Bo Diddley, RIP

Pioneer rock and roll genius Bo Diddley has died at age of 79. Along with Chuck Berry, Diddley was a musician who had the very rare opportunity to create a new kind of music. Shave and hair cut rhythm, chunky guitar swipes, a street wit, a bellowing voice of desire, his was the sound of inevitability; you didn't know what was coming exactly, but you could hear it and you couldn't stop it.

Hey, Bo Diddley, RIP

Yes, I bought a damn cell phone

I long refused to get a cell phone and preferred rather to rage at the yakking philistines who couldn't stand silence in public places like bus stops or airline terminals, nor be bothered to bring a book or a magazine with them if they knew they might be alone at some period in the day, between stations, with no one to confirm how bitchen they were. It was a satisfying arrangement; overworked and underpaid and yet with so much unfulfilled promise that I could barely speak when my anger welled up like some dystopic stew blowing off the oppressive lid, my contempt for cell phones and the tech-addicted jerks who diluted the language with the odious devices was just the thing one needed to get a psychic leg up in the world.

I was smarter, I was old school, I revered books and the words printed on them by great writers who took their mission seriously, I cherished meditative quiet and loathed boorishness, I was a man of the ages (or at least the Seventies), I was an arrogant jerk. Arrogant and a jerk, yes, but it fed my ego, made up for whatever perceived failures I might have brooded over and over as the years wore on. The thinking was that for all the shortcomings and defects of character and amends that have been a part of my story, and for all the spasmodic awkwardness of getting my life back together, I at least had integrity and maintained a standard of using words carefully. I spoke only when I had things to say, and that I wouldn't indulge in an appliance that would, for a fee, indulge the prolix demon that lay dormant inside me. I had a home phone with an answering machine, and I would well wait until the end of the day to listen to who wanted to speak to me and why; if I needed to make a call en route somewhere, I could always use a pay phone.

Always use a payphone. Things change incomprehensibly when you're not paying attention, and came the time I needed to make one of those calls from a pay phone, none was to be had. There used to be two pay phones at the gas station next to the bus stop where I catch my bus to work. One morning, I needed to call and tell them that the bus was running late. I turned to where the phones were and noted that one had been missing, and the other had a smashed receiver dangling from the end of the phone cord. It would have made a great photo urban reality, an example of all the shiny things of the recent past becoming obsolete, smashed, useless and lacking even design virtues for one to consider in self-satisfied repose. Or maybe it was self-deluded repose.

All the integrity and class and hard won soulfulness I assumed I'd garnered by refusing on principle to be reachable virtually anywhere, at anytime, benefited me not at all. I stood there in the familiar raging powerlessness, staring where there used to be two perfectly operating phones. It was all I could manage not to fall into that abyss that seemed to suddenly appear just below my belt line, a gaping chasm of nothingness and undirected Being. It was dread, nausea, the whole anxious existential moment Kierkegaard fretted about with such vituperative relish. All this to say that I was annoyed unto death that I couldn't make a phone call when I needed to with the pay phones that were formally available with an Eden-like convenience. One ought not to have been surprised, or feigned the indignation of being caught short, as I had noticed the shells of old payphone booths dotting the city blocks from the lower to the higher economic sections of the city; gas stations, 7-11 stores, strip malls were having the pay phones removed, leaving an acceptable scarring on the building sides where they formally waited to be used, abused, bashed with hammers and spray-painted with gang graffiti. Like some of us, I never considered the world to change this close to the route I take to and from work every day. There was sufficient warning, my senses were not addled, I wasn't unaware of what would need to be done sooner or later. Sooner, though, comes sooner than you think.Meanwhile, a mixed clutch of exchange students drifted toward the curb as the wayward bus finally emerged in the horizon. It then approached the red painted curb, every other one of them rambling with a dead pan earnestness in the narrative tongue into cell phones wedged between shoulder and tilted head while they fumbled for bus passes or exact change. Doubtless, whoever these folks were talking to knew when their phone mates would arrive, and how to reach their party if they didn't show.

So, there I was, in downtown San Diego, entering a cell phone vendor's storefront as a newcomer. A salesman with a name tag reading “Jesus” offered an inquiring hello. I swallowed what small portions of pride I had left and told him my dilemma;

“I need a phone, and I need a plan”.

