"On God" by Norman Mailer and J.Michael Lennon

On God: An Uncommon Conversation
Norman Mailer, J.Michael Lennon
(Random House)

Norman Mailer has spent a good deal of his fifty plus year career as a writer wrestling with the issue of God and the nature of His being, speculations that have helped make his books rich texts for advancing limitless sets of dualisms about the condition of America 

and the growing complexity in the issue of good vs. evil. He has now brought us his new book,"On God:An Uncommon Conversation", a series of discussions with his literary archivist, professor J.Michael Lennon. It is a fascinating discussion, intriguing quite despite Mailer's confessed lack of theological training. The lack of training works to Mailer's advantage; his God is less an all seeing General Manager of the universe than he is an artist trying to fill a page with beautiful words , or a canvas with arresting figures in sublime colors and shades.

Mailer is that rare creature, an actual American religious existentialist, a philosophy that insists that we cannot have a meaningful faith unless we face the circumstances of our life straight on, without reservation, and take a creative action to deal with them, sans the comforting catechisms priests, rabbis or monks might offer us. The point is that we advance toward a solution, create a meaningful context for ourselves in an existence where greater assurances are impossible, and that we take full responsibility for the consequences of the acts we do; we commit acts of faith that God is with us, without guarantees, and that we make mistakes along the way.

Mailer is taken with the notion that we're created in his image, and speculates that he also gave us his temperament and fallibilities as well as his best graces, all without the supernatural abilities. God is more like us, let us say, than we are like him, and it is in this area where religious existentialism finds another nuance. Far from being the silent Kierkegaardian God who is static,cold and despairing, apropos for Northern European weather conditions, Mailer is considering a God of Action, something of a Hemingway in deistic form who must prove himself with creative acts, a deity in the trenches, making mistakes, failing, succeeding, learning from his mistakes, constantly evolving.

The God that interests Mailer is one guided by intuition no less than we, His creations whom we are said to resemble.One might say that it's a pity that Mailer hadn't followed through on his spiritual notions and developed a fully argued theology, but he is a novelist and storyteller, after all, and his long held ideas about God's motive, condition and instincts have served him splendidly as a source of metaphor in his fiction, journalism and essays. Mailer and Lennon go through Mailer's ruminations at length, and there is something of great interest in how his conception of The Lord as literary figure, an artist have informed and enlarged his fiction and nonfiction writings; it is in the books, from "Presidential Papers" through his latest novel "The Castle in the Forest "where one finds the greatest and most provocative application of his religious thinking.

"On God" , always intriguing, quietly quirky, lacks the energy and , one may say, the conviction of older writings.Lacking a novel or a major essay to reinvigorate his metaphors and thus surprise himself and the reader with the limitless ambiguities involved in reconciling Higher Powers with the flux of actual experience, he sounds weary,as if he's explaining himself yet again one time too many . Mailer's spiritual thinking is best witnessed elsewhere, in his novels " An American Dream","Ancient Evenings and "Castle in the Forest", and his journalism, especially in "Armies of the Night".

the headache

Lessons from the Seventies

for catnapping

It’s love that breaks
against the rocks

and not foam nor water of any kind,
it’s a baptism of irrigated contempt

that makes the horizon
burn in black static p1umes.

Stained cotton from
every beach front window.


We smoked joints
in the guts of the canyons,

the mired trails
to the sea kissed shale.

All the blues from
Chicago knife fights
and gunshot histories
are folklore all the kids destroy
with their breathing.


Even at dinner time,
forks are next to plates whose owners
wonder what’s eating their neighbors
with all the strange phone calls
about what’s going on the beach.


The armies of the night
couldn’t scare up a quarter
of something to decent for all
the beaches America has landed on
in search of someone to talk down to..

Shaving "Against the Grain"

The problem with private laments made public is that too often the concealed sadness and the mixed feelings remain private, the difference being that there is now an audience that needs to puzzle out the encrypted melancholy and inside jokes."Against the Grain", this week's poem in Slate, is one those pieces where the language isn't enough to empathize with. This is the experience of walking into a room you thought was empty only to find someone already inside, talking to themselves, eyes staring to a distant spot.

This irreconcilably subdivided poem spends a lot of time muddying the distinctions between things being dragged and those creatures that do the dragging, and author Genwanter adds to this patchy mess pale Latin quotes and the creased, leathery visages of Freud and Jung to confuse things all the more. Given the dedication of the poem to Joy Young, Genwanter's wife from what I understand, "Against the Grain" is an agonizingly ambivalent love letter, conveniently wrapped up with the mock-question toward the end as to whether he may address her as "Freud Jung"; there are cross currents here Genwanter isn't able to navigate; this poem quickly locates the nearest sink hole and allow the sheer weight of it's un-mortared allusions take it down into the ground, pass the gas pipes and the water mains.

