pink as rug burns,
cracking their knuckles
and rubbing their necks.

plastic cups with traces
of orange juice along the bottom
litter the street in front
of what was once a hotel
when rooms were rented
until check out time
the next morning.

stacks of Tiffany lamp shades
fill the back of the truck
and block the skyline
that tries to reach higher
that the loftiest power line
in the city where every lazy crow
comes to rest in the daylight
just to watch us cross streets,
go into buildings, write checks,
cry in the chair that faces
the street,
getting up again
and rubbing our grizzly chins
and the back of our necks
as if we knew what we were doing.

Shoes on a wire

Shoes on a wire
Originally uploaded by Ted Burke.

i am not Bob Dylan

nothing jangles except
keys in my pocket,

there are no
ghosts around
the light switches
in my kitchen,

they cannot read
my passport
at the border
as it drips with
Farmer Brown's paint,

i was under
the yellow sun
today dreading
avian flu,

why are my sheets
covered with
with chalk crop circles,

my friends from
medical school
won't tell me
what's in my mailbox,

even my girl friend
tells me what
my wife couldn't admit,
i am not bob dylan.

Four Scenes Set to Country Music

1.

Too long after the sun
has set do you dare me to tackle
something that sends
you running through the French doors
holding your nose,
there's something about the phone
bill
I wanted to ask you about, but
then I'm distracted by you on the patio,
back turned,
waving your hands, shaking your wrists,
an orchestra of flowers
below your feet
to do your bidding.

2.

You unfolded the newspaper
to where you
found me on page three,
under the obituaries
and next to the ad
for the Sunday specials.
My mouth was open,
I was shaking my fist,
the world around me
was leaning to one side,
yet only my hat was flying
off in that direction.

3.

You want to die
and I want to dance.

I want to sleep
and you want to
talk something through
until natural light
fills the room.

You want to
get real
and I'm always
in the mood
for amore
or at the mechanics
of it all.

Both of us feel like
Chinese tonight
and neither of us
have asked
why there's a grotesque
onion loaf in the middle
of our table,
next to the flowers,
which are dying.

4.

Chances are that some
of the things that I might say
will save someones life,
provided, of course,
that this is a cartoon
we are living in.

Nights are cold in the canyon

Cross your arms when hearing
your wife and her phone calls
in the night on the porch,
sobs and crickets carrying on
until sunlight comes over the garage,

Bless yourself again
for having a family
whose eyes saw you falling,
whose arms caught you
and laid you in a bed
until another morning
came and the sun emerged
from behind night and morning low clouds,

Give a man a quarter
for what he needs to drink,
nights are cold in the canyons
where you lost flashlights
and pocket change,

Stop speaking of
former loves
and open every window
and listen to noise
that does not come
from inside your cranium
buzzing like electric shorts
in an old house at the end of
an ugly, washed out street,

Kneel when BB King
plays his guitar
or someone reads
a Frank O'Hara poem
about being stunned
because the lights have changed
and the whole city waits for him
to cross the street
and have his breath taken away,

Play your harmonica
until your lips start to bleed
at which time you'll be ready
to kiss all the invisible gifts.">Slate Magazine: "Nights are cold in the canyons

Cross your arms when hearing
your wife and her phone calls
in the night on the porch,
sobs and crickets carrying on
until sunlight comes over the garage,

Bless yourself again
for having a family
whose eyes saw you falling,
whose arms caught you
and laid you in a bed
until another morning
came and the sun emerged
from behind night and morning low clouds,

Give a man a quarter
for what he needs to drink,
nights are cold in the canyons
where you lost flashlights
and pocket change,

Stop speaking of
former loves
and open every window
and listen to noise
that does not come
from inside your cranium
buzzing like electric shorts
in an old house at the end of
an ugly, washed out street,

Kneel when BB King
plays his guitar
or someone reads
a Frank O'Hara poem
about being stunned
because the lights have changed
and the whole city waits for him
to cross the street
and have his breath taken away,

Play your
harmonica
until your lips
start to bleed
at which time
you'll be ready
to kiss all the invisible gifts."

cafe_windows

cafe_windows
Originally uploaded by Ted Burke.

I am not Jack Kerouac

I am not Jack Kerouac
when my thumb lifts over the curb
and into on coming traffic,

Every tree I see is not
Big Sur with its endless groves
and shacks in the clearing,
smoke rising from chimneys
made of twigs and old tin cans,

Every abandoned car
reminds me of paradise
under harsh gleam of
bay side moon when
every spoon and pair of dice
glitters with impossible radiance
as the stars form a grin,
a full set of teeth
for the man in the moon,

I am not Jack Kerouac
and I won't have a drink
as I type,

I am as sober
as the judge
who laughs at hangings,
straight as managers
of franchise shoe stores,
square like new ice
when it hits the bottom of a glass,

Yet I dream
again of delerium and sin
and states of the union
where the grunion run on
the beaches under the clouds
covering the
acne scars of the man in the moon,

Don't let me speak too soon
nor too late,
Kerouac is dead and
in such a state
that he cannot spend
a dime of the money he made,

I am not Jack Kerouac
and this dollar is mine
to buy a Red Bull with
for those wings that keep
the city humming along,
singing a song
for pennies a day.