The DaVinci Snore

There are critics and Catholics plenty enough blogging about the blasphemy and historical errors that glare in Ron Howard's film adaptation of The DaVinci Code, and I won't reiterate them here. The subject of long standing conspiracies concerning a secret Catholic society's efforts to conceal the true nature of Christ on earth has become a bore as well as cottage industry in publishing, and all I can say to that it's not likely to spur an interest in Renaissance Studies or an examination in core Christian virtues. We are in love with our distractions and special effects, and a mass audience such that that author Dan Brown has reached prefers to be lied to in the name of entertainment rather than grasp a more personal truth from the glibly mentioned philosophies and attempt a better, less consumptive life as a result. Entertainment is fine, of course, but we are being crushed by our banality. The disturbing thing about The DaVinci Code isn't the blasphemy, the errant reading of Catholic history, or even the disrespect it shows towards the Church, but simply that it's a bad movie, a dull movie, a ham-fistedly constructed movie. It's not thrilling, scary, provocative, alluring. For all the racing around, the murders, the frantic scurrying about European cities and mountain ranges, the film is static, and very, very talky, with the experts and priests talking very, very fast to outline the convolutions of this knotted plot. Director Ron Howard's usual graces--pacing, narrative construction, tight editing--
are absent here, and can assume from his absence from the talk show circuit to plug the film that he wanted a safe distance between his name and the mess the DaVinci Code movie turned out to be. A New York Times full page ad last week for the film last week featured star Tom Hanks' name in banner print over the title. One would note the lack of critical blurbs. Under the title , in very small print, were the rest of the credits, and last of all, very tiny, almost invisible,
we find the words "Directed by Ron Howard". It's doubtful Howard's lone and diminutive mention in the ad is due to modesty.

The envy of the dead

In one of his essays, Edgar Allen Poe summarizes one the essential elements of his philosophical musings by asserting that we are cursed with "the memory from before birth", a slight and wavering recall of a time when calm and serenity were in place and there was nothing of the distortions or crass money, family, or religion to make us nervous, devious, only half alive (if "alive" at all). The upshot of his baroque hypothesizing was, to be sure , our constant and at times overwhelming desire to return to such a nocturnal, darkened, stressless state, a return to the womb, perhaps; in any event, his pinings were a desire for sleep from which one needn't wake up from, death in other words.

Following suit are Poe's peculiar interest in things decadent and decaying, those thin , reedy and tubercular characters of diseased gentry and errant aristocratic stock who hang on to the waking life by a mere thread, effete and defeated and gracefully blended into the material realm, waiting for gravity to take its toll and to become themselves receivers of the dirt nap, freed of the binds that only punish you for having nerve endings.

There was, among the decadent writers and artists following Poe, a literal worship of an aesthetic principal that the greatest beauty was in a person or a thing in it's decline, when it was letting go of the struggle and was reduced to it's basic, most true and frailest form. An aspect of this, I suspect, was envy of the declining aesthetic object, be it a human or a diseased elm; a deep and permanent rest awaited them, and death would be that thing that gives the lie to the certitude of philosophy or economic determinism that insist that life must forever be thus, a certain way, without change. Those who die have escaped, and there are no arms to bring them back to suffer more with the rest of us pining over a grave.

Poet Patricia Traxler gets all this wonderfully in her poem The Dead Are Not in this week's Slate, succinctly in her poem The Dead Are Not; as rob and others have already remarked, the poem is brief and each finessed line conveys the complicated, conflicting and confused set of emotions one
journeys through as yet another death comes closer to one's inner circle of confidants and family. Indeed, the dead are not dead yet,

Always they take
their time, and we wait
politely, dreading
how real it will
have to be, sooner
or later, and at the
same time longing
to know that reality.


There are arguments one has with the departed, negotiations still in session, curses and protests of undying love are uttered, self-recrimination and blaming goes on for days and nights until one tires of the their tears and breathes easier because sunrises still come inspite the weight of grief. We mutter to ourselves that the dead are
"in a better place", that they "felt no pain" or that
"...at least they died quick..." all so we get on with our lives and our responsibilities, and yet an echo of our accepting rhetoric stays with us as we shoulder our daily responsibilities, that "better place" doesn't sound so bad, and we become envious and petty all over again, we blame the dead for being cowards and laggards who would do anything to shirk their duty, and we come to envy them and that place they've gone. Gravity takes its toll, our bones ache, the mailbox is filled with bills, someone else you know has told you they have a fatal disease, your back hurts like shit:

Nights, as we reach
to switch off our bed lamps
and close our eyes,
we dare it to take us
into its mouth
that smells of tar,
saltwater, sludge,
take us up then let us
tumble endlessly,
blameless again
and helpless as any new life
forced out for the first time
into the terrible light.



Traxler gets to the center of that guilty little secret
at the core of grieving, the scourge of envy and the many faces and tones of voice it takes. Without metaphysical baloney, faux piety, or even a tone of anger, she writes in the cool, reflective calm of someone who has investigated their feelings and discovered an unknown fact about their thinking. This poem has the remarkable clarity of genuine self-sight, unnerving in its tone, beautifully expressed. Her skill gives us the chance to see something very private, unobscured by clouds of delusion. A very fine poem.