This is an act T.S.Eliot has already mastered and performed to perfection, succeeding due, most of all, because Eliot was a phrase maker, a polisher of potent lines. For all the fragmented allusions and elusive centers his poems contain, the poet was quotable, memorable, which makes the task of pouring over and debating his poems a joy; there is in Eliot the instinct that informed him that while he was purposefully not making sense in his work, IE, getting to a fine honed point, he was still required to write well enough to create a sense of the psychic states and subtle desolation he felt. One walks away from Eliot's work not knowing what he meant, perhaps, but one certainly grasped the less obvious nuances of how he felt. Genwanter isn't quotable here, he isn't even clever, and he's unable to get the balance between the self-mocking and the dead earnestness that could have made this a workable pastiche; it reads as if he tossed his papers on the lawn and pieced them back together willy nilly after running over the pages several times with a lawn mower. This barely deserves the word pastiche, which implies a skilled blend of disparate elements; this is more like newspaper clippings, snapshots and shreds of pages torn from classics and diaries, bulging, frayed and clipped together with a twisted paper clip .

Detroit

I live in San Diego and I love it here, but I was back in Detroit last summer after a 28 year absence, and the truth of the matter is that I fell in love with the city all over again. I stayed with family in Royal Oak and Birmingham ( I lived at Livernois and 8 Mile Road), and the mixed feelings I had were over-whelming. The old neighborhood made the transistion from middle class white families to middle class black families, with the brick homes still in beautiful shape--not a blade of grass, limb of tree, seemed to be mussed--but the business district on Livernois was distressing, with barbed wire and check cashing markets where the clerks were behind bullet proof glass, and the whole shot. Went to a downtown jazz festival at hart plaza, and had great fun walking around the buildings--I have a love of old, tall skyscrapers,but I remember one image.

I was driving back over the Ambassador Bridge from a visit to Windsor on my way to meet family at the RenCen, when I looked to my right on the Detroit side and saw a grand old high-rise, built, I would guess, in the 1910's. it was overcast that day, the sky cloudy and blue grey, like pencil lead, and I noticed that I could see the sky right through the windows of the high-rise.EVERY WINDOW WAS OPEN AND EVERY ROOM WAS EMPTY.The building, grand, old, beautiful, was abandoned, given over to the facts of old factory towns like Detroit.
______________________________

WOODWARD AVENUE


1.
Sane by the times the wars were done,
my wings are clipped and preserved
with tar on brick walls
where scenes of a family
hang like posters from grainy home movies
that shimmer on TV screens in Interstate motel rooms,
jet planes bring me here.
I come home riding jet planes
over industrial skyline and
houses huddled at the end of blocks angled like bums
raising shoulders to the bad weather
they have become.
Wings cut through the chill
over still lakes with a
sight that whistles through the empty steel frames
of auto plants
that tires rolled from that rolled a nation through history that
came undone like a map
folded too many times,


There is only a big, empty factory that sits here
with a sign that notes what used to be current
and what was never replaced once the price tags were torn from the mattresses,
the soul of a city
chasing the sun,
leaving empty buildings,
the sun coming through the windows
that are eyes you cannot stare back into


After all feathers are trimmed
and useless
fresh
or stale air that blows through
the canyons of downtown Detroit,
there is no
going home
to a street that hasn't left you.
with the tall buildings
we can see through.



I'm in love with skyscrapers empty and towering,
seeing through windows
on the highest floors
left open for years over burning rivers, centurion smoke stacks,
Canada
across the water, cars full of tourists feeling homesick
eating
candy bars on the Ambassador Bridge.



2.


After work, busboys
who had bought old cars
with their tip money
discovered that
their tires had been spiked,
now flat
as a dollar
under an empty cup.
Over American cities
fly jets full of unwritten biographies,
history will not settle in,
it's a wind that turns cold
when the sleeves of
a junkies' shirt get longer,
the glass kingdom on the Detroit River
thumbs its nose,
it's rounded, gleaming turrets at Canada.
COME HERE, PUNKS, WE'LL SLASH YOUR TIRES AND CALL IT LOVE,
I think about flying away
looking for bricks,
the river rolls on,
roads lead to new airports
where they sell the same national magazines,
the same kinds of tires
get slashed.



