Camille Paglia's back at Salon: a floundering wallow of self-regard

Erstwhile firebrand Camille Paglia , a maverick humanities professor who chose some time ago to be equal parts genius and fool in an effort to get a general public to think outside their flimsy catagories and frames of reference, has returned to an old writing gig, as a columnist for Salon. She wrote the column from 1995 to 2000, and then left the gig to concentrate on writing her 2004 book, the punchy collection of poetry criticism Break , Blow, Burn, and now returns to Salon's cyber pages, declaring herself in the first column that she was a pioneer of all that internet geeks and pundits and blogoholics take for granted. She essentially provides the "About the Author" box in the column's first paragraphs rather than at the end of the piece, where it traditionally appears. She has written important monographs, she has appeared on C-Span, she was in the advance guard in speculating our the cyber realm will effect politics and culture, she is a lesbian liberatarian Democratic pro choice aethiest, she wants you to know who she is. It is tiresome, of course, and yet you keep reading knowing that parsing Paglia isn't a waste of time. For all the prate and prolix , there are the fabled "flashes of brillance", ' though I fear, as the late Molly Ivins has said about this claim, that any such glimmers are lost in the yammering.


I'm a fan of Paglia when she gets beyond herself and writes about the culture and the arts it produces. It's here, and nowhere else, where the claims of her intellectual virtuosity and originality have merit. Sexual Personae had more outrageous and wonderfully defended propositions than any bit of academic criticism I've read, and Break, Blow,Burn brought an old school rigor to discussions of poetry , prate and self-consuming criticalese and connecting her selection of poems to the world. With those two books she makes the life of the mind exciting and attractive to someone wondering whether they should bother with Great Books and avant gard posturings. As a columnist, though, Paglia tries her hand at being the public intellectual, or worse,the celebrity intellectual,and comes up seeming comic rather than compelling. Doubtless she has Norman Mailer in mind as the self-aggrandizing firebrand, but strange as it seemes she lacks Mailer's charm and musical finess as a prose stylist.

Mailer might have been a boor and a lout, but he could write rings around his peers and segue into a metaphor rich discussion of war, poverty, women's rights, sexuality , theology, architecture with an intoxicating urgency. One need only compare Mailer's essay collections like Advertisements for Myself and The Presidential Papers to realize that Paglia has modeled her public persona on his amazing self confidence. What she lacks in this fast-paced world of instant opinion, though, is grace or a sense of her own absurdity, a quality that Mailer had , expressed and which endeared him even to this critics. He had a sense of irony about his attempts to light a fire in the conciousness of a post war generation he knew had been seduced by television.Paglia, I'm afraid, is just another typing head as this stage; pioneer she may be as an ur-blogger, but her return to Salon is not a return to form. An extended bout of self-congratulation makes her sound like she's interviewing for a entry position in a new media company. The remarks about Hillary, Obama, John Edwards, et al ,are likewise unremarkable.She sounds like she's the last one to have heard the news; she sounds several beats behind the rest of the band she's trying to join. I hope that Paglia's columns yet to come are better than this slogging mass of egomania and trite conjecture. Sad to say for someone of her daunting intellect, but she seems out of her depth.

"Major Third" by Jeffery Bean

I worked in the carnival for a number of years when I was half the age I am now, and it was a pleasant memory Jeffery Bean evokes with his opening stanza of his poem Major Third, ] the most recent selection by Robert Pinsky for his column in at Slate.

It comes from gravel lots where the state fair
pushes fried dough and bagged fish out the mouths
of red-lit tents. It's pumped out of dunking booths
across the blocks and into windows, up the stairs

My recollections of the carnival are fun and joyous , for the most part, hard work and rough life as it was, mostly because I was young, resilient enough to withstand insane hours, gross monotony, and , being relatively rudderless as a young man, having nothing really better to do. It was an extended lark. Bean's poem, though, does little to reinforce my simpering revelry, as the piece lurks toward the inevitability of death and the details of a departed person's interior life of associations that made his time in life worth the pains it takes to breath comfortably "it" that Bean addresses is undisclosed, but that is the case of reaching for a far recessed memory when one's accumulated life experience becomes crowded and unsorted. It is the essence of experience, perhaps, that sensual texture that is for a second very strong and then recedes as one follows the rhythm of daily life, moment to moment, second to second. "It" , undisclosed, is fluid, ephemeral, but strong in it's allure that we follow it, from one thing to the next, the meaning of that essence, that center of vivid recall, altering as it touches the hems and trouser cuffs of passing phenomena.