A bitter sweet comedy from Philip Schultz

This was originally posted a year ago, I believe, and just today found some additional thoughts on Philip Schultz's fine poem; vanity , perhaps, but not without purpose. Enjoy.--tb
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The last Tuesday poem in Slate caught my eye, made me laugh, and made me sigh (just a little). "Failure" by Philip Schultz is that kind of poem, a potentially maudlin and morose subject matter that draws you in with some unexpected punch lines and left turns. This is as fine a lament for the Walter Mitty type as Tragic Figure as I've ever read. I thought this was a piece of comic writing, a funny monologue that gathers each tense muscle and clustered ganglia in a man's set-upon shoulders and releases the collected negativity as a Woody Allen digression where one defends the unsupportable with unexpected distinctions. It opens up with an opening line worthy of an early Philip Roth novel:

To pay for my father's funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can't remember
a nobody's name, that's why
they're called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.

Poet Philip Schultz has a perfect set up with which to riff with variations of the punch line, and that he does, admitting the farcical nature of a father who's plans for success seemed from the outset unworkable to everyone but him

An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father's business failures—
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis—
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand.

What makes the poem moving is the particular reserve Schultz shows here ; there is, to be sure, plenty of material in family recollecting where each stain , wrinkle and idiosyncratic whiff of dysfunction upon the family name can be a suitable launching pad for confessions, first person melodramas, compulsively unfunny comedies of baroque proportions, but Schultz keeps his ground. He admits his father's faults, enumerates documented failures, gives details of things that were bothersome, nettlesome, annoying--watches that pinch the wrist, snoring during movies--and yet embraces him all the more. Admitting his father's flaws he admits his own--the fuck ups of the father are visited upon the son? -- and in doing so finds a clue to what comes to the bare fact of existence, a constant seeking to create a context in which can exist on their own terms , not what's dictated by religion and financial institutions:

He didn't believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.

If the dead father's strivings had been successful, the same said "cause" of his perceived failures would have been viewed as the source of his good fortune. I don't think this poem has any real religious underpinnings other than the rabbi's closed-system dismissal of a deceased's refusal to invest in dogma. He is, rather, more a model of what we view the truly existential man, someone (to paraphrase Sartre) "condemned to freedom" who defined himself by his resolute decisions and actions, and by his acceptance for what the results, good or bad, turned out to be. This implies is that the son assumes his father preferred to live a life of his own defining, in good faith, instead of swearing alliance to a belief systems he had no use for. The son, who left town but never escaped, realizes that there is more of his father's temperament within himself than he might have first realized.

His father wasn't a nobody, Schultz insists, he was a man of distinction: he was one who tried and failed repeatedly to create meaning his life, and that is something to be understood, not belittled. Unsaid and yet implied, Schultz finds himself channeling his father's unrest and sees for himself a variation on his father's life in his own attempts to accommodate a life that seems like a suit that's 5 sizes too big. He left town but he failed to get away. There religious element is important in the poem because it characterizes what cultural institutions the deceased father placed himself outside of while he was alive, making up his own mind about what he wanted to do with his life. It's my feeling that Schultz intends (and succeeds, I think) in conveying the specific tone of the belated criticism. The poem, though, doesn't involve a critique of a man who turned his back on the faith that might have a line on a One True God; that would make it dogma, not poetry, however skillful the language. What's involved here, in a more general (and more purposeful) sense is the judgment of groups casting judgments on members of their faith, their group, who they feel have strayed, be they agnostic Jews, lapsed Catholics. The situation is universal, if we dare use the word, but the texture is culturally specific.

Frank Rich finds his price, loses his voice

Frank Rich, a cultural and political columnist for the New York Times, has recently announced that he has signed on with HBO as an advisor, of sorts, his task being to aid them in creating new programming. A plum engagement in addition to his NYT chores, and the Times, so recently burned with too many reporter scandals, has slapped Rich with a restriction that he may not write about his work with HBO, or about HBO at all. Avoiding a conflict of interest is prudent, yes, but the situation effectively neuters Rich as a critic, even on those cultural products he has no financial interest in. A nominal critic, I think, ought not be accepting any money for any work from any entertainment combine. Whatever safeguards The Times sets in place to keep Rich's intergrety in tact, it's become clear that the man is willing to accept funds and so have his voice modulated, if not muted outright.

I'm of the mind that Frank Rich must choose one or the other , be a critic not beholden to anyone who can say as they please, or be a cultural entrepreneur , delivering arts-related programming to the marketplace and subject to honest commentary. I've never been comfortable with the idea that Time magazine reviewers, for example, are charged with critiquing the worth the movies , television shows and books published by the subsidiaries of its parent company, Time Warner, even if the magazine editors made it a point of including unfavorable reviews among the estimations.The point is that a corporation like Time Warner , in effect, is controlling the conversation of their product by having both film makers and reviewers on their stuff, a situation that mutes negative remarks and converts merely into the buzz that excites potential viewers to buy tickets.

