USED BOOKS: Tough Guys Don't Dance

Tough Guys Don't Dance
Norman Mailer (Random House)

Mailer had said that he wanted to write something fast, nasty and fun after the time and energy he lavished on two of brilliant and more ambitious projects, Ancient Evenings and Executioner's Song. Tough Guys Don't Dance is that book, in the tradition of Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald.

Tim Madden wakes up after a long life of wasting away as a binging alcoholic and finds his bed drenched in blood; later he finds his wife's severed head in a secret pot stash. He, however remembers none of it, and this provides Mailer ample room to ruminate about the metaphysics of hangovers and black outs and the perversions one finds themselves willing to commit when wealth and power are at stake. The cast of characters are unruly, pinched in the nerve and casting a faint whiff of what one imagines the store room where Dorian Gray's portrait was held in sick secrecy. Madden, hardly an innocent , stumbles and routs about trying to piece together the events of his last binge, terrified in the possibility that he might well be his wife's killer.

This is the most horrible of personal journeys, the saga of a man seeking evidence as to whether he's a monster or merely a hapless dupe.Mailer's prose is breathtaking and poetic, and creates a tension with the gamy undertakings of the plot. This is not one of Mailer's masterworks, not be a long shot, but it has verve and drive and a splendidly sick wit, and it reminds us that Mailer can construct an odd tale and twist it in any direction he pleases. Among the considerable graces of one of Mailer's most controversial novels An American Dream were the flights of poetry and jazz-tempo'd cadences the late writer could draw from the paranoia and psychic dissolution of an alcoholic finding himself crushed by a world he could not will into his designs, and Tough Guys has much of that desperate, tragic elan coursing through it's noir-toned narrative. Think what you may of Mailer the masculinist, Mailer the artist was an acute witness to an embattled soul accommodating powers greater than itself.

"Confinement", take 2

I'd say that the "treadmill" I refer is evidence of the confinement Hoagland is writing about; what's for certain is that at this moment, the experience recollected in the poem, he wants out of the life he no longer has empathy for. I don't think the poem is political in the way some have suggested, although it starts that way. Rather, the first stanza is set up as a situation that will be contrasted against the narrator's increasing unease, and with the final stanza, he alone in the room with a television blaring with the sound off, we find him relating not to the righteousness of the cause, but only to the gathered anger and rage itself. All these angry faces seemed ready to burst out of their confines, spill over, render their former social relationships meaningless. What appeals to me is not the sense this makes as an argument rather than the sense it gives of the sensation of being closed in and set upon, and the increasing level of the instinct of fight-or-flight.

The poem had been criticized for making use of political reference in order to make a self-centered confession, but saying that Hoagland's use of a politics situation is narcissistic is a little shallow. Hoagland's narrator is responding to the jacked-up reporting and manipulated images of the situation, an editing style designed to ratchet up the viewer's anxiety level; Marcuse discusses this when he refers to the Thanatonic desire, which is the desire to consume, engineered by marketing, to deny an impending sense of doom. The poet here is on the money and accomplishes the task of getting at a common malaise that is an obvious under current in a materialist culture.

The poem, though, is primarily about the narrator's own plight.It's an efficient dialectic the poet puts across here.Remember that his unraveling is triggered, by implication, by a media hyped reports of a coup in the Middle East, cause of the turmoil not disclosed. It sets the tone for the rest of his day, which he was obviously anticipating with dread. After he is saturated with the alienating currents of the memorial service, he returns from the local to the global, witnessing angry televised protests, feeling it as rage about to spill over or explode from the box containing it, and recognizes at once that he isn't the only one who feels like this. He indeed does relate to something larger than his own unease; he realizes the discomfort is shared, the rage is same whatever the language.
Lastly, the last stanza about the pall bearers is choice. Sometimes attending funerals seem like reruns of old tv shows, as the causes of death and the tributes and regrets expressed in grief seem interchangeable after awhile. You get the feeling that you're watching a teaser trailer of an upcoming feature, your own demise. Hoagland's wit is appreciated here.

