Wayne Shorter's Ensemble Straight Jacket

Alegria -Wayne Shorter

Fronting a superb brass and woodwind ensemble, saxophonist Wayne Shorter goes to expand his considerable palette with this 2003 set of compositions intended, I suppose, to highlight his talent as a master of texture, tone color and someone who can lead a large ensemble through theme and variation. This is not Ellington, this is not Julius Hemphill, this is not even Gunther Schuller. What is, though, is monotony on a virtuoso level. Technically there is much to admire, but there is little to enjoy since the project is obsessed with making Alegria match other large-group efforts at the sacrifice of the punch and flurry a richly showcased set of improvisations would provide. Oh, if they had reached a little less and jammed a little more. Davis didn't forget to swing amid the expanded contexts of Kind of Blue, and neither Mingus nor Monk forgot the blues wail or the gospel shout in the textures and subtler angles of their respective concert works. There are moments here, of course where Shorter's tenor and soprano saxophone sorties emerge from the arty murk and redundant changes of the ensemble to lighten up the proceedings, but even here it feels rootless, divorced from the melodies they should be making statements upon; one senses Shorter trying to make something happen. Nothing does as a result.

Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate

I'd be pleased if a poet preferring small matters to big themes became our Poet Laureate. But in the value of Kay Ryan, I find her work malnourished, under muscled, simply lifeless, and still as a rusty coin in a cushion crack. She is part of the School of Quietude, a dismissive term coined by Ron Silliman to describe the poets of the larger marketplace who concentrate on approaches to poetry that will not attempt to tackle more than one idea at a time. I have less animus toward poets who desire to do one thing well before moving on to the next matter at hand and have taken more than a bit of joy reading Billy Collins, Robert Haas.  Collins, though, is someone whom you "get" in short order, amused, shall we say, but his stylish effects but with no compelling reason to revisit the poem. Dickinson, certainly not a Quietuder (although she has been mentioned in conjunction with Ryan's name), shows all of us that compact does not mean straightforward; whole philosophies and shades of far-reaching intellection exist between those dashes. We read her because she's not easy to reach; with each re-reading, the reader tends to bring more to their experience of her work. Collins gets paraphrased, like a joke one half-recalls. The impression he leaves is soon smoothed into a general nothingness like the white noise that makes up radio static.

The compressed diction, the ruthlessly scoured syntax, and sparse, clean rhythms (or rhythmless, at times) is breathtaking when it works in the world of single-subject poets, analogous to rare moments when a perception, an odd and unplanned arrangement of things, surprises you when your eyes come to rest on them. It's the sight of surprise, the aha!, and the short formers, the Quietuders, likely excavate against excess rhetoric and come upon the one thing they are writing about. It's not an easy thing to do well. But more often, it is a mere shtick, a form of slick aptitude for evading the harder edges a poet would be expected to walk on. One idea, maybe too, a good turn of phrase, a quick exit. Ryan, though, isn't even this interesting.

My problem with Ryan is that too typically, she seems to be getting started on an idea, about to unravel some mystery of a material thing and connect it with an ongoing argument each poet has against Platonic idealism. Still, she leaves, darts away, and is elsewhere after her aggravations are generated.

Bad Day

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf.

From Say Uncle, 2000

One admires skeletal purity and an aesthetic that won't be overstated or festooned with gamy rhetoric. Still, there are some things Ryan might have taken from the more formal approaches she turned her back on, central among them the need to finish a thought. As with the above, the ganging up of internal rhymes makes this poem cute as a button but not practical as a poem. It would serve, I suppose, as a setup for a more extended set of complications with the size of the clothes one is supposed to wear. Still, the theme is rather banal: one grows out of their clothes as they age and gain weight, and complications don't seem to interest Ryan anyway. Incompleteness can indeed be appealing in a poet who provides a strong sense of the absent details they address elliptically--strong points for Dickinson and the fascinating Rae Armentrout--but Ryan's is not that kind of poet. Her poems make you lean in so you can hear this soft voice suss through contradictions and the follies of fanciful thinking, but it ends in a mumble.