Lacking an independent voice outside the the Corporate culture that produces the products diminishes the reliability of the reviews as honest appraisals. Worse, though, is that the situation of corporations having studios , publishers and reviewers on the payroll makes the task of speaking a brutal truth to power--our entertainment industries produces crap and little else-- too daunting a task, and produces, in effect, a collective feeling to merely allow the mediocrity continue . Rich, in any case, is about to become a compromised presence on the pundit scene, and that's a shame.

Judith Harris: Soma Poetry

There comes the occasional moment in the week when you walk past a room with the door ajar, and note that it's mostly dark save for light straying in from a window , casting the furniture and the folds of whatever fabrics in plain sight in a deep , earthen hue; there is peace, there is a richness and depth to the colors you see by chance, there is a idea that what you're seeing on the sly are things of themselves, in arrangements free of the harnessing concepts of what utility they might have.

We see them , for a moment, in pure form, from a dimension of being only absurd math dares make an attempt to address in dimensional terms. But we get busy with our things we-must-do before leaving the house again, our perception , which has strayed outside the paradigm, finds its purposeful step again, and the room is merely a place where the lights are off. The half shadows no longer suggest magic or tap an instinct at the base of the skull where the brain contains its secret places and spiritual hankers for that which cannot be defined and divided up as commodity. We see these things in passing for years, and some of us spend careers trying to get the moment right, in words, words that fail them.

"Memory" by Judith Harris goes for the moments that seemed so right so long ago and gives us a Hallmark momento as a result. This is not an awful bit of remembering, if one were actually listening to a friend over coffee or a meal , listening to them pull bits of a detail in a story they were telling you, placing the detail in the right place in the narrative , and then remembering even more things as the picture they speak to us becomes an even larger verbal canvas.

It would be something to witness a racounteur stop, rewind their tale, embed and embroider the new information, and then proceed with the tale. In the unhurried moments, those days when there are no deadlines, no timetables, agendas, chores looming, and when the company one has that day is someone who you don't mind listening too at length, the telling, the style and personality of the presentation, can be enthralling. It's one of those times when you realize that life is worth the effort it takes to get through the day.

Harris' "Memory", isn't one of those rare and special get -togethers when the sharing makes for more profound bounding; it's a quaintly antiseptic, nutrition free bit of sweetness that is all set for the last line.

Those years, after dogwoods
and purple phlox
the color of dyed Easter eggs,
the screen door rattling like a nerve …

On the porch, a cardboard box
for the stray cats
who stayed just long enough
to swell and litter.

So simple,
my mother, home
from the stenographer's pool,
starlings dangling like keys
over the rooftops,

the late hour pulling us in
like a magnet,
the moon baying,
the solitaire train of cards.

We are to linger over the commonplaces set before us and recognize them, remember them in situations of our own, and surrender to the mood of another tingling epiphany, a swooshing rush of nothingness sweeping over us. The details seem less like things one would notice in pursuit of the right phrases to describe to someone else an experience or an emotion that's difficult to contain in a sentence or two, than they seem to be from a list one dresses up their template with. "The moon goes here, solitaire goes there, but lemme put the Easter eggs and stray cats over here". The details seem more from a prop department than from felt experience, and one really shake the feeling their being set up through a series of stiff, over burnished cliches for a finale that is , in some measure, supposed to take our breath away, stun us into silence, have us utter "oh wow" while fighting an urge to weep.

Nothing could budge us
from our own little island,
our own little cushions,
where we stayed,
eating tuna sandwiches,

just her and me,
floating on TV laughter,
her hand clasped over mine
like a first date's.

This is where I feel like someone had dropped a bowling ball on my head and there were cartoon tweety birds and visions of Saturn and star, jagged stars circling my harried skull, meaning that has a hard time thinking they hadn't been sucker punched for sticking with this work , hoping for a subversive element or an idea to emerge and run a parallel, more skewed set of proposals to Harris' medicine -breathed sweetness. We confront a poem that reaffirms its own inanity and which wades in the receding hallows of an unexamined life; Judith Harris prefers the world which never existed, the sort of universe where happiness and joy are givens without reservation, unproblematized by disaster, tragedy, a late credit card payment, even the inconvenience of a cold caller. Hers is a world of perfect forms to match every unruly thought or unannounced glitch in the daily plan, with props , cliches, tropes , schemes, and two dimensional set of equations that are designed to keep a reader sentimental, submissive, weepy and resigned to the sort of
pickpocket morality that will keep one quiet, receptive to every easy answer to come their way; poetry is the prison house of language fans of this kind of sonambulent tripe are locked in. Pity the fan who might actually be surprised by circumstances no items in Judith Harris' playbook can explain.