"CONFINEMENT" by Tony Hoagland: the desire to smash the box

The misery of the individual in crowds is the theme here, and death itself is the only release available to the harried sole who wants an end their unceasing trudge on what has become a grueling, repetitious treadmill.Tony Hoagland is a writer I like because of his skill at constructing what begins as conventional narrative--in this case one suspects he is about to go into a jejune broadside about power corrupting absolutely--and then changing course ever so, to go with a counter narrative from his own life. "Confinement" goes from the global to the local with a swiftness of association that's substantiated by Hoagland's attention to small but telling details, and his particular skill at drawing distinctions and then erasing them. There is what we take to be the description of televised news headlines of a coup

The dictator in the turban died and was replaced
by a dictator in a Western business suit.
Now that he looked like all the other leaders, observers

detected a certain relaxing of tensions. Something in the air
said the weather was changing,
and if you looked up at the sky and squinted, you could almost see

the faint dollar signs embossed upon the big, migrating clouds

,

And then the abrupt transition to the narrator's real time doings, snapped from a gaze of silent news headlines to his actual task of trying to get to a funeral on the other side of town. There is something of what-the-hell happening here , with the conventionally phrased anti-politician rhetoric of the first sequence and the WHAM! segue that comes without warning, but there is something; it's about the details, the creeping , scarcely contained dread that creeps through the body as one observes themselves in a crowd gathered to the departed, a brother in law who had large appetites and bad habits that caused his demise and forced this ritualized grieving on his family and associates. The anxiety of trying to think of nice things to say about someone you scarcely knew to people you're not especially interested in is credibly conveyed here;

And Barney was dead, big PartyBoy Barney,
famous for his appetite and lack of self-control—
—now, needing an extra-large coffin,

as if he was taking his old friends
Drinking Eating and Smoking
into the hole with him.

—So what hovered over the proceedings that afternoon
was a mixture of grief and vindication—
like a complex sauce the pallbearers and aunts

were floating in, each one thinking,
"Oh God! I told him this would happen!"

I like the way Hoagland alternates between his terse narration and the overheard remarks of the other mourners, the babbling, weeping, beseeching voices that are confounded with the death of someone in their concentric spheres of association. Escape is the theme here, a need for release from what imprisons the body , whether socially, addictively, physically, and Hoagland's observes , toward the end, he finds an empty room with a television turned on, sound off, recalling the coup presented in precis in the first stanza. A hit , a palpable hit, an undeniable aha, eureka, a small but actual moment of clarity reveals itself, in a flash of insight;

Even with the sound off,
not even knowing the name of the country,
I thought that I could understand

what they were protesting about,
what had made them so angry:

They wanted to be let out of the TV set;

This is the closest most of us will come to a zen moment where we find ourselves witnessing the thing itself and not the confines or shadows of our perceptual filters as they mold our experience into something useful for a consumer economy; this is about getting caught up in more demands on our energy than our mind or our soul can stand, those requests , entreaties, commands from outside ourselves that continue to resound even as we feel our autonomy being crowded out of consideration.It doesn't matter what killed his brother in law, it doesn't matter what style of suit a dictator wears, it matters little what mourners think they should have done or what the departed might have thought after the eulogies are read, there comes the time when one all the events and material things in the world cease to have delineated meanings and rational purposes and come to instead symbolize the crushing burden one feels in the extremity of radical self-consciousness. The reason for the televised protests wasn't what our beleaguered soul related to, it was the energy that needed release, violent release. He wants out of the box as well. Escape is the issue, and it doesn't matter to. 