...up the stairs

of the apartment where my grandfather is
dying in a room of mums. It's the song of Sunday
traffic, the car horn's hot punch to which he
tunes his hymn, the last tune he remembers.

Something begins to swell, something real is about to emerge from the familiar clanks and clamours of street life, and yet this fades as well, reduced to something tangibly minor and insignificant, puzzling to the casual observer, inscrutable.


It's where the voices in rooms above him drift when
they cheer, or sing, when they ooh and ahh
or rise in anger, say where have you been,
when they call out for help or to mourn—even then.
It's "La Cucaracha".
It's "When the Saints Go Marching In".

"It", after we follow the trail and appreciate the world where it floats on the air, is unknowable to anyone who wants to know the inner experience of a departed they felt they were close to. Sometimes things are revealed soon after the fact that are just baffling and are destined to be just that. Some things are taken to the grave.
Inane songs, quaint aromas, the comings and goings of neighborhoods; all we are privy to are assumptions that these odd elements indicated to the mourned that they belonged someplace in this lifetime. What that means beyond that is a matter for us to infer from our experience, a task too many of us defer until the day before the sightings of daylight. Wonderful poem.

Letters from Iwo Jima: Another Eastwood Masterpiece

Letters from Iwo Jima is yet another addition to Clint Eastwood's late blooming hot streak as a film director, a suitable and splendidly paced companion piece to his earlier WW2 movie Flags of Our Fathers. Bearing in mind that Eastwood had a mere twenty million dollar budget and had to significantly reduce the scale of the battle in which we meet the Japanese soldiers defending the Island against American invasion, we have all the same where character is constantly tested in the face of churning, devastating battle.

Small ironies, nuanced truths, and personality transformation are all to be had in this rag-tag gathering of island defenders, and it is well managed orchestration of story lines. The cowardly, the brave, the sadistic, the conflicted, the insane and deluded make up the character ensemble--what else would one want from a layered war story?--confronting demons and recall a life they've left behind or a life they've never had as the inevitability of American invasion gathers, literally, like dark clouds. Sappy as this may sound, Eastwood is a savvy enough director to pick up the cues of Iris Yamashita 's screenplay and not allow the character development hijack the harder point of war itself; while the performances resonate grandly (especially the performance of Ken Watanabe as the conflicted General Kuribayashi), it serves as texture, not narrative direction. The battle sweeps,blasts and burns regardless of what bonds the audience might have been formed with the pitiful soldiers, and what remains is a sense of what is destroyed as men are focused on destroying one another.

Long, yes, the movie is long, but Eastwood's style is the slow build; one may say that his slow moving films at least move, in the sense that there is a rich development the range of human quirkiness under duress in the shadow of oncoming disasters and fiascos. Letters from Iwo Jima is very , very fine.

Say it, don't splay it

Talking to people about their problems makes for frequent miscues of speech and grammar, a habit stemming from something no more profound than that most of us don't know how to talk about ourselves and our personal problems to another human being. Hence, we come to the habit of trying to sound clinical, distanced, as if we have some clear grasp on what's the matter with our inner lives or internal organs. Either way, it makes for low grade comedy, and it is struggle not to laugh out loud or lecture someone on sloppy usage. I want to keep the friends and acquaintances I have.

One of the most egregious uses I can think is the promiscuous use of "potentiality" when the simpler, punchier, less ambiguous "potential" would do a better job. There's a confusion of the number of syllables in a word with the precision of expression; the more trills the tongue has to
glide over, the clearer the communication.

Another coinage that sends static crackling through my ear is the frequent use of the bizarre formation "uncomfortability". Again, there's that self-concious nervousness that mistakes terms with centipede rhythms to be superior to more succinct words, but this instance is further problematized,(that is to say made more confusing) by an unintended, unEmpsonesque ambiguity. Are we to think the speaker is in a state of "discomfort", which is what one arrives at through context, or is he addressing his ability to be uncomfortability at will?

The literary possibilities are rich, but this is of no aid to someone who needs to make it clear that he needs an aspirin, a therapist, or a
licensed saw bones to alleviate the particular disorder, physical or psychic.

It's not that I object to multisyllabic words in everyday use, since one needs certain words to convey more elaborate ideas, but I do require that
the words exist, in the dictionary if not in nature.