Flying over the Cabrillo Bridge
or watching
the shadow
of the plane shimmer and slide over the folds
of a crowd doesn't change
the table of contents I read,
the tires
have been
spiked and are flat in any state
in any wheat field
and downtown corner
or trading room floor,
we're coming to the age where ghosts
arrive and stare over your shoulder
as you do your taxes
and fill in your crosswords,
a bony hand cannot hold you to things you've said,
it can only point
and point
and point until lights come on the towns
that is the furthest from the center,
we cry at our own funerals,
I weep at the
drone of a plane crossing a lake,
'NO ONE LOVES ANYONE, GODDAMNIT,"


Detroit looks awesome
from across the river,
from Windsor,
all the buildings are tall
and made with stone,
but on the bridge,
eating candy,
getting closer, every window on every floor is open,
the buildings are riddled with daylight, only wind is being traded,
only ghosts shop at Hudson's,
Cars burn near Cadillac Square
and busboys swear in every language.



3.


No one speaks for the dead
except a priest
who's so drunk
that all he talks about is how many saints


it takes to screw the poor
all the capital letters
they might have written their names with
and invested
themselves in a city where the future was more than the silver of the words it takes to blind everyone the mist of promises that evaporate before they hit the sidewalk.


But he tells the truth, slob that he is,
meaning
that language is controlled beyond requisite breathing
and everything is on loan from God.
Even my name means
"gift from God"
and someday
I'll retire to the dust fields
while another
fool prates on
on how I was only passing through this neck of the woods
and now I've
gone to the better place,
returned like a library book, or a dented two speed bike whose bell
rings in a muted, choking rattle.


Everything is taken away,
but red brick buildings
look great
after the fires and bombs
blasted them empty
of residents
and meaning, anything worth staying for,
brick and glass towers
climb over the four-wheeled remains of a rumored prosperity
where nothing but
grind and groaning has gone on for years.


Drivers along the road going through the mythic downtown
now spell


their names with no letters at all
and the hit parade from
Mexico is replaced with static,
rap and country music mix together,


Jazz from the waterfront pavilion
where the sweetness of the human voice
rises in the ruins of industry that
almost erased it.
The music rides over the water on diesel fumes,
the only sound Canada wants
to hear from us, ever,
music that drifts on
pristine mountain winds
over her lakes
and forests and rivers of teeming trout,
all is industry
where storefronts still glitter with name brands
and the orchestra plays the music of dead men,
the audience places its
collective tongue


To pencil tip and answers the essay contest question
about the future being about
ghosts in cars playing soul music in Motown
where cruising for burgers and chicks
in the grind of motorized manhood
while millions move from
suburbs where oil drives the engine of burned out futures,
You're a life story on TV, and then canceled, on Woodward, driving past big tires and gas ovens and spark plugs,
realizing every road marker is a plot against what wasn't thought up,
the future that families like mine bought into until money and hope ran dry
as the ink of the contract I signed, both of which turned invisible when any one called anyone from a pay phone at the edge of the county, I try to light the steps along the street in Fall when the sun sets earlier and maple trees threw long shadows across the streets that used to belong to all of us.

What I Bought at the Used Book Store

The Gates Of Eden by Ethan Coen , of the Coen Brothers film making team, offers this collection of odd-lug short stories, collected from various magazines from where they've been published previously. Uneven, as with any collection, though there are some nice slices of dialogue, and some potent descriptive writing, but as a film maker, Coen's descriptions of things seem like film treatments at best, hurried and breathless, like the film pitches we witnessed in b The Player, and our laughs are too dependent on our knowledge, even reference, of tired genre forms. But "Hector Berlioz, Private Investigator" is a Philip Marlow/ Sam Spade send up that results in some honest hoots, and 'Destiny" is a particularly vicious laugh at the boxing trade, with a Coenesque hero eating fists over and over as a direct result of his own miserably rationalized choices.



Bear V. Shark by Chris Bachelder is another very funny novel, a real self-reflective, post-modern hoot. Don't let the tag "post modern" put you off, because Bachelder gets it exactly right as he skews his target, television and the culture of Total Media Saturation. Bear V.Shark is a great, wild read for anyone who enjoyed Pastoralia or the work of Mark Leyner. There is a vaguely described though loudly trumpeted Big Event forthcoming that's precisely what the title suggests, in a future time when TVs have no off switches and whose soft ware can sense a viewers boredom and flip the channels for them: TVs are everywhere in this world, in the kitchen, the furniture, bus stops, train stations, and in such a society, the idiom of everyday language is subverted by commercial patois and jingles. America, here, is subtly insane and in a constant state of distraction.