One should consider the work of a lesser-known but though brilliantly clear-eyed poet named Kate Watson, a writer I know and was featured within a 1996 anthology Small Rain: Eight Poets from San Diego (D.G.Wills Books). Her tone is modulated, her sentences balance tactile adjectives and purring verbs with an uncanny equilibrium, and her quiet moments transcend the perceived banalities of the School of Quietude and actually enter into perceptions that are sweetly unique, clear, aesthetically riveting. Something is arrived at. The rare thing about my friend Kate is that her version of considering the thing-in-and-of-itself is without the faux profundity so many other poets would evoke despite their best efforts to rein in their egos; poets by nature have a hard time stepping from being the Arnoldian seer/priest. Kate Watson's is a poetry that is in large part free of those posturing suppositions.

Smudge

Pussycat,

pink eared, squints

in the sunshine,

sniffing flowers.

Button-eyed, she

purrs and

furlicks my legs

in the kitchen.

Four years ago, four

kittens born

in a drawer, smelled

of a barnyard.

Mature, she sleeps

in a circle,

the slope of her head suggests--young doe.

Trinity

She meets I

in the body

which is one

with my mother

I can see

where sits by the blue fire

flame-quick knitting

Is she sighing

shall I sing

she is I

am a long way away

when the wind blows

white wall coal black

light grey hair

my mother winks

from the middle of the flame

and I rise up

and leave her

alone

In the fire a reflection

coming home?

(C) 2008 Kate Watson

This is just a way of saying that the Library of Congress could have made a better choice. Saying that they could have done worse than Ryan doesn't say much for the office nor for what good graces are to be found in her conceit-laden lines.

A windy defense of the "Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara"

Selected Poems
Frank O'Hara
Edited by Mark Ford (Alfred A. Knopf).

Famously dour poetry critic William Logan smooths a few of the wrinkles from his creased visage and assess editor Mark Ford's new Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara with a surprisingly even hand. That is, he found some nice things to say about a poet you wouldn't have thought he'd consider to have any saving graces .The upshot is that he has a peeve against massive "Collected Poems" from dead writers where the good work is buried among limitless juvenilia and failed experiments. The poems of O'Hara, he writes, needed a good weeding.

"O’Hara’s wonderful poems are all too easily drowned out by the vivifying mediocrity of the rest. At times the banalities pile up and overwhelm the poems — but then they were the poems. Rarely has an American poet so influential (two generations of urban poets have come out of O’Hara’s shopping bag) written so many poems dull to anyone except his genial fanatics — his very notion of the aesthetic courted failure as a method.... When O’Hara was lucky, he was very lucky, because his method could not help but fail most of the time."

One does have to admire this congenial sourpuss's ability with a phrase.I happen to love my massive , Donald Allen edited Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara , and think that Logan is being obtuse for the sake of not diminishing his reputation for taking iconic writers to task, but all the same, enjoy the review. What is significant and wonderfully successful about O'Hara's poem is , as Ron Silliman upon, he was the first American poet since William Carlos Williams to shy from, lampoon or ignore altogether the dominant conventions of formal, high style then current in American poetry and to instead settle on a unique idea of the patois of American cities. There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's epiphany, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language.

Not unlike the live-wire architectural cubism in Stuart Davis paintings, with their jazz inflected angles , bright,bursting colors and idiomatic use of advertising iconography (but avoiding the entombing tendencies that doomed Pop Art), O'Hara's writes the poetry equivalent of a man supremely stimulated by what the boundless blocks and tall buildings of New York could bring him; his was the rhythm of someone wanting to talk to you about a dozen items at once, and there in is his genius; with so many things to relate, to remark upon, to marvel at and express the accelerated rush of emotional response, the poet allows matters to drift, topics to drop, creating an impressive verse that is at once of it's time and yet timeless in the sense that a reader to this day recognizes the exhilaration and sadness of O'Hara's valedictorian missives, both compact and expanded, generalized and specific to friends, lovers, situations.

There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's epiphany, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language. As others would learn from him, O'Hara was the master of not getting to the point. The point , if any, was that he was alive in a life that was simply too incredible for words to contain.

GOP parody a flat tire

Daniel Nasaw writes the deadline:USA news blog for the Guardian , and ran an item regarding an ad produced by the Republican National Committee intended as a parody of Obama's recent speech in Berlin. The point, one would guess, is what would an Obama election ad look like if he were running in Germany rather than in the United States. We are meant to shiver with the slight yet obvious Nazi implications and indulge our Europhobia yet again. The fear card is a hand these guys cannot stop playing. The ad here.