Notes on Hemingway, Kerouac, Melville,

Living in a studio apartment where three of the four walls you have are dominated with bookshelves with nary a spare inch of space will sometimes find you staring extravagant lengths of time at the spines, arranged in neat rows and horizontally atop other volumes, reading the titles, sounding out the exotica of author names and pronunciations, driving through the roads of recalls of the villages, taverns and
great wars that have swept across the bound pages. Sometimes the only thing you can do with to make all this time spent regarding your taste in literary property is to jot down, or type out, some random thoughts, hoping some sentences lead to an essay, or merely work as complete thoughts. The following paragraphs are those kinds of sentences, hoping to make sense and be worth a reader's effort. -tb
______________________

Now and then, in passing, not intended to start a war of any dimensions, someone remarks about how Ernest Hemingway is overrated, his books kept in print and his reputation buoyed by conspiracies of tired white academics that yearn, in secret, for another “good war” for America to again assert its virtue. I get irked, bothered, pissed off royal when someone baselessly derides Hemingway’s accomplishment as a storyteller and stylist (but none as a thinker), but I do see the point about the cult of Ernest who’ve come to regard him as a stalwart of honor and reserve forged by the sacrifices of having lived through a World War when the enemy and the Evil they presented to America wasn’t the least ambiguous or murky with runny metaphorical drift.

Now and again I recall essays and lectures about bad wars and bad faith and bad character for the citizenry as a result, and even sighing in exasperation as otherwise intelligent people suggested that America could use a good war, a “just” war in moments of low national mood so that we might collectively have something to rally around, some shared values to swear to protect, some duty to perform. This is a slippery slope to fascism, yes?

I say leave Hemingway out of the war drum circle and concentrate instead on how well his stories convey the experience of a generation of Americans suddenly thrust into and upon the world, pulled from Wisconsin farms, Bronx tenements or California movie lot, and marvel as well at the economy with which he did it. As the moral authority of governments gave way to chaos and slaughters that only burned the earth, ideas of what were of value were internalized, personalized, nearly becoming part of the nervous system.

Hemingway is, in fact, grossly under-appreciated for his best work, specifically "In Our Time", "The Sun Also Rises", "To Have and Have Not". So much gets accomplished in such a stingy choice of words! His was a different world than the one we live in now, and his accounts of the world, is, at its highest, sublime. At his worst, he wrote sentimental gruel whose bathos so thick you could use it for mortar. A string of post-humous novels hasn't helped the reputation, and have served to obscure the real accomplishment. His writing is about trying to learn to be a man when even the teaching father is a madman sacrificing family for blind patriotism.It 's precisely because that he had issues with his masculinity that he tried to work out in his fiction , is a large part of what makes him great. The point of literary study is empathy as well as analytical comprehension. Hemingway may have fallen short of the self-actualization, but his fictive attempts, at best, resonate and move, and achieve transcendence even when he did not.

Perhaps it is a male thing, that these are matters that a reader might have to be intimate with in order to enlarge their appreciation of the work, but I think not. More, I think, it comes to personal taste, as in, if one does not care for the way Hemingway described his universe, fine.

But I don't believe the ability to relate emotionally to a text need be restricted to gender, nor should it be limited to any other smoking gun criteria. The college professors who instructed me through his work were men and women, and the women, I have to say, win for inspired lectures, wedding appreciation with critique, understanding the poetry of the struggle, and why the struggle was futile.
____________________________
Prospecting for insight through Jack Kerouac’s' journals will be give scholars reason to devastate another section of prime forest, but his novels remain , inspite of it all, maddeningly inconsistent in their best forms, and progressively unreadable in later writing years. Kerouac had his moments of divine lyricism, I admit, but the cult around his grey, sotten visage is nearly as objectionable as the devotion many give to Ayn Rand: the matter is not how good the writing was, but what the author stood for. Once the chatter about writers drifts, or jumps desperately, from concerns with style in the service of great storytelling and lands in the odious camp that insists that a writers' primary task is only to reaffirm a readers' shaky self image of being a rugged and forward thinking individualist, I reach for a good book, or ponder taking a nap. Either option is more fruitful, or both are more interesting endeavors. It galls me that comparatively little attention was given to the passing of William Burroughs, the one true genius of the Beat group, while the easily assimilated rebellion of Ginsberg and Kerouac claims the top half of the literary pages.

__________________________________

It's not a matter of us finding our "Moby Dick" for this century, because that places a false premise from which we expect writers to operate from. Yes, there is the anxiety of influence and the desperate writing younger scribes do to escape from under the long, inky shadow of the geniuses of the recent and less recent past, but I think each period is unique, and that great work is produced in some concentration of creative frenzy that dissolves the anxiety.