This is the America that Baudrillard absent mindedly ruminated about, only much funnier, edgier, and smarter in the evisceration. Bachelder writes like a master, and there's much to look forward to in his next novel.


Currently finishing A Multitude of Sins, a collection of short stories by Richard Ford. He has the strained relations between men and women falling in and out of love with one another nailed, better than anyone since John Cheever, with a prose that is flawlessly crafted and deeply felt in its economy . Richard Ford is an extraordinarily gifted prose writer whose control of his style is rare in this time of flashy virtuosos , ala Jonathan Franzen and DF Wallace or Rick Moody, whose good excesses run neck-and-neck with their considerable assets. Ford, in his The Sports Writer, Independence Day, and certainly in this collection of Multitude of Sins, understands his strengths in language and advances , seemingly, only those virtues in his work. He obviously understands the lessons of Hemingway , and wisely chooses not imitate: rather, the words are well chosen. For the more poetic language of simile and metaphor, The Cheever influence is clear; the imagery to describe the detail make those details resonate profoundly, as in the last story "Abyss", without killing the tale with a language that's too rich for the good of the writing. His writing is quite good, although the shadow of Hemingway dims the light of his own personality. Ford seems as if he’s made peace with the gloomy and morose code of honor and betrayed idealism that is said to the heterosexual male’s stock and trade. But maybe not just peace; it’s as if he’s cut a deal with the emotional sagging age brings upon his brow, and he cherishes each sour taste and resonating resentment to give his brooding prose the feeling of being more than cleverly disguised metaphors simulating the moral dissolution of a grown man’s sense of situated-nests.

Beasts, yet another new one from Joyce Carole Oates, is short novella about an impressionable young poetess surrendering to a catastrophic seduction by her amoral, decadence-spouting writing professor. Oates doing what she does best, inhabiting a mind on the verge of a breakdown, giving us a personality that translates experience who’s every instance portends disaster. She is not my favorite writer, but this one is convincingly creepy.

Kevin Young: my Dad would have told me not to mumble

The poem Elegy, Father's Day by Kevin Young,is nothing less than a low-rise building under construction, bare girders and preliminary piping through which a stiff wind blows. That's the point, I suppose, a creaky construction of unmoored signifiers requiring brick, mortar, lumber, wiring , the placement of windows so it can finally resemble something useful. Kevin Young's terms on on that stiff wind, bringing to mind the Hollywood cliche , the stock scene when some one's career is in the tank: a newspaper with their name on it shown being blown down the street, crumbled up, into the gutter. Kevin Young's scaled fragments seem part of a set of memories that are no longer whole:
From above, baseball diamonds look
even more beautiful, the pitcher's mound

a bright cataract.
The river wavers

its own way—see
where once it snaked.

Shine me like a light.

Ladies & Gentlemen, we are flying
just above turbulence.

The roads like centipedes,
their flailing feet.

How many, thousands,
to fall.

Below, parcels & acres blur
like family plots.

100 knots.

Cities bright
in the blinding dawn.

In Superman Returns, the Big Blue Guy tells Lois Lane at one point that he can hear everything that's being said, and from there the movie turns into a computer generated montage of swirled and confusing images and bits of conversation, the inane mixed with the desperate.One is meant to believe, apparently, that part of what makes Superman super is his ability to make sense to find what is meaningful and worth paying attention to out of the roiling , bubbling babble and so save humanity. Although I lack Superman's heightened finesse in detecting the important matters in the sediment of streaming babble, there's nothing here to catch my ear, no voice, or voices that are uttering anything of interest. The fault isn't with these things and the associations they might have for Young, it is Young's fault for not making them interesting.

This makes me think that nothing more was being done other than staring out the window for a long time waiting for something poetic to traipse by, to blow by, to drive by, that a sequence of minor events might become a narrative unity. It all does, no doubt, in Young's explanations for the poem and the guided tour he can offer us stanza by stymied stanza, but this poem, as it tries to breath and not fall apart in a the noisy terrain Young placed it in , is a species of Found Art. But where an hose fire hose nozzle , a bottle cap or a tarnished Gulf sign have visual design properties that in themselves are interesting enough and can draw associations from an audience's respective recollections of their own history, Young's phrases are not special enough, are not uniquely mysterious to make one curious to what thinking lies behind the slight writing.

All told, this piece is more gesture wherein he shows us who he's been reading but misses the point of their stylistics.