GEORGE CARLIN RIP

It's rather too easy to exaggerate the virtues of a renegade celebrity when they finally pass on and glide into whatever ethereal after-existence one conspires to imagine, citing some usually short lived early insights into the layers of falseness and bad faith that sap us of our virtues , and turning a blind eye and a deaf ear when our late hypothetical rebel went sour, became hackneyed, and had exhausted all freshness of approach. We don't want our iconic iconoclasts to lose their reputation as relevant sayers of truth. The irony, of course, is that our collective mourning and remembrance wraps the departed with the same kind of wrap of cliche and truisms the truth teller sought to dispel; strange, wouldn't it seem, that the efforts of a Twain, a Thompson, a Richard Pryor or a Bill Hicks did nothing really to bring their generations to clarity and purpose, but only gave the old apologies a new coat of paint?

That's the dilemma when one sets themselves up as a a speaker of truth to power, as it were; in print one risks the charge of seeming shrill and paranoid, effectively marginalizing any effect one might have had on the discourse,and for the comedian, the risk is that one is charged with the worst crime of all, of not being funny. The late George Carlin, of course, never had a problem of being funny. At various times a social critic, a Menckenesque student of the innate ambiguities of language, a rather superb commentator and satirist specializing in the dialectic of unrealistic expectation meeting concrete and inevitable fact, Carlin caused laughter, nervous coughing, debates; and did, to some extent, provoke discussions after his comedy albums were played or his many HBO specials were finished, disagreements above and beyond the "funny bits" and laugh lines and landing on the subject near to Carlin's lovingly cynical heart, the collective delusions Americans rely on to buffer themselves against the stressed out and crushing banality of their (our) existence. His was the spotlight where Lenny Bruce, Mencken and Thorsten Veblen shook hands and polished the best insights into hard, fast and lacerating lines, given with a delivery which could, to steal a line from Norman Mailer, boil the fat from a cabdriver's neck.

One can maintain, no doubt, that Carlin was straining in the last ten years or so, that he was too acerbic at last, too acidic and joyless with the sharp stick he jabbed into the side of the obese culture he was attracted to as much as repulsed by. Perhaps; what I remember is that Carlin was a consistent cynic ever since he dropped his TV-friendly routines and brought some measure of refreshing independence to the shows on which he was a guest. Yes, I know, his criticism, his act, his jibes, his jeremiads were all an act, right. Yes, but that didn't make him a phony, and one had to admire Carlin's skill at remaining an effective entertainer for all the corrosive views he brought to the table. In a time when many a showbiz contrarian is soon revealed as disposable and ill-fitted for a long career, Carlin remembered what he was, at bottom, he remembered what made his skewed disposition marketable; he was an entertainer, a comedian. He could make you laugh, and that is a gift we see too little in our lives.

Notes on a poem for 2 upcoming anniversaries

I am under a month away from two special occasions, a birthday when I will be six years past the half century mark, and the day after that, on which I will have twenty one years sobriety. Thank you, thank you. The goal today is not to die or take a drink before the crucial days in July; in any event, I've already been to rehab, at the Betty Ford Center in fact, in Rancho Mirage, California, in the Palm Springs area. What I love the facts of my sobriety date is that I can honestly say that "I went to the desert to dry out in town called Rancho Mirage", amusing myself with the low irony of mashing the cliche of alkies "drying out", the desert being the driest clime one might choose to live in, and that the town name summarized what I felt July 16, 1987, the day after my thirty fifth birthday, the feeling that what was happening to me was unreal, unprecedented, consciousness expanding,in its own way. What I knew at the time was that I couldn't stop drinking nor stop the wreckage my worst habit created, and that the first night in treatment was also the first time in a decade that my head hit a pillow without having a pint of vodka to ease my into rough slumber. Anyway, all this musing over what it was like , what happened and what it's like now through the last week prompted this poem tonight; I've also been reading Berrigan, O'Hara and Padgett lately, some of each shows up here. At the near age of fifty six and with nearly twenty one years sober, I trust something of my own style seeps through the influence.