Readers looking for another "Moby Dick" for this century are better served to consider their period unique and regard the tradition as a lineage that is not a straight, paved highway that vanishes into a classically defined set of particulars every would be master adheres to, but is rather a broken, dotted line that threads and weaves through a loose cluster of tendencies in the culture, filled with writers who redefine themselves and their art each time out. Melville himself had to break with his own habits, transcending his discipline as a clever crafter of sea stories, a venerable genre he arrived at, to write the masterpiece called "Moby Dick".

The best writers today do no different, living up to the nothing else other than the authenticity of their process. Faulkner and Joyce have comparable greatness, I feel, but I cannot escape the feeling that Joyce was the brainier of the two. Joyce’s' infinite layering of literature, history, theology and myth in to the molecular structures of Ulysses and Finnegan’s' Wake demonstrates someone with a sensibility that subtly wishes to have Art supplant the Church as the institution men may comprehend a Higher Truth( what ever it turns out to be). His own dialectic method, perhaps. I tend to agree with the remark of Faulkner being much blunter, though he is scarcely a brute: the sensationalism Faulkner could give into was also linked to a patch of swamp that released his language, and allowed him to master the interior monologue. This gave us novels like "Light In August" and "Absalom, Absalom" that had with diverse psychological density.

The human heart at war with itself.

Sartre, poetry, itchy side burns

There are those of us who constantly wonder what the worth of it all is, the struggle,the tears,the aging, aching muscle and bone, until we happen a bit of beauty that makes having senses, feelings a wondrous thing indeed. Music, literature, all of it that makes one for a moment transcendent of their earthbound obligations and variegated sadnesses , has a value more important than "cash value" or practical application. The sounds of things and what they suggest to us rather than what they say to us get us in that rare state we can think more intensely, more creatively on our options. I think that beauty, in whatever guise, is the means through which we commit again to conduct ourselves creatively.

This reminds me of the most useful exertion of Sartre's peculiar blend of existentialism and phenomenology, that we have to acknowledge that reality, such as it is, is solid in its existence independent of our senses and fluid in how it pulses to laws that defies our subtle demands and expectations, and only when we realize this and bring ourselves to a "creative commitment" to live fully with the terms and consequences of our own actions can we , at least as Westerners, gain something like freedom or the chance to be happy (which is not to say contented). Meaning is personal, intimate, a creation culled from language and an aesthetic systematization of the senses, but it is not arrived at, willy nilly, from whole cloth; the particular desires for a form that gives us pleasure, brings us joy, and furnishes us with inspirations --spiritual, artistic, mechanistic-- to rise from an ever percolating vat of despondency and bring value to daily existence are unfeasible and practices of a short circuiting bad faith unless the world, as is, separate from our desires to control and command it like God(s), is cold to our desires , dreams and religious longings. That much we bring to the terrain.

Sartre is peculiar and appropriate because of the way he mixes what he likes from the philosophies he came under the sway of, and because his intuitively arrived and difficult to surmise views are fairly much in line with the poet's (or the true artist's) faculty to formalize their imaginings in what we can call , perhaps grievously, a "product" ( a poem, painting, a song, a novel, a film, et al) and hence add to existence a texture that makes prevents life from being merely something we survive. I am taken with his break from the theological existentialist who plied their trade before him, taking from them the notion that it is the act of faith, the action of belief, that has meaning alone, along with the willingness to live with and take responsibility for the consequences (or rewards) of one's decisions. Kierkegaard, Jaspers, et al, of course, were varied in their approaches, but there was God behind their theories, and what intriguing about Sartre was his idea that one had to live authentically in the absence of extra material guarantees of coherence,purpose, or final destination.

Heidegger was a phenomenologist, who had no interest or use in intricate systems of knowledge and who instead insisted that the meaning of existence can only be known through felt experience. Sartre's extension of Heidegger's framework, that existence has meaning only within the activity of participants, included an all important distinction, a continuous set of inquiries of the quality and style of choices one makes in a world bereft of institutional surety. Sartre, of course, took from religious existentialists like Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Paul Tillich, but the revolution in Sartre's thinking was to ponder the ethics of our choices in the absence of a God to micromanage our moral center.This atheism is not unexpected given that Europe had dragged itself through two World Wars that undermined , usurped and disrupted all universal claims as to how the World Spirit operates in a slow, deliberate, inevitable end of History. Sartre, though, wasn't entirely cynical, even if he was a little thick to read; meaning, hope, reason, joy were possible provided we realized the true freedom we always have and practice a creative commitment to the life we're are lucky enough to have; we make our decisions in good faith, take the steps to bring them into being, and we take full responsibility for our undertakings.

