How smart is this blog?

It seems that this blog's reading level requires your intelligence and inspiration to be off the chart. The odd thing is that I constantly suspect that I'm in waters way over my head most of the time and that writing is the equivalent of mad paddling to keep from slipping below the surface. Ah, vanity, you expose me again!

Movie Reviews

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Robert Pinsky blows his nose

Former Poet Laureate and current Slate poetry editor Robert Pinsky recently caused a stir , a small one perhaps, with a column he wrote for the online magazine’s Culturebox department where he offered up a Poetry Frequently Asked Questions. He gave a number of questions it seems the mildly interested have asked him over the years such as why don’t modern poems rhyme, why are they so hard to understand, or why don’t contemporary poets write about politics and current events? The selected questions tip Pinsky’s hand, and his own replies are terse, as he prefers to instead quote a poem at length to clarify his point or contradict an inquisitor’s assertion. The feature read like it was Robert Pinsky giving everyone the rasty raspberry with his version of Frequently Asked Questions, and the sarcasm and condescension of his replies and example poems reflect someone who is tired of being kicked in the groin each Tuesday for his selections. It's time for the poet to move on, or if you prefer, to move forward to other projects where he hasn't such an opinionated readers who are more than willing to flip him the bird and eviscerate his often quizzical selections . Pinsky tipped his hand answering the final question, a one word reply that sums up a few years worth of bottled aggravation:

9. Well, I like poetry that is amusing, that maybe makes me chuckle a little. I'd rather read something reassuring and light than something complicated or gloomy. Is that bad? Does that mean I am a jerk?

Yes.

The abuse the former Laureate has received is due more than his idiosyncratic choices; his refusal to engage the criticisms from PoemsFray commentators has put him at a remove. His silence is imperious, detached, reeking of contempt. When he was writing his Washington Post column about poetry, Pinsky could write lucidly , and concisely, on a topic and specific poems, and more than one of us at the PoemsFray had hoped that he would offer prefatory remarks to his weekly selections. Not to give away everything before the poem could be read, but with enough context and insight into style and technique that could well have been a launching point for more varied thinking on the board. But remark he didn't, and from anyone can tell he gritted his teeth , waiting for a chance when he might have his turn at the microphone. Yet even here he pusses out; it's worth remembering that what he presents in Culturebox is what he thinks are the most frequently asked stupid questions that have come his way, queries given him by legions of straw men to whom he gives poems as a way of saying "fuck off". We have, in effect, an editor who really can't understand the resentment he's created, cannot (or will not) talk with the posters, and gives vent to his congested anger in a messy, unsightly spectacle. Yeah, maybe he should go on to the next project, the next appearance on The Colbert Report. The point is that he should probably be someplace other than on Slate.