Recent DVD Sighting: Lord of War Is a Sack of Soggy Pretensions

I saw Lord of War last night from among a number of unviewed DVDs that've recently come across my desk, and all I can say, if I were one to say only one thing, is what was thinking? That lead actor Nicholas Cage finally become a good actor in a film that made narrative sense? Please schedule me for a padded room and straight jacket.What I found it to be pretentious and shallow, preachy in very obvious ways, with a "surprise" ending that was telegraphed from several city blocks away. The bits of dialogue between Orloff and his pursuer (portrayed by Ethan Hawke) about the relative merits of each other's chosen roles in life was half-baked and unfelt, lacking any real conviction in or twist upon middle brow cliches. The movie attempts in several ways to be a morality play , oozing with irony,but the pitch here is so determinedly at the bottom end of an emotional range that it's nearly flat lined. No one seemed to know how to direct the actors with a cheaply sanctimonious script, and the actors themselves appear to lack interest to do any free lance scene chewing.

Paddy Chayefsky, prolix screenwriter behind Network and Hospital, set an as yet unsurpassed standard on making socially-conscious movies that want to force the audience to dwell a little on the invisible undertakings involved in keeping them safe and secure. It comes down to a frank exchange of cliches and alarmist platitudes, but Chayefsky had a genius for infusing them with new phrases, coinages, and could contrive a flaming morass of cynicism that was particularly compelling despite what depth he failed to achieve. The movies were quoted, the issues made the op ed pages and the chat around the coffee maker.

Lord of War lacks all that, and depends on a slick video-game surface while Nicolas Cage's sad puppy dog eyes gaze upon his gunning character's fatal transactions with a detachment that is supposed to make us think of a man straddling both heaven and hell, pondering which is worse. It doesn't work, though, and it's really another excuse for another movie gallery of Cage's set-mannerisms. At least he wasn't pretending to be Elvis this time out. He is has his suffering saint visage on, the look of smacked dog lounging on the grave of his beloved , late master. Cage might as well be laying on this film.

Mission Impossible 3

There was that momentary urge after leaving the theater to rush home and write a long, filbustering deconstruction of the new Tom Cruise movie Mission Impossible Three (MI:3), but luckily for the reader a gross weariness overcame and I wound up spending the allotted time doing laundry and paying bills. As an action film, it has its moments of proverbial chills and thrills, although you notice that the set ups are suspiciously similiara to what you've already seen in director JJ Abrams'
tv show Alias. Plagiarism yourself , I guess, is not exactly immoral, especially if the gloss is tony and shiny enough, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Philip Seymour Hoffman, fresh off an Oscar win for Capote, relishes a nice pay day with his quirksome villian--he's the only one who seems to have any fun in this project. Cruise, of course, is getting worse as an actor with each film, and with this souped-up vehicle seems no more than bad computer animation in the presence of real flesh and blood. Verdict, if you need one: wait for the video.

A short snorter from Tom Robbins

Just finished Tom Robbins' Villa Incognito, and it's a hoot and a half, about an animal spirit who parachutes to earth in an odd manner as he outruns a posse of angry gods, and spends his time here drinking sake and bedding farm girls. The creature learns to assume human form, and in his time and travels winds up in the 20th century, where he, through odd coincidence and circumstance, is upsetting a drug trafficking operation devised by Viet Nam vets who remained MIA.

This isn't all the animal spirit upsets, and Robbins, true to form, includes a goodly amount of other tangents and bits for us to chew on, including his own authorial intrusions. Not his best work, I don't think, it seems rushed, but it's very funny for the most part. I do like the way Robbins is able to mix and max genres, from detective thrillers, folk tales, and what not, weave them with bits of amiable philosophical asides, and not come off as so precious and smart and depressingly self-serious as other post-modernists seem to. It's about the story, and it's about pleasure the story give. A quick, fun read.

I used to find stashes of recently tossed porn

I used to find stashes of recently tossed porn books in a trash can when I walked to school during the mid sixties; crude art, coarse language, grubby cover art featuring innocent men and older, salacious babes in permanent states of undress. Nothing I've read or seen in the porn industry has equaled the thrill of this gamy paperbacks, mostly due, I think, to my not knowing what to do with my growing obsession with women. This is was a particular kind of private world a young man walked around in, something so far removed from his daily references of parents, teachers and comic books that there was literally no coherent way to deal with the drive save dirty jokes and whatever sticky paperbacks or back issues of Stag you could get your hands on. It was as exciting as it was secret. The thrill was increased by the aspect of seeming to get away with something that is not allowed, and made more intense by the prospect of getting caught

Fake Poetry Manifesto for No Good Reason

The poets I like have to be good writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page. There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience, unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but  because the writing is just plain awful, being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of  real feeling toward their experience, or, most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliché choked sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry workshop.In either case, the visual look of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good writing always matters, and there are many, many wonderful poets whose works have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled savant garde has completely overtaken the conversation.Good poets must be concerned with language,I think, since that is the stock and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about language itself, as a subject.The concern, boiled down crudely, is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from a imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us. This kind of stuff appeals to the idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake, O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in non sequiters , fragments, clichés, sparsely buttressed inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.More often, this sort of meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before.I speak, of course, of only a certain kind of avant garde; one I endured in college and have since survived when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry. With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of airs. Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will continue to be professional poets as long as there  is grant money to be had, and will continue in their own destruction of forest land.