Why is Sartre trying to reassure us that feelings are possible without believing in God?Sartre would maintain that feelings, emotions are there regardless of whether one believes in God or not. The over all feeling of aloneness, isolation, he'd maintain, is one that is at the core of our awareness of existence, and what he would advise is grappling with that feeling of dis-empowering solitude, recognizing the source of the despair and (sigh) angst and construct a meaningful existence built around healthy choices about how one defines themselves. Not a quick fix, not a panacea, but it is about an authentic existence where we live in true freedom because our choices are own and we are truly responsible for them.

Is he acting like some kind of infomercial for existentialism?

I'd say no; rather he was a provocative intelligence who posed questions about authenticity, truth, and ethics after a world war where most commonly held assumptions about the Higher Purpose and Meaning of Life were undermined.

Aren't there other ways of finding commonality if there's no God for God's sake?

Sure, whether through art, politics. Sartre himself was his own particular species of humanist, which maintains that the qualities we ascribe exclusively to God are rather erring projections of virtues already latent in us "mere" mortals. He had a hunch, if an abstrusely expressed, that humans would find commonality sans a dictating Deity; far from each man being a lone agent enacting their lives oblivious to others , men would rather spontaneously find that there are enough similarities between the varied arrays of "creative commitment" to form a community, a government, a structure of government both rational and true to an otherwise misty conception of freedom.

Didn't Sartre pimp for Totalitarianism? Sad, yes, that philosophers whose aim is to free men from false constructs fall prey to tortured states of hero worship; where once these fellows might have sussed through matters as to what an individual can do to lead a principled, ethical and creative life now give themselves over to charismatic leaders who seem to them the sole possibility of human redemption and transcendence. Ezra Pound, hardly a friend of capitalism, found much to like in Mussolini's ideas of the Corporate State, with all the attending anti-Semitism and obfuscated racism retained, and erstwhile sophist Ayn Rand, for all her heckling about how the State shackles men and enslaves them to mediocrity, is seduced by the notion of powerful men of genius who will rise above conventional morality and blaze a new destiny for all humanity.

Note, please, that Rand's fantasy approximates the standard misreading Nietzsche received when his work was used as a philosophical argument for the inevitability of Nazi imperialism. The problem for these writers is not the state of human freedom but rather with the most effective, potent and correct use of Power that would rid the slate of man made complications. It's the moral authority of power that is at issue, not the worry that the common people aren't achieving greater levels of political and artistic expressiveness.

The tendency seems to be to convince readers, members of the literate population, to give up their quest and find solace, purpose and place in powers, forces, ideas that are greater than themselves--frustrations coming from, I don't doubt, from a recurring and systemic disgust with the stupidity of human doings, at the failure to learn the lessons of history. Diagnosis doesn't equal cure , though, and the brightest thoughts of of our most brilliant thinkers wind up eschewing the whole idea of personal freedom and responsibility and concentrate instead on ways to make the contentious noise of debate stop .It is fairly clear to me that even though he might have been clearer with his ideas--he was often a muddled writer, repetitious with his insulated definitions of particular words--his efforts were towards having human beings use their imaginations more fully, unencumbered by systems and dogmas that limit and destroy individual potential, places him in the center of the central ethical debate of the last half of the 20th century, which grappled with the problems of power, control, and the use of the imagination to make a world that is meaningful in terms we create, and are free to change given new evidence.

This poem made me madder than a wet hen

It might be said that was impossible to make anger a boring subject for a poem until Aliki Barnstone tried her hand at it. "Anger", Robert Pinsky's selection for the week, is set in situation a good many --too many-- of us recognize as awkward, strained, thoroughly unpleasant, a dinner for two who, sitting presumably at opposite ends of the table as they cut and chew their food with controlled strokes and grinding, manage a language in which they put each other on trial. Each has a turn to outline their argument , to make their case, the casing of civility chipping away with every scrape and jab of knife and stab of fork:

Yet we sit together at the table, each to serve
the other artfully poisoned morsels, point a fork,
and go on and on, watching the widening distance.

This would work, perhaps, if this were a fresher take on a soured relationship, but the poem treads territory that is too familiar, and Barn stone’s greatest mistake here is over writing the scenario her template provides. The poem reads like a set up for a knockout punch that does not materialize from the corner she's trying to fight her way out of.It goes on too long, and the device of comparing this meal and its discontents to a trial is less a metaphor than a reason to write further, to add stanzas.