The sublime and the hurried

• Swift narratives that both cover ground and supply both the pace and blitz of rapid, time-constrained travel have their appeal; everyone loves a cliffhanger, and it's a sweet thing when the story leaves the expected and begins and ends with qualities that are distinct and opposed, violence and kindness, but which are linked. Michael McGriff’s poem [the line between heaven and earth]is a minor pleasure because he shows that he can give a sense of a cinematic timeline as he shows us a journey that begins with a brutal and unflinching slaughter and evisceration of a bear and what processes the removed gall bladder goes through to emerge, in the end, as a cure of a kind, that blandly presented item that eases discomfort and, we assume, exists entire free of violence. 
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• It works because McGriff has the wit to show the procession from raw animal guts to a palliative that will soothe a child’s fever. The imagery is concise, telling, and free of editorial conceit or metaphysical conceit. As with a camera lens, this poem observes the determination of a poor man to prepare a folk cure for a child's discomfort, the virtual act of faith, and taken with no evidence nor guarantee that it will have the desired result. The line between heaven and hell begins in the heart of the person willing to soil and foul themselves with bloody work, which intends and follows through in their effort to comfort another human being. 
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•   The line between heaven and earth ******glows just slightly when a bear's gallbladder ******is hacked out and put on ice in California: ******the line between heaven and earth begins ******with a ginseng root and ends in an anvil: ******the gallbladder rides in a foam cooler ******on a bench-seat in a pickup heading north: the line ******between heaven and earth carries a crate of dried fish ******on it's back: The man driving the gallbladder ******used to sell Amway and sand dollars blessed ******by Guatemalan priests: 
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•  This is thinking that believes in the cause and effect relationship between the earthly and the supernatural, and fittingly, the flow is fluid, serpentine, with the sure slither of hissing tires coming up a wet street; less than McGriff concerns himself with locations as he instead focuses what is nearby, in suffocating proximity, such as ice, a foam cooler on a bench seat, a man who used to sell Amway and shoreline contraband. The poem is suggestive of place, and this is a style I wish he’d maintained. Unfortunately, he saddled himself with a title that promises large significance and revelation. Still, there are no Blake-like metaphors geared to tear apart the thin veil that divides the realms from one another. There is no adequate irony either to make a diminished expectation pleased with the result. 
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•   into the mouth of a child ******whose fevers grind the teeth of rage: ******this is how the stories of all miracles begin.
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• Alas, a mere summing up in pedestrian terms, a moral of the tale delivered as if the reader were in third grade, grappling with the simplified versions of Aesop’s Fables. The subtext is not so disguised as to make the poem an inert collection of ossified cleverness, nor is it so obvious that one might yawn upon seeing the resolution telegraphed so far in advance. Mcgriff, had he maintained his delicacy, would have had a piece where the reader would be allowed to parse the ambiguity and arrive at conclusions that might surprise them. As happens too often, the poet started looking for the exit before engaging with an ending that fit the surefootedness of his initial images and lean flow. McGriff furnishes his own spoiler and hadn’t the confidence, this time, to let his subject—that acts of kindness and charity are linked intimately with the genuine evil of existence—emerge unexplained but in full context, with resonance and that bit of mystery that makes many a spare lyric linger in mind than would the details of a sermon or a presidential speech. I'd have been more satisfied had McGriff left us with images of striking contrasts, like the animal entrails, the hammered anvil, the child taking the grimly created cure, and allow the reader the chance to discern the line between heaven and earth, the juncture where miracles happen, is in the instance when something caring and noble arises from relentlessly mean circumstances. He needn't have given us the marginalia from his first draft; we would have gotten it after all.

Recently from NetFlix: Cinderella Man

A friend of mine commented a couple of weeks ago that in a time when what we consume in popular culture is so prefabricated , formulated and test-marketed until all potential joy is legislated from it's predictable husk, we tend to praise any movie, band, play, novel as "brilliant" that displays anything resembling a heart or half a wit about itself. Other superlatives come into play as well, like "great", "genius", "masterpiece" and all the rest, and the over rating of perfectly ordinary albeit respectable entertainment goes on. It's a sad and sorry cycle, especially in the case of the movies where the critic's assessments are most readily consumed by movie goers and used to pick the flick to while away the dark with. It's a sad time for anyone who wanted who wanted to write about movies because those that influenced--Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, James Agee--could think cogently about films in their essays. The paragraphs too many critics are dis spiriting; every other sentence reads as if it could be taken out and plastered in the ads as fully servicable blurbs, heavy on adjectives, empty of ideas.

It's a classic case of setting up great numbers of folks for disappoints aplenty: perfectly fine motion pictures like "The Interpreter", functioning perfectly well as classic B movie genre pieces, are saddled with overpraise and hyperbole , written by critics suffering , perhaps, from "irrational exuberance" for a movie that was marginally better than the swill too often served up on big screens. Critical reasoning is out of whack, and films that are fine and dandy without being profound , edifying or in anyway "brilliant' beyond their professionally executed duty to entertain well are not given a proper reading. This makes films age badly.