A weak parody that lands far afield any target the would-be propagandists might have had in mind. One wonders how the fact that Obama is liked by Germans should bedistrubing to American voters. The opposite is more likely.Disgust with the war policies and subsequent disasters of the Bush Administration would cause a good many voters to be heartened with the prospect that there's a major Presidential candidate Europeans actually like,respect and are eager to cooperate with. Those of us in the States are sick of going it alone and being the bane of Civilization's existence; we're more than aware that the cowboy antics of our current group of election-hijacking thugs have made matters domestic and international a miserable mess. What's clear is that the RNC is desperate to undermine the success of the Obama trip; McCain and his surrogates dared him to go to Irag and Afghanistan with the expectation that Barack Obama's alleged naivete and inexperience would cause to make mistakes, commit gaffs and otherwise look unprepared and ill suited for the job he's running for. Nothing of the sort happened, of course, and the Republican Noise Machine is reduced to seeming like a nitpicking, complaining, embarrassed and whiny bunch of playground bullies who are trying to recover from a humiliating and deserved public spanking.

This would be a suitable footnote for a dictionary of famous phrases, specifically "hoist by one's petard", IE,

"To be caught in one’s own trap: “The swindler cheated himself out of most of his money, and his victims were satisfied to see him hoist by his own petard.” A “petard” was an explosive device used in medieval warfare. To be hoisted, or lifted, by a petard literally means to be blown up"

---(from Bartleby.com).

In a less literary vein, this is the equivalent of an inept robber getting shot with his own gun. That's gotta hurt.

poem: This page & a pair of pants

No romance for dental ovine modular cordless
Coltrane sheets for loud wall paper, habitue
lounge jazz frisky changes bandstand waltz time
allegro tropic corridor rhyme scheme , harmony boned up
like homework under iteration sans antidote to anecdotal
grave-cleaning, take the pennies off a dead man's eyes,
Yes to negative figuration as Madonna herself
gypsy queen of the Kick Stand Church of Low Heeled
gas line, stretch pants show the gender and the money
she and he carry as they travel between drainage ditches,
in my mind there are always factories gone behind forests
quiet as the commas gracing this page & a pair of pants
zipped up, sans legs, arms, a useful torso.
No time in half acre barn dance
means quarter notes and bandstand antics
grappling with third moon erasing
cruel ripples trails never clear
in diacritical manager's special,
the choice leaves on the absent pages
crack with what's made of history
but there are no bannisters to slide
down in Oakland
where you house exists
on a lake cured of flat fish and mud sharks,
after tonight everything is in the present tense,
But what you said even then,
as the strawmen fell out of their jeans
and shirts and their hats floated across
the stained planks of the gymnasium floor,
that our lives are less
now that bull whip politics
has an attitude
about spiral notebooks that
come undone and get stuck
to the notebook it lays atop,
all the notes are written at an angle,

What was said about masters and slaves
crawls over the slippery finger tips
of land lease, yeah, he said
I pull the trigger until it goes “click”.

Deconstructing the Deconstructed

Architecture is an art form, but of course, the crucial distinction between this art and other mediums is what the consumer, the perceived, and the witness to the artwork can do when confronted with unsatisfying works. One can walk out of a movie they dislike, they can walk past ugly paintings without relinquishing many linear feet of space, no one can not buy books by authors or poets they find not worth the time. As in Richard Serra's obese steel curtains, even massive sculptures can be removed from the public space they bother. But architecture? Great and ugly buildings are both more or less forever once they are constructed; in either case, one hasn't the option to ignore them. A structure can either be the greatest gift to a community or the vilest curse on its horizon. Thom Mayne's new U.S.Federal Building in San Francisco is a case in point; Architecture critic and historian Witold Rybczynski offers an even-handed critique in his current Slate column/slide show, and I do wish I had his sage-like repose. My recent view of it provoked something less generous. It would've been interesting if someone who actually had to work in the proposed building five days a week were involved in this building's planning. Assuming that each of Mayne's notions and details would be explained to a potential group of structure inhabitants, the architect might have received the sort of practical, technical, aesthetic feedback that would have prevented the Federal Building from being another whiz-kid vanity project constructed with public money.

But alas, there are the lingering traces of Howard Roark's fictional fingerprints all over the self-image of many a star architect. Even with the requirements that the project meet budget deadlines, structural codes, and conservation requirements, the structure will provide all the same penancethe petty concerns of practicality and beauty for whimsical design innovation that, although reputation making, age badly, look tawdry and contrived over time, and are more imposition than benefit to the community they are built-in. I've walked alongside this aberration, and the experience is, say, less gratifying than walking past a boarded-up storefront. I had the sensation of being crowded off the sidewalk, or worse, of feeling compelled to try and outrun an avalanche. From street level, it's a densely packed leviathan that promises a hard road ahead, a bleak and desolate future for the civic population that dares to remain in cities. From afar, it resembles nothing so much as a collection of remote control devices that had been taken apart, bashed with a hammer, and reassembled with two bottles of Super Glue.