You say, "You should have listened to me,"
and, "But you had to be you, didn't you?"
Then I become the witness who testifies against me.

We deliberate all night, inventing counterpoints,
narrowing our vision at spears of candlelight
and we go on and on, watching from a distance,

as we appeal, go back to discovery, retry, seek
sympathy by recounting suffering and history,
though this defense may deliver the verdict against us:


The prosecutorial element would have worked if it were brief, even fleeting, and if it were a means to segue into something else about the world this couple thought they were living in contrasted the world they now perceive as they relationship, presumably, slowly grinds to a stop. Barnstone might have managed something genuinely poetic if there were a sign, in images, of how the reality has changed. Rather, "Anger" reads as if Barnstone were too fascinated with the mechanics of making her -trial conceit work; the poem is damaged by repetition, needless volume. It is a mistake of perception, the assumption that the length of a piece is a measure of its value.This length equals a long wait in a doctor's office. It is a drone, as in the buzz of a drill felt through Novocaine's fading distance.

Grating as well is the last stanza, where Barn stone’s woman character, the "I" narrator, has a failure of nerve and instead wallows in the misery she and her husband/boyfriend make for each other:

our embrace will pull us down
through the shades, and we'll hold on to our grievances
and go on, too watchful, unable to get some distance,
reading and helplessly rereading the sentences against us.

Who amongst us does want to yell "get your ass out of there"? Barnstone clings to the relationship less for affection than for a reason to continue writing poems like this one. Poems written in bad faith about bad faith give evidence not just of bad, self-pitying verse, but gives obvious clues to an underlying disorder. I prayer is that Barnstone gets a relationship that is everything she desires it to be, and writes a poetry that doesn't reinforce a pathology.

Elvis Costello's deluge

Here's hoping that Costello doesn't publish a book of poems, since his more elaborate work of the last ten years, save the punchy and rocking' When I Was Cruel, suffer a kind of Aesthetic Bloat. He wants to be taken seriously, and has weakened what used to be a strong cache of talent by too many half-considered

at complexity, diversity, and sheer musical muscle. Contributing to the diluting of the songwriter's work is his odd multi-label record deal with Polygram Records, with whom Costello seeks to release an album on each of that company's many imprints as if they might suit particular projects. What's informative, at least, is that there's a limit to what used to seem like Costello's unlimited capability; it's a symptom shared by novelist Joyce Carole Oates or poet John Ashbery, where quantity indeed diminishes quality. The voice becomes so ubiquitous and inevitably repetitious that you're left with nothing to look forward to. Sorry to say, that one grows tired of the signature styles with unceasing stream of releases and experiments. You become thirsty for other waters.

Costello's genius lies in square in the pop music tradition, where his fanciful notions of theme and eclecticism were reined in by a sense that a song had to work on many levels and still justify itself as something essentially pop-ish, of interest to listeners. This is a lesson he could take from the Beatles, who remained tuneful and catchy, for the most part, during their great period of experimentation and lyric irony. So much of Costello's music lately has been reminded me of nothing so much as the sound of a man in the corner, on a cot, moaning and crying over a sadness he can't express. Costello used to be able to get the words and music to match the heartache and anger; this is not the case any longer.

One can go on about the preening seriousness of Costello's quest to wear a bigger

beret; Painted From Memory, his collaboration with Burt Bacharach, works only half as well as it should, since nearly song is a medium tempo torch song where heartbreak after heartbreak is detailed to such brutal detail that one stops caring and wishes that Costello and Bacharach provided some slick, horn accented pop music that was Burt's other strong suit during his strongest period, back in the day. North, truth be told, was so marginal that one had to wondered what brings a man as gifted as Costello to release a disc of leftovers, half thoughts, modest inventions.

I had the faint hope that Elvis Costello's most recent CD, "The Delivery Man”, would be a solid and tuneful set of punchy rock and roll and sharply writ lyrics as was Costello's previous "When I Was Cruel" from four years ago, but such is hardly the case. Well, no, that understates the disappointment, which was something akin to questioning my tastes when I was in college and feeling compelled, fleetingly so, to apologize for all the positive reviews I'd given his albums in the Seventies and early eighties when I felt I still had some purchase on informing the culture and the people in it about the best work the best of us were doing. Fortunately, I stopped drinking some years ago and avoided anything so rash; I went to sleep, and the worst despair was gone, but I was still irked, cheesed off, madder than a wet hen. Elvis Costello has been sucking for years now, and I was tired of waiting for one of those "return to forms" one anticipates aging rockers to do, hoping they live long enough to make one more disc that has half the kick such musicians might have had back in the day, or the night, or just back when they cared. One way or the other, it amounts to waiting for someone to die, yourself or the artist in question. It's a very slow game of chicken.