"Cinderella Man" is certainly a fine B movie project by all involved, and there are plenty of compliments to dispense to all involved here, particularly in the continued fine work of Russell Crowe. He continues to reveal previously unseen nuances in his performances, and here is perfectly fine as a decent palooka who through what's portrayed as a humble Will-to-Power rises above his poor prospects as a fighter in order to provide for his family.Nearly everyone in the film is a decent personage--damn decent, you could say--and it's a compliment to director Ron Howard for not letting the storyline sink under the accumulating bathos. It's perfectly played, laid out, absolutely symmetrical in the way it arrives at the conclusion in which the power of contender Jimmy Braddock's selfless love wins out over the brute strength and Vesuvian rage of heavyweight champion Max Baer. There is a tug at the heart, you choke up a bit, you fret and cheer and applaud with every glove that land's on Braddock's face and every connection he makes with an opponents chin, nose or ribs. Fight movies are the only genre where the skillful director, armed with an able script and smartly placed cast, can make the button pushing moves plausible; Clint Eastwood's recent "Million Dollar Baby" is another example of the human situation being reduced to a few determinist particulars the hero (or heroine) must rise against so that the invisible quality we call Human Spirit can become a plausible thing for us to respond too in ways that are no longer abstract mouthings.

My preference between the two films, though, goes with Eastwood's drama: it veered unexpectedly (but not implausibly) from the underdog storyline and presented an unvarnished tragedy in the making; the situation of "Million Dollar Baby"'s characters was problematized , and the personalities of the characters became intriguingly complex as the issue of assisted death arose as a plot point. As someone has said, everything in the world of "Baby"'s characters changed in minute, leaving the issue of Human Spirit and unconditional love more complicated than whatever cliches that would come trippingly and unthinkingly off a fast, glib, idea-free tongue.

"Cinderella Man", of course, has no such complications, and stays the course towards what is a classic Hollywood Ending:the good guy wins the fight, makes good on his debts, lives a productive and decent life in the glory of American hopes and dreams; what makes it work is Howard's particular genius for narrative rhythm and momentum--the storyline moves ahead with a leisurely swiftness that stands in contrast with Eastwood's remarkable ability to take his time and dwell on scenes without dragging in his direction. This is not, I don't think, a great motion picture--I'll hold out for the superior "A Beautiful Mind" by Howard--but it is a very good one, a finely crafted and engaging bit of professional film making from a Hollywood director who remembers when Hollywood itself made the best movies in the world

A poet in the lower case

It's strange to go through old bits of writing and see again what you once thought was simultaneously cutting edge and timeless. This isn't the sort of thing I pursued in my writing life, and have vacillated between degrees of difficulty that at least read well, but I can't quite dismiss my time attempting to write within the self-critical confines of Language poetry as being a waste of time; it was , in fact, terrifically instructive, not least of which was to direct me toward my strengths and away from my weaknesses. I also have a real fondness for some of this en-jambed lines and marvel at the language's capacity to snap back into usable form after being tortured and twisted by willfully abusive wunderkind.

But overall, I couldn't see writing a poetry that only a brief coterie of associates and a thin scaffold of masters might appreciate. I read this and recognize that the non-sequiturs have there origins in actual conversations in which tempers flared and love affairs commenced, and that the puns are jokes I used to share about texts, authors, gossip, local landmarks, pop culture references, all mixed together in a way in many attempts to dislodge the master/slave relationship we thought existed between writer and reader. The words to describe the appearance of things that compose an imitated world are the subject of the Language poets; the variant commodity fetishism that links a unified idea of poetry to a consumer reality is reduced to non-sequitur, babble, a distracted murmur of people standing in line.