One reads continually in interviews and scholarly critiques that the capital "A" architect desires and is compelled by little muses to challenge the citizen and force them into various dialogues, inquiries, inquests, and critical examinations of their relationships with shapes and forms. The purpose of that, I suppose, is to coerce the mere resident and worker to confess that any expectation of graceful and efficient buildings in crowded centers is an indulgence. The hidden agenda isn't just glorifying the builder who sees himself as a social engineer but diminishing the stature of the citizen from whom all power flows; symbolically, the building informs us rather plainly that the electorate's consent is damned. Albert Speer would nod and give a knowing chuckle if he observed the grandstanding disarray constructed on the San Francisco site. I couldn't help but think that Thom Mayne's realized this too and was somewhat giddy thinking that he was getting paid by the same public his new building would vex.

The Dark Knight

I was wondering if DC Comics would ever deliver a counter punch to the glut of comic book movies arch rival Marvel Comics has so far managed to bring to the screen, and now, on the eve attending the San Diego Comic Con, I have my answer, The Dark Knight, directed by Chris Nolan. It's earned over a $158 million dollars on it' first weekend, blowing away the previous champ, Spiderman 3 , and may well become the biggest earner of the year. What did I think? Well...I rather liked the movie over all, but my basic complaint is the one that plagues nearly all Hollywood films these days; The Dark Knight is simply too long. One has to admit that there is little slack time here and that all the materials coming at you are part of an intricate and dense weave, but the attempt to compensate for length by having a brisk pace results , if not torpor, then monotony. Would if director Nolan had paused and let Batman, the Joker and the lot perform their drama agains the glorious architecture and neighborhoods that are Chicago; racing through them makes one feel cheated visually, giving you the effect of trying to see a city while driving through the city after dark on the freeway leading out of town. The additional padding comes with the character of crusading DA Harvey Dent, who's commitment to clean up Gotham City has Batman more or less grooming him to assume the mantel of being the town's symbol of law and order. The tension between he and Bruce Wayne/Batman for the affection of the same woman would've been compelling enough, but having Dent morphed into Two Face and become an an aggrieved avenging angel, replete with gimmicky suit, is bloat.Aaron Eckhart’s performance as the pre-disillusioned Dent is so effective to the narrative drive that I wouldn't have had the character disfigured and made over into an insane villain in the same movie, saving the Two Face saga for another movie. The final was flat, pat, predictable. Plot management seems to be a challenge for director Chris Nolan, and one wishes there had been someone around advising him to condense when he should have, to slow down when he could have.

Birthdays

Time was in the seventies and eighties when I had an exceedingly high opinion of my opinions about poetry, literature, movies, and music, and it followed that during the period I would share my opinions with you as to the aesthetic merits and sins of what cultural agents were trying to sell us. Rather, it was more like I was telling you how the world work or why it didn't work; I wasn't a philosopher, a politician, or priest. None of that. I was something better, a critic. My reviews were in the Reader, The Door, The UCSD Guardian, Kicks, The Triton Times, The Paper, tabloid pages were my means to have a say on lyrics, fumbled organ solos, botched metaphors, I was in love with my own voice as it said sour things about a whole lot of people places and things.

Not that I've come any more modest with time, but I've calmed down some since taking the pledge; being a drunk for twenty years with the arrogance I held onto is looping mindset that kept me drunk. Not to wander into a drunkalog here, but let us say that my phone stopped ringing, my prose was incoherent, my poetry naught but an angry page of typos. Getting older and sobering up, I'll say, are the best decisions I could have made under my reeking circumstances. It's a miracle that I was able to make the decision at all.



Well, here we are again, another pair of special occasions come and gone, and still, the novelty of turning 56 on my birthday and the celebrating a 21st sober anniversary hasn't worn off. When I was younger, in my thirties, this arrangement of back-to-back touchstone dates were my primary bragging rights, something I would share, no, declare to each stranger, work mate, attempted girl friend and luckless traveler. It became a standardized rap, a memorized monologue about miracles, phoenixes arising from stirred ashes, cruelties, indignations and various cheats against daily ethical limits, and the sure deliverance a horrible biography needed.