The songs are wandering bits of amorphous mood setting, vaguely sad, melancholic, and inward drawn. The worst of "Painted from Memory", is irresolutely medium tempo collection of Muzaked dirges with Burt Bacharach (both of whom apparently forgetting that Bacharach’s work is marked as much by quirky, up-tempo tunes) meets the pulse less shoe-gazing sniffling of "North”. Costello has been trying to show everyone how much he's matured and grown as an artist and writer, but unlike someone like Paul Simon, who improved dramatically in his solo work after he finally bid adieu to the collegiate poesy of Simon and Garfunkel's too-precious word mongering, Costello tries to get it all in, to say it all in one song, and then again in the song after that. His songs tear at the seams, and there is not the overflow of talent you'd like, but rather an uncontainable spillage. Simon, through "Rhymin' Simon" and onward, knows the meaning of restraint, containment, care in image and metaphor. He remains a songwriter with an especially strong sense of pop structure, a matter that forces him to make each song the best he can do at the moment. Costello is, occasionally, a better melodist than Simon and a more interesting, verbally dexterous lyricist, but it is his lack of care that sinks him here and throughout most of his output in the 90s. Tom Waits, his closet in terms of sheer talent, does the sloppy and the unrestrained with the kind of genius we reserve for Miles Davis and Picasso. Costello is shy of genius, is a brilliant craftsman when he applies the technique, and reapplying himself is accurately what is called for. The songs on the new one are unfocused and drift in structure--Costello seems to be trying to convince that playing being indecisive about how he wants a melody to unfold, or what mood and psychology he wants to get across is enough to evoke Hamlet like assumptions of deep thought and artful equivocation on key narrative points. He sounds as if he's trying to be artfully oblique, but what Costello forgets is that his greatest talent was his ability to absorb the styles of fifty or so years of rock, pop, and rhythm and blues styles and then compose a fantastically buoyant music that was at once subtly argued in the lyrics and intensely rocking with the music. Costello must not like to dance anymore, and has entered middle age with some overblown assumptions that he needs to be artier, moodier, more depressed, more diffuse, and more obtuse than he was when he was a young punk trying to make a buck off his bad attitude.

There are those die hard fans who would counter that Costello's lyrics are the subtlest and most literary of his career, something I would argue against, but all the same this is a weak defense of the general torpor that saturates "The Delivery Man". Even if it were so, albums that are more interesting to read than to listen to are fit, theoretically, to be used for target practice at the next skeet shoot.Elvis Costello is a boomer himself. He was born in 1954, I was born in 1952. The issue isn't his taste in music-- I've been a fan and supporter of Costello since he first appeared in the States in 1977, precisely because it seemed he and I shared much of the same attitude about the world and that we drew from the same musical and literary influences. The issue is the lack of consistent quality in too much of his later work. He's written a good number of good songs scattered throughout the uneven and unfocused discs he's released, but it's disconcerting to buy albums on the fading hope that I might be lucky enough to get two or three good tunes out of the average seventy minutes running time per CD.

I bought the record all by myself, listened to it alone, listened to it again alone, generally listened to it for a week by myself, more or less, and found that I liked it better than any record he'd been out in several years. I wrote my review on a now defunct music site I had without the benefit of reading anyone else's reviews; what I found when I did read the notices in The Village Voice and Rolling Stone was that the reviewers thought as I did, that EC was working at full boil once again. Not surprisingly (to me) most Costello fans I talked to about Cruel liked it quite a bit; some even thought it was his best album ever. Anyway, the point is that it's more likely that our man actually put out a great album rather than a manifestation of group think. Cruel, actually, bucked the trend, since most of his later work was getting mixed reviews at best. The herd mentality, if there was one regarding EC, was to give him less than unqualified raves. As for the song lyrics, you already named two of them, both "Episode of Blonds" and "45" are punchy, clipped, caustic and wonderfully layered in their nuance, puns and insinuations, and I wish he could write this well more often these days. I would add another favorite, "Spooky Girlfriend".

