Metallica goes to the Hall of Fame

Somewhere in their headbanging journey a bevy of smart rock critics seeking a token metal band to extol as encapsulating the rebel virtues of the music picked up on these plodding purveyors of car wreck chord changes and have argued in earnest that their by-number anger and angst is of greater merit than the inchoate whining and flailing it actually is.

If they have captured the feeling of a generation, then it a mind-dead generation they represent; their music is a catalog of things most of us grow out of. They haven't a memorable riff, not a quotable line to shout in the car on the way to work, not a grunt nor a scream nor a rim shot that would agitate the nervous system to a creative frenzy. Metallica is the music of stalled traffic, tons of machinery grinding gears, moving nowhere.

We're left to ask when will the drugs wear off the Hall of Fame's nominating board and they realize their terrible slight of motor city punk pioneers the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges? Those are two bands who created a sound it took the rest of American and British bands over a decade to catch up with. Please, some sane choices for who deserves the pantheon for this insane music.

Big Wind, Good Poem

"
This is a surprise, a lyric poem going for the musical measure and actually achieving the end. "Morning of the Monsoon" is not an over-alliterated fruit bowl of loud colors and stray wind chimes, it is a series of low tones modulating to harder gusts, the peace of a shore line giving way gradually to the roiling plunder of seasonal storm. Diane Mehta gets it right, and elliptically fuses memories of sublime nature writing with the human response to an eden about to be turned and churned by natural process.

The blue-black curve of weather sizzles when it smacks the asphalt.
Ocean air tumbles in, loosely shaped in networks of water.

Embroidered marigolds on muslin, canary-yellow kurtas,
pelican pink blur together in the wash
flowing in rivulets down the grooves of roads

the British built. Rainwater aimless as worshippers
tilted in prayer, chanting the old rhythms.

The monsoon works itself north. Cashews infuse the air
which thrives on motion, ripe fruit, and daily appeals—
a step up in the next world, more love.

So many poems get drunk on enjambment and stall like a car engine we've just flooded with our impatience to get out of the parking lot; Mehta has the ear for the way words cascade and comment off one another, she knows which articles to drop to quicken the pace, and when to slow it down with a line or two of greater length, deeper measure. Rainwater aimless as worshippers /tilted in prayer, chanting the old rhythms is rich and resonant, a rhythm of r's purring over the collective cloistering that seeks a refuge from the disrupted air, the erupting sky. It suggests a layering of sounds, strong winds and shrill whistling through the cracks, a droning prayer that centers the community.

Ash is the color of the road,
my grandmother's ashes cold as my mother's bones,
remains that will be mine. Words don't last in me—

there are too many dialects. I tilt into finite.
The rest plug into a circular, scene-shifting pull of souls—

Nirvana and the rest, rapture—
to be cut loose from life, its repetitions
hell. Like walking into the shade.

A keen ear and a sure tongue are a combination any poet would desire, and Mehta has them both on display with this work, bringing the reader through the experience of the monsoon and out the other side without hamming up the particulars about Nature's Wrath or How I Survived The Big Wind, among other stale strategies she might have taken. It is the perception of the child after an event she had not had before in her short life, eyes full of the blend of muted terror mixed with awe, the experience of seeing everything you've become accustomed to changed in a power set of instants. A poet who gets that right is someone meriting a further read.

Patrick McGoohan

A note for the passing of actor Patrick McGoohan, known to American audiences as intelligence operative John Drake in the 60s television show Secret Agent (titled Danger Man in Britain, where it originated), and especially for the dada/surreal serial maze he created and starred in, The Prisoner.

A craggy countenance and a rumbling boom box of a voice, McGoohan had pacing, brooding presence on the screen, someone who could give you the impression that he was thinking of several different different things while he spoke to you directly about a particular item of dramatized controversy. It was a restless energy he could bring to a career of roles he succeeded in problematizing with a repertoire of ticks, manic hand gestures, tilts of the head, an abrupt change of posture; he seemed like he was about to go off at any moment. He was a smart enough artist to guide his persona into the right roles, and The Prisoner was the perfect fit; an uncontainable individualist quits an undisclosed intelligence agency, only to find himself kidnapped and held prisoner in an isolated village with other prisoners where the cryptic overseers demand information which he will not give.

The Prisoner, referred to as No.6 in the series, continually calculated his escape attempts, all of them failure, a task he would only start again because he would not be contained.
Odd, driving, quirky, The Prisoner fit neatly into a generation's reading and viewing habits where The System and The Man and The Establishment meant sterility, conformity, death on two feet, and it got the spirit of rebellion through the likes of No.6. One suspects that McGoohan's pacing rebel would do well with the counter culture that turned him into a hero: the prisoner didn't seem the sort of trade one sort of conformist rigidity for another. He wasn't a joiner.