it means go, brother

as it goes
this year
this month

i am 3 sheets shy
of a coastline to
walk upon

just coasting
on old bed frames
anticipating Spring

and Summer
close behind
another year older

in every cents of the word

5 years past the half dollar mark
20 and change since
a drink or the handcuffs
that came with them

i go to work
i pay my bills
no one crosses the street
or leave their tables in diners
and cafes where
the gossip
is about celebrities
and not what i did
or didn't do
on last decade
this month

it's all money no one sees
axis that keeps the spheres on their paths
though one cannot
see a cog or gear
for all the lavish metaphors

sometimes it's enough
to lay on the mattress
and stare at the ceiling
after i tire of visiting my problems

you call me
you call me
the phone rings and it's you

talking the same old lines of how-do-you -do

and
did you read those
books i lent you?

it's 3 clean sheets
that hang on the line,
the same phone number
for 10 years since moving day

it rained last night
a mist wraps around the homes on the hill
beautiful traffic rushes forth
through the fog and green lights,

it means go, brother, go!

RUSSERT GRIEF: Enough

As mentioned in a prior post, I admired the work of the recently deceased news broadcaster Tim Russert, but I am a bit leery of NBC's week-long saturation tributes to the man. Keith Olberman, someone else whom I admire for his pioneering willingness to fire back at the Right Wing Noise Machine, went over board last night during his popular Countdown segment "Worst Persons in the World" when he went to great length to excoriate California Representative Daryl Issa for segueing from a Russert tribute to a partisan pitch for lifting the ban on off shore oil drilling. Tacky, tasteless, in bad taste and all, but Olbermann was at the edge of getting shrill. It's one to project a cooley aimed anger when making special comments regarding torture and the like, but the Issa bit was small potatos, small beer, too small a catch to break a sweat over. Jack Shafer of Slate agrees that it's time to stop the excessive mourning and do what Russert did, roll up the sleeves and get back to work.

"Watch" BY Eamon Grennan: only impatience grows here

Writers who become mired in thinking and finally writing about their own composing processes are , in my view, spinning their wheels in the said murk and are perhaps denying the presence of that lurking suspicion that they've written all there is for them to write. So they keep busy, fuss about with their technique, advance or contract their formula, and find themselves alone in the messy living room of a mind thinking about writing and worse, writing about writing, about how hard it is to write a poem, to get it right.
Eamon Grennan's "Watch" is that sort of poem, a prose confession disguised with line breaks, a practice run that is composed more to limber up stiff muscles and assure the poet that the world flow is still there. The flow is in this poem, as Grennan is a choice phrase maker, but the phrase making here isn't in service of what's seen in the evolving garden. Grennan writes here as though he cannot talk about the garden unless he has his stamp on it, and so load the poem with the details of his material exitence.

Watching it closely, respecting its mystery,
is the note you've pinned above this heavy Dutch table
that takes the light weight of what you work at,
coaxing the seen and any mystery it might secrete
into words that mightn't fall too far short,..

The need to establish that he's at his desk watching his garden as he tries to write his poem about his inability to distill the essence of his ephemeral perception sufficiently in words begins the enterprise on a false and throat clearing note, the sort of harrumphing we note in blustering cartoon buffoons who haven't a real thought under their verbal exteriors. The poem isn't about the garden and the changes it undergoes in just a few daylight hours, and not even about Grennan having an experience; it reads more like it's about a poet trying to have an experience. Indeed, there is a the feeling of steroidal, vein-popping strain here, and there's even a bit of what one would call Sports Babble, the talent of sports commentators to prate continuously with statistics and incidental aracana while the game is being played.

Such matters can be dealt with in interesting ways if the writer is willing to accept a new sort of rigor and retire the centering "I" .He might then avoid the boredom of trying to revitalize old tropes and instead develop a style, tone and aesthetic method that can make the confounding multifacetness of subject/object split and the limits of narrative givens to break through the third wall and be in the presence of the world known only by God; Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, Ron Silliman and Rae Armentrout , among many others, have succeded in taming the self-conciousness that infects many a poet having difficulty with the final inadequecy of their poems to be more than figurations and writing interesting , frequently brilliant and bracing poems as a result. There goal among these poets, generalizing perhaps a yard or two too wide , has been to transcend the ego that thinks it's having an experience and and to bring to the craft some relevant rhetorical ideas that can help the writer actually accomplish what Grennan only flirts with here, to evoke, not define a world beyond the control of the speaking, writing voice.