The problem, though, is that that audience for whom the pieces were intended has dispersed, moved on, or died as tends to happen in the unexamined life, and the poems and texts I produced emulating Language poets are homeless, so to speak, sans an audience to confound and taunt. People just stared at me at the readings where I dared trot this creaking experiments and attempt to perform them; imagine a room full of confused dogs staring at you, heads tilted the side, waiting for the biscuit of wit you don't in fact posses. But by this time my appreciation for the Language writers I was coming familiar with --the multi-tracked universe of Ron Silliman, the satiric inversions of Bob Perelman, Rae Armentrout's crystallization of the fleeting perception that would usually escape a sentence's ability to make lucid--only deepened in an appreciation for the rigorous pioneering their aesthetic undertook when no one would really shake up the post-Beat/New York poetries. But what they had started was there battle to put forward, not mine, and as I began to develop something resembling a mature style--when the poems were "more hits than misses" as poet Paul Dresman told me-- I resigned myself to being an unusual sum of all that I liked in poets in their work, someone at the margins of the scene I was nearest who's influences were clear but whose application of styles had grown beyond emulation and formed something natural and original, something my own. I was content to be a good minor poet, unknown for the most part, but satisfied that what was on the page with my name on it wouldn't embarrass nieces and nephews after I was gone and perhaps some future professors might find some poems that were actually satisfactory in estimations other than my own neurotic rethinking of my own worth as a writer.

Unlike Cage, extended silence bothers me tremendously, and over the years I've opted for a style and strategy that at least invites the reader to interact with. It's not inaccurate to say that I found my subject thirty years ago, but only fifteen or so years ago did I find the consistent, flexible voice to give it life. But I am grateful for the fifteen years of poems that don't make me wince and which have brought a nod, a laugh, a tear to some others and which made me feel as if I was actually connected to a greater chain of circumstance that fended off the desire to wallow in the kind of EZ alienation that is our culture's chief curse and cheap excuse for doing nothing to make this life better. It beats putting a gun barrel where it would do the most harm. Breathing, says all good poetry, beats not breathing.

Who needs to age gracefully?

Claude Scales is a thoughtful blogger with a keen ironic sense who quotes New York Times columnist Gail Collins on the issue of boomer aging:

Long, long ago, Mick Jagger used to say that he couldn’t picture singing rock ’n’ roll when he was 40. His message, obviously, was not that the Stones planned to retire, but that Mick planned on remaining in his 30s forever. That which we cannot change, we ignore.

Ah, I hear you. A friend of mine solved his age issue by refusing to have anymore birthdays. It was a funny line at the time, when both of us were still in our mid thirties in 1987, but the last time I saw my friend a year ago I beheld him in latest guise as a high toned, edgy shoe designer for Hollywood stars. He certainly took the part seriously, with his thin designer glasses, body fitting shirts that hugged his weight-machine toned torso and arms like a small glove on a large hand. And then there was his face, which was lined as it ought to be for a man in his fifties; he's a good looking man, to be sure, but the conflict between an untouched face and clothes more appropriate to Euro trash movie villains leaves one scratching their head intensely, at the risk of making the scalp bleed.

Not that I am without vanity; a mirror is sometimes the only friend I have, in that a friend is someone who tells you the truth no matter if you like it or not. The evidence is in; act your age, yes, you've gained weight, those lines around the eyes are yours, friend, enjoy the character they give you.The best I can do is play blues harp in sometime bands with musicians of like age, 39-55, and resist the twitchy urge to mime guitar chords.The generation that listened to big bands had an easier time with their idols aging than we rock and roll boomers have had; jazz musicians stand there and play great music while the rock musicians, in sound and mythos, is predicated on the promise of youth and rebellion, ridiculous things to strive for when the grey hair and creases and body mass gang up on them.

All the same, one has to tip their hat yet again to the Rolling Stones and appreciateaa the fact that whatever the issues of age have been, they've protected their reputation as a working band. They continue to release albums with new material, most of the tracks being surprisingly taut and crisp (even though Mick Jagger's famed jaded ambivalence in the lyric department sounds rather pat these days), they continue to tour , they continue to sound like what rock and roll , in theory, should sound like, angry, ironic, aggressive. We might also add that Jagger and Richards et al sound , in their best recent music, wise but not withered. Like the recently departed master Norman Mailer, they aren't leaving show business without swinging for the fence each time at bat, hitting more long balls than anyone has a right to expect. Might we get some of that energy and inspiration?

Blues Harmonica

Nothing inspires at the moment except the harmonica. So here it is,