Slippery Literature

There was one of those rowdy discussions about literature at a corner cafe habitats for under employed bohemians where the topic of fiction took a hard left turn, when an aesthetic difference became warfare, a conflict of moral philosophies. I was defending postmodern novelists like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace for the way they were helping blur and otherwise erode the 

barriers that separated fiction-making and reportage, and a woman who'd been in talk suddenly clenched her fist, gritted her teeth, and gave a stare worth of a mackerel facing you down from a cutting board. To paraphrase crudely, her point was that the antics of postmodern writers gave her a loathing sensation she couldn't stand to have; her world was shaken, disturbed. She said she couldn't have the barriers between reason and emotion so disturbed and suggestively destroyed. She went about her business and left the table, and the cafe. I never saw her again, and side step having conversations about half-grasped literary theories with people I've met only that night. It takes so few assertions to undermine a pleasant evening.The convolution of reason and emotion is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in however severe the psychic toll adds up to. If there is no risk to the reading or a dull edge to the narrative, the story is a waste of time. Literature is provocative in the best situations, where style and innovation match and afford the author a means to dwell over the lives of characters who have ambiguous notions of what path to take; heroic, or self-preserving, brave, or cowardly, virtuous, or slippery in ethical and moral principal. It's a tour of the grey areas of existence. Being neither philosophy nor a science of any stripe, fiction is perfectly suited for writers to mix and match their tones, their attitudes, their angles of attack on a narrative schema in order to pursue as broad, or as narrow, as maximal or minimal a story they think a rendering requires.

The attack on modernism's' arrogance that it was the light to the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is grossly over stated, it seems, vastly over regarded: Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stein, arguably literary modernism's Gang-Of-Four, did not, I think, tell us in any specified terms exactly what that true reality was, or what it was supposed to be, but only that the by dicing up, challenging, making it strange and making it new could we challenge ourselves, as artists, and as readers that new perceptions, and new ideas about the nature of the world could be had.Individually , each writer had a different idea of heaven that they wanted the world to become--Pound was ultimately a befuddled, albeit fascist sympathizer, and Eliot became a conservative Royalist (and their anti-Semitism is problematic for anyone looking for real-time heroes)-- but so far as the principle thrust of their work, which was away from the straight jacket of accumulated literary history and toward something new and different that renewed the possibility of art to engage the times in an aesthetically relevant manner, is scarcely diminished in power merely because it came before. I agree with Fred Jameson on the point that Post Modernism , in effect, is a restating of the modernist project which is, in a cramped nutshell, a set of overlapping trends in cultural thinking and expression that countered the conceit that there is a contiguous and coherent way of interpreting the world. After two world wars , discontinuity was the rule, and the ground was set for constructing new ways of seeing the world, as was the cataclysmic optimism that something final and perfect could be made from the ashes. Postmodernism's particular twist was there was no end to historical development and that history was merely a processing of events through convenient fictions. Beyond that, the style of the literary expression hasn't much altered. The key difference seems to be that brand name have replaced place names.

Writing is an argument so far that the central impulse to write at all is to make a series of statements about oneself and one's experiences in the world , and reach a satisfying conclusion, some "meaning" at the end of the discourse.As Barthes noted, the effort to achieve fixed meaning is doomed, as experience is not an static event, but a fluid movement through time that a writer's perception of changes moment to moment, text to text. The argument is thus not one sided, but multi-vocal, complex, interwoven within perceptions that argue amongst themselves within in the writer and onto their pages, in the extension of characters, plot, instances, local, active bits of imagining where the goal, is finally to attempt to resolve contradiction, arrive at something absolute in a universe that seems to permanently with hold its Absolute Meanings during this lifetime, and to achieve, somehow, some peace, some satisfaction. But no: the argument persists, the imagination soars, the old certainties cannot contain either the unset of new perceptions, nor can sooth a writer's innate restlessness. In literature, the conflation continues, reason and emotion color each other, the eyes shut, hoping for vision, a clear path, but the writing continues, the sorting through of experience continues, the unease continues, the world changes radically and not at all. That post modernism's over all mission is to notify us of the limitations of our tropes, our schemes, and our rhetoricized absolutes seems redundant to what literature already does.

Critics in their Later Years

A diffuse style, effective in previous work where there was a strong sense of a cluster of ideas being brought together, here just lets the whole thing dangle like laundry tossed over a bed post. This seems to be a style of the critic who ascends from their particular niche and limited audience and become, over time , a public intellectual, a smart celebrity. Harold Bloom has been a conspicuous presence in the media for a good while, and years beyond his important books like the useful Anxiety of Influence and American Naturalism, his books have been increasing oracular, visionary, cloudy, full of pronouncements but stalling, hesitating, on a specific points.The last solid work by him was Shakespeare:The Invention of the Human, a provocative and entertaining assertion that what we consider to be the state and plight of Modern Man, a creature continually looking for meaning his actions and his ability to persist despite catastrophe, began with Shakespeare's writings. All our modern metaphors that demonstrate an existential void at the end of our philosophies come from The Bard's genius for making English mean new things.