USED BOOKS: Sartre, Italo Calvino Tim O'Brien

Nausea
-Jean Paul Sartre
Invisible Cities
-Italo Calvino
Tom Cat in Love
-Tim O'Brien

Sartre's Nausea is a gripping, twitchy little novella confirming the ways one person of unpleasant station can make them self sick , nervous, an odious presence by lingering long on the ambivalent shrug .No one else could write a better tale of an intensely self-aware intellectual whose physical discomforts translate into a changed worldview. Not a lot of laughs, but Sartre does insert his descriptions of bad faith of an intellect aware of his stagnation but whose dread saps strength, and will from him, makes him powerless to do even the simplest exchange. There is, of course, transcendence of a sort, but none are comfortable with its results. The peculiar interest here is the lingering on the problem and an inspection of the illness that infects the spirit as a cumulative consequence of an individual denying their potential and getting by with a bare minimum of engagement. Sartre’s fiction and his plays are for those who have an avid interest in those who live in just one room of the many in life’s vast mansion.

Still, we mut assume that some of us like to get out of the house, let alone leave our room, and enjoy a book reflecting a similar attitude. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino appeals to Universal wanderlust, the tourist who wants to transcend the visitor status and gathers an intriguing set of tales. Marco Polo telling tales of his travels to fantastic cities to Kublai Kahn, who is stupefied and enthralled, until he queries Polo of the veracity the tales, and the veracity of language, becoming, finally, a dialogue between not which representation is real, but which one is more useful in a scheme of things that presents itself only a line at time, charts on an unfolding map.

Spinning tales of where one has been and what one did while they were there is an fine , delicately balanced craft where the plausible context and the impossible coincidence must balance each other in that strange space of gravity that keeps the reader in suspense, wondering what is real and what is of made up of whole cloth. Tom Cat In Love Tim O'Brien ‘s novel of a very smart guy who’s incapable of telling the truth the first time he tells an anecdote, is a superb comedy of manners. A college novel, a grandiloquent professor of linguistics puffs up his chest as he brags of his genius and his conquests of the ladies, until he is exposed, over time, as a liar who has comic complications that might rival Harry Crews worst southern dysfunctionals. Funny, bitter. There is not, though, a sympathetic personality in the lot. O'Brien, however, writes a very fine, faux- Nabokov prose of self-puffery.

Tim Russert, RIP

NBC host of Meet the Press Tim Russert died today of a heart attack. He was 58 years old, too young.

He was a firebrand interviewer, famous for making Republican and Democratic politicians squirm with this jabbing questioning style. Anyone who'd watched Meet the Press couldn't help but feel sympathy for the guest who showed up unprepared, without a plan or a consistent history of policy thinking who found themselves being expertly dissected by Russert's questions; Russert's reputation as a passionate, thorough yet fair inquisitor was legendary, and one was left to wonder why any politico, elected or otherwise, would bother showing with less than their best game.

His effectiveness had something to do that he seemed to do his homework , and his staff was very good at finding past guest statements about issues that contradicting more recent utterances where opinions and agendas were at least mollified, softened, or at least soft pedaled. No one was better in revealing politicians who desired power for its own sake rather than use for doing the people's business.Tim Russert will be missed, and one hopes NBC has the good fortune to replace him with some of similar punch.