Sure enough, I was impressed with the results I'd experienced as a result of laying aside the bottle, but I was word drunk all the same, and often times a bore. With every success in work, love, career, with each disaster or middle state of the same, sobriety was my boilerplate, spirituality was the punch line, and the signature phrase was my length of sobriety was the number of years I was beyond my life expectancy. The miracle sounded canned, in other words, and I could hear myself going through my paces as if I were the person I was talking at (as opposed to speaking with).

Even I couldn't deny the staleness of the best phrases, how slack the cadences and rhythms had become. It was something I couldn't spice up, juice up, liven up no matter my efforts; the only thing left to make it interesting to dwell on such matters aloud would be to make things up, that is, to lie, but that was contrary to the point of staying sober in a fellowship constituted on a spiritual cure for my hopeless situation as someone who couldn't stop drinking by his own power. So I a sat in the back of the rooms where folks like me gather night by night, listening hard, making it a point to ask how other people were doing, letting them finish their answers ; the hardest part of this project to take a genuine interest in others was refraining from offering up my own version of the anecdote they might have shared, and to avoid giving intense forms of unsolicited advice on what they ought to be doing with their problems. Surely, it was a humbling experience realizing that those around me weren't problems to be solved or ills to be cured, but rather people with live no less difficult and no less blessed than my own. At 56 and 21 respectively, I think I might be getting the hang of that simple notion.

USED BOOKS: The Poems of Norman Mailer

Modest Gifts:Poems and Drawings
Norman Mailer (Random House Trade)

Some of us think Norman Mailer ought to win the Nobel Prize for literature because of the sure and quarrelsome genius of his books and the ideas they contained; like him or consider him an aberration in the culture, a number of the styles he took, particularly the novel, the essay and journalism, gave you a personality that was hard to ignore.

 Many who thought him a lout , a grind, an egomaniac had to admit, after reading him to counter his many assertions about many things, that Mailer was, after, a Great Writer. Joyce Carol Oates, an astute critic of Mailer, offered that Mailer's ideas were dangerous because he wrote so well.This, though, isn't one of those books," Modest Gifts" being, at best, a gussied up reissue of a lone book of verse he produced in the early Sixties,"Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)". Now, as then, the pieces are slight, skeletal, un-propelled by anything resembling a notion that the reader cares about. For a writer who's composed some of the richest prose and lyric flights this side of Faulkner and DeLillo, these efforts are so minimal that even a verbal skinflint like Hemingway would call these gifts not modest ,but cheap. The poems were written in the early sixties when the author had several professional , legal and marital crisis hanging over him, a situation that had given him writer's block and which, as a professional writer, placed an additional burden on him.

Brief, truncated in content, artless in the lack of interest of achieving the sort of ambiguity that is poetry's to apply to the senses, the poems are more like pained gasps of someone airing their gripes, bitches, and congested rage in a sequence of angular phrases. These are the kinds of things you might hear in an operating room when the patient's ether and pain killers wear off. The splintered style, rough and absent color, rhythm or graceful metaphor, is what Mailer wanted to present the public, though, and thought it in his best interest to write about his troubles in a language that lacked the elegant buttressing his essays and journalism could achieve. Of interest to scholars, perhaps, who can examine these puny bits in context with the larger body of work--many of his life long obsessions are to be found here--the reader desiring Mailer's talent for metaphor, adjective and metaphysical fancy had best look elsewhere for some of the brilliance some of us claim for him; this volume is an embarrassment in the late author's career. Mailer explains interestingly that these were put together at a bad time in his life when he could not compose--stabbing your wife will tend to dampen your willingness to wax--and that he found something therapeutic in their existence, but there never has been a compelling reason for these things to be put between covers and sold. Unlike some, I think that a great writer's less great work, the unformed work, the jottings, the juvenilia,the notebooks, the scraps and crumbs, need to remain in the drawer, and not committed to the judgment of history. This poetry is so minimal that it can't even raise a stink.