Rand is smited

Now, more than ever, I believe The Fountainhead, to be a dangerous book. This may worry a point already mulled over here, but one cannot just pass-off this book's implicit assertion that mass destruction is justified in the name of "higher values" whose substance supposedly overrides the need to respect and protect human life. It is only irrational romanticism and literary convenience that Rand softens Roark's destruction with an empty structure. Roark is the hero of all those ruggedly individualist libertarians whose opinions sound as oddly uniform as CPUSA position paper, but shed of the that odious veil, he's pretty much the prototype of the perplexed goons and gangsters whose lives are committed to making the world notice them by the most miserable means available.

Rand a sense of humor, a meat hook kind of satire that wasn't especially funny to a readership unaware of her set of villains; a salon scene in Fountainhead, where progressives and other manner of elite collectivizers hold forth amid an exchange of vaporizing platitudes, comes as a surprise, considering the other wise lock-box seriousness of the rest of the novel. It's ironic that I imagine this scene makes me think of Rand and her circle sitting around themselves at some interminable skull session, reaffirming a core set of involutedly starchy tropes that reduce what they think is a comprehensive critique into short and simple phonemes.

Anyone wondering what practical use a Rand-obsessed architect might be outside a ridiculous plot line would pose the question. Rand's brutal prose makes her hero's activities to be the most direct means to Resounding Truth , but she is an extreme romantic who , no doubt, thinks that her fiction were reasonable outlines of how the world actually works. No doubt she sees the actions in her novels as being the diagnosis of what ails her adopted society, which places her in a tradition of the Naturalists, who in turn wrote longish, turgid works. Even so, one is within one's rights to query what real good Rand's heros might be if you needed them to commit an actual task, apartment demolition excluded.

The idea of social construction has more to do with the structures humans create within a phenomenal world, and it additionally supplies an idea of how the human structures of culture, society, law, institutions are able to adapt to a world that functions quite independently of the absolutism Rand would insists she's able to distinguish. Rand insists that there is a world with a fixed , finite , and intimately knowable existence upon which her Ideal Geniuses can impose their own Systems of use. This is the kind of End-of-History daydreaming that often sullies insight, whether Marx, Toffler, or Rand, and with Rand's ideas, giving the phenomenal world over to the unencumbered exploitation by the kind of genius that is hers alone to define, we come to the end of discourse and arrive at a dreamy heaven.

Social construction, in the writings of Erving Goffman and Thomas Berger, Lyman and Scott, among others, describes the ingenious ways that humans create cultures and societies and form kinds of political resources that aid populations to exist within an unmindful nature, and they describe as well the notion of action within the socially-constructed systems; it is more a theory that describes how communities are formed and remain dynamic within a material world, whose final and ultimate nature is unknown, unknowable, and finally irrelevant.

If we can't know anything about the ultimate nature of reality, how can we make claims about it, such as whether "it" has any "relevance" to the familiar world of medium-sized objects?

We can make our best general statements about what comprises what we know of reality drawn from the best measurements we can take of it, but a claim to a final, , conclusive and "ultimate" definition of that reality , is arrogance, and over rates science's ability to replace the comforting theology of religion and other exotica to contain our references within comprehensible and metaphorical boundaries. Such boundaries prescribe limits to what nature is, and operate on the notion that it is containable and finally exploitable to our own end, as the thinking has been for centuries that reality exists only to furnish us with raw materials to pursue or own needs and abstracted desires, free of consequence.

This is hardly been the case, as the results of industrialization and war have come back to choke us in the air we breath. We can , though, make statements about what we measure, and piece together some sense of reality that becomes a comprehensible world where laws, culture, religion, art and economics are devised to aid in the creation of human communities. Within that grossly over stated riff, there is infinite variation in how resourceful the human race is in constructing relevant communities of politics, culture and commerce. Only that which man makes can man know. Vico wrote that.

Three Poems by Jim Powell from Slate

When he's on his game, Jim Powell has a finely tuned ear for voice, place, and period, which we can see with his poem "The Seamstress," which can be read here in Slate. A good poem, as it goes, nothing special in the long run, but Powell does a neat and not-so-obvious job of creating parallels between a holiday that commemorates the dead and keeps their memory alive (and in so doing preserving some order in the minds and morals of those remaining alive), and woman trying to bring a decorative skeleton figuratively "to life" so it might add impact and meaning to the celebration. Powell is rather good at implying that it is all for naught, under the noise and decoration; the dead will remain in their graves as dust despite collective conjuring, and the skeleton will just continue to look limp and tattered, a rattling assemblage held together with costume thread and brocade. 