A kiss that cannot end : a blues poem

a blues poem

Pick gripped tween thumb and index finger
a curling current loops up the steel string,

a blues in an odd key on similar Saturdays
after the lights go down

tires roll in an adhesive hiss
like a kiss that cannot end on a bad note

nothing else that gets written
at the desk equals the soft, keening

note growing larger with each breath
one takes as the moon rises higher

over the bars that are locked and
the windows are dark,

a down stroke, a pass at the frets,
cat fight feedback creeps under the garage door,

lo, the rain and the fog
rolls over the distinctions,

a drug store, a parked car,
a street besot with an ashy patina,

Muddy Waters says he's ready,
Little Walter tells us everything's gonna be alright,

Mayall tries to bring it home
but drops the bag

and now there's only broken bottles
in a wet paper sack,

while upstairs
the radio goes off
a hand closes the window
and then pulls down the shade.

"Blue", a good jazz poem by Peter Balakian

I'd normally put this poem at the bottom of things to be read and evaluated, given that it is yet another poem in a long string of tributes to jazz legends; the results I've read or heard from thirty years of open readings, workshops, and editing anthologies are that most of the attempts to get to the core of the improviser’s art are ham-handed and none-to-fresh (nor particularly musical). Davis, Parker, Ellington, all have had their names evoked and their legends dragged through a white jazz critic's generalizations about music, suffering, and black folks and their innate "soulfulness" and rhythm, through which a sort of benevolent racism can be viewed, the mythical good intentions of the humane plantation owner who sought to be kind to "his children". It's not a topic category that's ever yielded much in way of revelation or poetic effect for me; the revisionist poems, ostensibly written by mostly white poets to honor a black American art form, made me think of the stale paternalism that was, after all, is said and done, merely another attempt to define non-white traditions within American history and defuse them of any quality a group might take to define their experiences in terms other than what the Caucasian canonThat said, I think Peter Balakian’s poem “Blue” almost works as the poetry equivalent of the sound of Davis’ trumpet. Void of the generalizations and ersatz sociology that have made this sub-genre in urban poetry a laughable species of verse, Balakian approaches the poem much the same as Davis might have approached his solos, focusing on the mood of the moment, the suggestive textures of a note bent against a modal piano figure and the quiet rumble of bass and drums creating a host of alluring shades, tones and coloration , a space that is about the problematic personality rising above and over defects of character and external hindrances to happiness and creating those series of moments that are sublime, pure, unaffected bits of harmony and beauty, albeit a loveliness tempered with the doings of a scornful cityscape. Balakian chooses interesting words for his impressions of listening to the Davis group; the city is transformed, it becomes something new, if briefly, for Balakian’s rhapsodic narrator and this must be the transcendence Davis himself must have felt when this music was played.

Light we pulled into a string of glass

that seeped out of the long vibration

of Miles' Blue in Green

like slow time in the empty lot

after soot and rain and rush,

the Ferry out of sight,

my bones electric with the hum

of the cable of the Bridge at 3 a.m.

and the dying lights of the Bowery.

Bill Evans making the rain thin

to a beam of haze before the

horn comes back from underwater.

New York seems lovely and quite habitable even by the timidest of us; it becomes not the most sophisticated and elegant place in the world, but rather, with the music from Miles' transubstantiating phrases, is the world where each and every crook, thief, liar, cuckold, and cheat assumes grace, finds a place, blends in with a rich backdrop of wise, somber hues that make up the thick and awe-inspiring skyline. The city with its traffic, racist cops, crowds, posers, slums, jerks, geniuses, writers and money-grubbing capitalist becomes transformed, cast in a softer light, rinsed with soft rain, tall buildings seen in water puddle reflections and blurred neon nightclub signs burning away the mist just enough for you to who is furnishing the soundtrack. This is a cityscape that exists only in black and white photographs carefully framed to produce an effect, but Balakian is writing about how Davis’ music from this period made him feel about the quality of his life in a dense urban center. That he does it with a modicum of hyperbole is a wonder, and the final lines about Bill Evans clearing away the rain and Davis’ horn resurfacing after an absence is the subtlest description of a jazz group’s interaction I’ve read in years. Of course, it makes no literal sense. It’s a poem, and a good one.