USED BOOKS: Novels by Richard Powers and Mark Costello

1. The Time of Our Singing
a novel by Richard Powers
The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers is an amazing novel, an ambitious generational tale of an American family with a mixed heritage of African-American and German Jew, and covers the travails, triumphs and tragedies of this family. There are three children, one with a beautiful singing voice who opts for a classical music career, a daughter who becomes involved with the civil rights struggle,and a second brother who, though gifted as well, buries his ambition to bridge the gap between his siblings. Not a perfect novel--sometimes Powers' superb style turns into a list of historical events as a means to convey the sweep of time-- but the central issues of race, identity, culture are handled well within the story. He grasps inexlicable contradictions--there are scenes when one believes that prim and closested bigots are about to have their hearts changed forever as they listen to the heaven sent, transcendent voice of the young man, only to resort to their unshakeable racism once the music has finished--and offers up the idea that what prevents justice and good will from prevailing more often is because of the collective and individual fear that no one wants to admit their world view is limited, wrong, and harmful to life on the planet. The writing is generous and frequently beautiful, especially at the moments when the description turns to the music. Powers, as well as any one, describes how notes played the right way can make one believe in heaven and the angels who live there.


The Big If
a novel by Mark Costello

First, this author isn't to be confused with another fiction writer named Mark Costello, who is the author of two brilliant collections of short stories called The Murphy Stories and Middle Murphy.Those books, a series of related tales involving the title character, is a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a generation growing up in Illinois, and it is one of the most beautifully written sagas of dysfunction, alcoholism and despair I've ever come across. This Costello does things with the language that take up where prime period John Cheever or John Updike left off and offer up a virtuoso prose only a handful of lyric writers achieve; it is the brilliance and beauty of the writing that makes the unrelieved depressive atmosphere of the two books transcend their own grimness. The prose in these two books demonstrate the slopper pretender Rick Moody cannot help but seem. Buy these books and experience a devastating joy.

The otherMark Costello, a younger writer, has equal genius but a different approach to the world, and his novel Big If is quite good, and what makes it work is that Costello accomplishes the dual difficulty of handing us a small town/suburban comedy the likes of John Cheever would have admired, and the other is with the rich detailing of the other secret service agents who work with Vi Asplund. There is something of a domestic comedy seamlessly interwoven with a skewed Washington thriller, with the elements of each spilling over and coloring the underlying foundations of both. In the first part of the novel, we have an atheist Republican insurance investigator who has a habit of crossing out the "God" in the "In God We Trust" inscription on all his paper money, replacing the offending word with "us". Vi, years later, winds up in a job where "in us we trust" is the operating rational, as she and her fellow agents strive to protect their protected from the happenstance of crowds, acting out on intricate theories and assumptions that can only be tested in the field.

Costello is wonderful at the heightened awareness in the ways he presents his details , his comic touches, A beautiful agent who still receives alimony checks from her smitten ex husband carries on a correspondence with him via the memo line of the checks, where he continually writes "come back to me". She writes "No, never" each time, deposits the check, knowing that her ex will see the reply when he receives the canceled checks. The book is full of these fine touches. We have a sense that it's the small things, the small frustrations as much as the larger disasters that conspire against our happiness. A fine book.

USED BOOKS:Satan, His Pyschotherapy and Cure by The Unfortunate Dr.Kassler, J.S.P.S

Satan, His Pyschotherapy and Cure by The Unfortunate Dr.Kassler, J.S.P.S
By Jeremy Leven (AuthorHouse)


No one has ever done a subtler or a more devastating send up of the psychiatric/psychology industry, nor have many been able to insinuate sly philosophical digressions into a frothing satiric text with such grace and pacing. This satan, faceless, locking himself inside a computer in a public gallery, has the charm to coax a snake out of new skin. The complications are wonderfully wild and orchestrated, and Kassler's travails as a single dad trying to rekindle a relationship with his children are heart breaking as they are potently hilarious.
I'm among those who've loaned out various copies of this book and have had to replace it with replace editions, not an easy task considering that the book is out of print. This novel needs to come back into print from a major publisher at a reasonable price, as the current edition from vanity press AuthorHouse is an arm and both legs at $27.95. The cost stops more people from discovering one of the best bits of black humor since the glory days of Naked Lunch; no one has better gotten the sheer hysterical intensity of the moment when one is facing impossible evil and finding something to laugh at dispite the oncoming despair and horror. Dispite the onslaught of misfortune that comes down upon the haplass doctor, the book also is about shouldering one's share of the common burden and dedicating themselve to the good work that must be done no matter the personal grief that distracts and irritates. Satan is indeed cured in this novel, and one needs to read it to get the kind of genius that's been missing in American satiric writing for too long, far too long. Author Leven has given us one of the best structured, best written American comic novels, and its a disservice to the reading public to keep it out of print