Powell's poem "First Light." and so it sits as well with the seamstress, herself old, creaking at the joints to finesse a stitch, squinting in the night light as the seams get wider, less tight, loosened with age. Her bones ache, her eyesight fails by degrees, the skeleton is a limp and tattered symbol whose power has waned, and meaning has lessened to the level of Saturday morning cartoon. The dead themselves are even more deceased than they were before, memories of their existence buried under the same ground the children dance upon other than that children love to the dance for any reason or no reason at all because being alive is only its most fun and enthralling at those times and moments when there is no knowledge of limits, of what you can't do or what can't be done. What about it? Perfectly suited for a slice-of-life poem, an observational piece focusing on the workplace, though it's problematic that the job described turns out to be in a bakery, alone baker just beginning his workday before light. The situation is a shade archetypal, and what has noticed in the lines, "tufts dusted with a snow of flour," and especially "thick arms cradling rolls and crusty loaves, a gift for late-returning revelers..." for the derelict who washes in the creek under the bridge his daily bread at daybreak come off more as wish-fulfillment than an inspired vision.

The setting is too ideal, everything that you would expect to be in an early AM bakery tableau just happen to be there, right down to the homeless man who picturesquely "washes his hands under the bridge." The stops being a poem at this point and become instead one of those faux Impressionist paintings of Parisian cityscapes in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, filled with blurry, alienated figurines in their shops and on the slippery hued streets going about their anonymous chores. There is an idealization in this well-crafted piece that strikes me as wrong and inappropriately dreamy. This may be because Powell gave us one painterly detail too many in this hyper-literalized diorama. Had he omitted the line "under the bridge" -- the problem is that bridges and rain are ever such ready poetic words to use when inspiration falls midline -- and substituted another tactile element, something plausible, recognizable yet unexpected (garden hose, a playground water fountain, a janitor's mop, something that could credibly be in the scene), the poem may well have worked. Even so, one expects something more to be said about this situation than the idea that it swells, dreamy, and meant to make you go "oooooooohhhhhhh" and "ahhhhhhhhhhhhh." There is an underside here that is ignored, and Powell shuns an urge to get beyond his cozy poetics to discover something remarkable, disturbing, and finally memorable. This poem is not unlike those previously mentioned faux Impressionist paintings, which are produced by the hundreds for tourist dollars. Powell's poem reads as if he's written dozens of variations on it. That isn't writing; it's merely production.

Not every poem clicks, of course. Another poem published in Slate, "Two Million Feet of Vinyl," worries an idea instead of bringing it to life. A bit laborious, heavy on the obfuscated detailing of industrial manufacturing in the attempt to let convoluted descriptions yield strange, alienated poetry. But one sees rapidly where this going, where everything, including workers, is mere materials to be converted in endless, brutal processes and wind up as dust. Powerful, perhaps, in a poem that doesn't telegraph its tragic punchline so much--you can see it coming like the Underdog float in the Macy's Holiday Parade--but here it just hangs there. You want more, and it doesn't come. It appears that he's seen "Things to Come" recently and is enamored of "Modern Times" and tried to emulate their effects with his own reassembly of the deadening effects of a technologized economy. But this is not a journey where Luddites and technocrats haven't gone before; it's a setup for a joke; man shapes his tools, after which the tools shape man. It's a poem based on first-semester political science lectures. The level of discourse is fine for freshmen, but by the time one gets around to be a published poet, there is the reasonable expectation that there's more than the gasping gee-whiz of it all occupying the writer's worried mind. 

What's being delivered is the moldy metaphor of alienation in Modern Times, that repetitive and mechanical means of production have made a man a part of the machines he invented to save him labor and time.  The facile equations between machine processes and the rescinded world are irksome at best. I don't know if he intended this to be ironic, a parody of futurist rhetoric, or whether he merely wanted the glorification of a brute, soulless contraption would itself yield remarkable poems of the "found" variety. This isn't the kind of ambiguity that makes for great art because it would have to at least point toward something, give a sense of direction if it were worth discussing longer than a terse dismissal. But this points nowhere other than at its clipped locutions. Powell is a good poet who must have dashed this off in an odd mood and didn't see fit to change it. Fine, I have dozens of poems that are exactly like this; cryptic, spacey, unyielding in their impenetrable weirdness.