A little pat, if you will (be leery of theories that account for everything that has befallen the race in it's grumpy history) , but with merit, and wisdom. Otherwise, though, Bloom has trailed off in his essays too many times, as in books like How to Read and Why or even his much lauded The Western Canon: he seems ready to offer us the keys to the kingdom before the cultivated quiver comes into his voice--I swear, I can hear when I read him. He leaves us hanging on a point while he references tropes and metaphors between authors and their works separated by centuries. Perhaps he does return to his points and makes his them clear and lucid, but often enough his writing in his late career leaves me filling in the blanks, interpreting, furnishing connecting paragraphs he didn't write in order to arrive at a semblance of coherent thought.

I don't think it's because Bloom is above my level--and I don't think the good professor is trying to get away with anything. I think it comes to a certain laziness on his part, running roughshod over older formulations, and laziness on his editor's part as well. They seem not to know how to encourage him to write a little more clearly.

Auster's poems

Strange to think, but the spare, undecorated prose of Paul Auster does achieve a poetic effect of sort, but it's something that comes about because he can create situations and odd scenarios that often times gives us the duplicitous ironies that are a good poem's hall mark. One is not sure where they stand after reading an Auster novel, and his poetry in kind does a trick of seeming like John Ashbery without the prolixity.Ashbery's genius is the concurrent circles of reference his hard objects inspire in his mind; they conflate gracefully, refusing closure. Auster's poems refuse closure as well, but his are stanzas that have a hard glare like black and white streets; no technicolor, just high contrast black and white.The stanzas and images are crystalline, hard, unadorned, and the dreamy language around them, the assumptive tone that starts with a given set of attitudes and finds itself changed or shattered by poem's end, is blurry, confused, and imprecise. An interesting tension results--there is the feeling of someone overwhelmed by the conflations and overlapping demands of events and walking away, blinders on, into a new identity.

Poetry v Prose 2: another poem by T.R.Hummer

Years, another poem by the intriguing T.R.Hummer, continues that poet's fascination with the promises and evasions of prose , the language of certainity in an existence that adheres to no protocols that have been spelled out, literally. We could say that the best aspect of having a written language is the poetry that results in discovering that things and events are never as they've been described and defined.

YEARS
Years ago, the story begins. Once.
In such-and-such a place, some season or other,
A stranger, two lovers, disaster.
She wants to close the book, but constellations
Of narrative structures interlock: gunfire
In the street, explosions at the embassy,
Betrayal, failure, decades of grinding hopelessness.
How long ago he died, his face pages vanished.
And she, dedicated reader, carries out sentence after sentence,
Her knowledge of the end complete, her execution certain.

The story begins and it never ends, as this tale and countless others like it are recast and retold; different actors, similar circumstances. Hummer gets ahead of the tedium that self-awareness of narrative form can create but chipping away at the didactic and getting to the good parts, the bits of unexpected circumstance that make a familiar narrative compelling, only they are not so unexpected. This poem might be a highlight reel, or someone fast-forwarding a favorite DVD for those scenes that resonates the most; the condensing of the particulars itself has an exhilarating effect. I think the last lines -- And she, dedicated reader, carries out sentence after sentence, / Her knowledge of the end complete, her execution certain -- because it suggests a pun, a reflection of the words we use to recount and recite a plot we know very well, and also something akin to a sentence one is fated to live through, to a willingly subscribed to circumvention of one's time where one's actions are plotted out in advance.It would seem to argue that we are only at ease using our own will power when we are secure in the belief that that we're constrained by a grand narrative where outcomes are premeasured and assured, despite our efforts to violate form. You are left to consider whether will power is an illusion in this instance, or if the violation of form is the disregard of the grand narrative and that we do have will power? As with the kind of ambivalence Hummer connects with for, the matter is slippery and does not rest either in or outside the distinctions; the boundaries are permeable.Will power, nee Free Will, exists indeed, and we live with the knowledge that we have the ability to go beyond implicit and tacit boundaries and create unpleasant consequences, but we chose not to. Most of us don't, in any case, and will use a sounder judgment. The majority of us wouldn't take a gun to traffic court to settle a dispute involving a ticket. This notion is something fluidly referred to as 'sanity', and there is a comfort knowing that one's fellow citizens stay within the boundaries. But there is ambivalence about those margins we stay within; there is an attraction to an existence where the Rule doesn’t apply. This seems a strong reason as to why we valorize and apologize for those artists, poets and writers we regard as artists, the usurpers of the norm. If they would otherwise be an unmannered assortment of louts.
Hummer's interest in written language as subject matter comes from the perception that human personality (in our culture at least) thrives on the notion that we're creative and groundbreaking creatures who can redefine themselves, as individuals, anytime it suits us, but that there is a virtually unspoken need to know that there are limits to how far we can stray from the script we're handed. It's knowing that we could break through the fourth wall and create all sorts of chaos for ourselves and our fellows , but that the host of us choose not too; we ascribe this to Free Choice, but for me Hummer has a darker theme, that of Fear Itself. The dread of an existence stripped of meaning, of limits, keeps us in check.