Waits has a shtick, sure, but everyone does. Packaging and image is a large part of getting the music out there. Finally, though, there is the music

that stands to be judged, and Waits sublime fusing of alien styles --hard bop, delta blues, Brecht-Weil, Beat prosody, and any number of influences one might toss at him--is unique and grandly textured. It is artful, as opposed to arty, and it is unique, and contrary to the notion that he makes the same album over and over again, it's more accurate to assert that he has a style, a set of aesthetic principles he brings into play and expands or contracts as his instinct dictates. The music he's making in the late nineties isn't the same as the relatively modest efforts from the Seventies. He's grown, he's gotten wiser, and he’s become more interesting to listen to. And he's the best "poetic" lyricist currently in the game.

Technorati Profile

IN PRAISE OF PATTI SMITH THE ROCKER

I've seen Patti Smith twice in the Seventies, once at a student-run music club called the Back Door at San Diego University, and then about two years later at the Civic Theatre in the Downtown. A shock was what it was, like sex for the first time, scraping guitar, rudimentary drums, one-note bass lines, and Smith's incantations, yowlings, caterwauling, and proclamations, channeling Jim Morrison and Blake. It was static, feedback and backbeat fused with Smith's flailing rag doll dancing and howling, hardly refined but sublime. I told my date in the middle of the Civic Theatre concert that I wanted to climb on stage and fuck Smith. My date, a demure young woman had a look in her eye and whispered in my ear "So do I..."Patti Smith may be many things, but she is not a phony, and neither was Allan Ginsberg. Full of themselves, perhaps, and a shade pretentious but this is what it takes to an artist in America. Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Kate Braverman, Ann Waldman, Truman Capote, and John Irving are no less fixed in their public identities and self-images of being people with words that cannot be denieddenied. 

Writing is not for modest people; but none of us have to live with these folks, just read their books and find what value there is to be had. Real emotion, insight, poetry, things that resonate with you despite the writer's quarrelsome personality. That's why you read them. Patti Smith I think is a fair- to- mediocre poet, but she was an excellent rock-and-roll artist; I have a firm rock-and-roll aesthetic and consider her best work to be on record and on the stage, in front of a band, and it is here where I think she taps into something larger than herself. But again, whatever she is, she's not a phony, whether you like her. I like some of what she has done and I admire her gutsiness to invade a male bastion and make rock-and-roll something women can find a primary place in. For Ginsberg, I would say he stopped writing good poems thirty-five years ago, abandoning his Blakean visions for a Buddhist practice of a direct transcription of his thought processes--no editing, "first thought, best thought". The result has been an awful lot of wasted paper. Still, when all is said about by professors, acolytes, and sycophants, there remain the great poems he wrote back in the day, mainly because "Howl", a certifiable masterpiece. 

There are several other Ginsberg poems and volumes that likewise ascend to the sublime, and when it all is said that there is to say about him, the writing that is actually good is what I return to, again and again. I worked a poetry reading he gave eleven years ago, and he was a crab, but he was also a man in a hurry; he knew he was dying and was dead about nine months later. So I will forgive his affectations and will be grateful that he lived long enough to write a handful of the best poems written by a post-war American writer.I wouldn't say that Ginsberg is a great poet, only that he has written some great poems. A great poet remains great over a longer stretch of their career than AG did; he ceased being a poet and became instead a celebrity. 

His great work, though, remains great, and that, for me, mitigates somewhat the ensuring mediocrity and cult of personality he cultivated. I would say Smith's arrogance is precisely what her rock-and-roll performance style require, and I found it exciting when I've seen her in full throttle. Personally, I don't mind arrogance in an artist if there's something there to back it up. I admire writers Norman Mailer and Camille Paglia, two strong personalities who back up their bluster with strong and eloquent word-smith-ing. The distinction between the gifted egotist and the blustering pretender would be that the gifted egotist's personality receded after a while and a reader confronts their assertions at face value.

 The pretender's disguise merely dissolves like spun sugar against a wet tongue. Smith, in a more limited sense, is akin to the aforementioned two; she is not a writer, really, but a performer tapping into energies made real by her immodest assertions. In a rock-and-roll context, I think it's riveting, and there is a strong DIY appeal here. She's marshaled her limit assets as a singer and musician, and even as a poet and transformed everything into a perfect rock-and-roll concept, where rough-hewed elements and qualities of the self-taught are deathless assets. If arrogance and extreme self-confidence are, of themselves, qualities one objects to regardless of the work produced, there's nothing I can say to change your mind.