Thursday, October 8, 2009

The Death of the Critic

A buddy had just finished a book I'd lent him, The Death of the Critic by Ronan McDonald, and was convinced that the theorists needed a severe pounding. His language was such that I had to put the phone down and answer the door for the pizza delivery man. When I got back and picked the phone up again, he was still ranting, unaware, it seems, that I was gone for a couple of minutes. He's a high school pal, someone who likes no matter the contrasts in cultural preference, and he likes a critic to perform the service of being a consumer guide. He likes mysteries, Clive Cussler, and actual crime books, and all he wants is a synopsis and brief evaluations on whether he'll get his money's worth. I have no idea why he wanted to read the book. Still, he was fired up enough to be convinced that the Usual Suspects McDonald lays out for literary criticism's demise--French theorists, multi-culturists, feminism, variations on the postmodernist riff--had conspired to irritate him. One might understand the response, as in any of those times, one volunteers a statement, heartfelt but visceral, not cerebral, about a book they read and enjoyed that might have happened to be the subject of conversation. Once you make your remarks, add your few pennies worth, some intelligent ass chimes in with caterpillar-length words and odd ideas from two or three different disciplines, and leaves you there, lost and humiliated.

That happened to me when I was younger, much younger, mouthing off my platitudes about arts and politics, but rather than getting angry and nurturing a resentment, I was determined to become one of those smart asses, or at least sound as though I belonged to the club. My friend, though, craved his resentments and continued variations of his anti-intellectual beef over the last forty-some years. I assume most of us have friends like that. It was an exasperating conversation. Finally, I got him off the phone and made a mental note to not lend him any more books related to literary theory or the history of ideas. Instead, I'll offer him some Elmore Leonard. There is a writer we can probably talk about.

On the book's topic, it's not that the literary critics are dying as much as people have pretty much ignored them, preferring the pseudoscience of theory, which likes to wallow in choking, jargon-clogged solipsism writing that actually engages a book. It's style, the author's intentions, and the successes or failures contained therein. At some point, a generation of young academics hitched their fortunes on the diffusing forces of continental philosophy because they found a method through which they could abnegate their charge to aid readers to sharpen their skills. Literature, by whatever definition we use, is a body of writing intended to deal with more complex storytelling to produce a response that can be articulated in a way that's as nuanced as the preparatory work, the factors that make for the "literary" we expect cannot be reducible to a single supposition.

Use is a valuable defining factor, but the use of literature varies wildly reader-to-reader, group-to-group, culture-to-culture, and what it is within the work that resonates loudly as the extraordinary center that furnishes ultimate worth, varies wildly too; some things instigate this use, and they aren't one determinant, but several, I suspect. Ultimately, the goal of literary criticism is not to create the terms that define greatness but to examine and understand what's already there and devise a practical, flexible framework for discussion. Ultimately, the interest invalid criticism is in how and why a body of work succeeds or fails in its operation, not establishing conditions that would exist before a book is written.

Some of us who toyed with deconstruction and the like, when we found that language in general and literary writing, in particular, couldn't address the world as is, remember the sweetly tricky issue of inter-textuality. Promoted by Derrida and deMan, if memory serves me (and it often doesn't), this was the fancy footwork that while books fail to address the nature things and make them fixed, unchanging situations, texts (meaning books) referred only to other readers, and the coherent systems writers seemed to uncover or create about how things are were in practice drawn from a limitless archive of each text that came before the one you might have in your hand and considering its fidelity to your experience.

We find a futile concern since everything has already been written, everything has already been said. If this were true, we asked, how can it be that some theorists are using language to precisely describe what language cannot do, i.e., precisely describe things? I never read a response that made sense, as the answers seemed even more steaming heaps of jargon that made the unanchored theory before even more impassable. It is a pity since science writers and even literary researchers could explain, in more straightforward terminology, the purpose, technique, and consequence of the minute and verifiable data science was accruing.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

CRIMES and MISDEMEANORS

Crimes and Misdemeanors is a seriously underrated Woody Allen film, and one of his most even handed. With the seamy elements of unbridled careerism, adultery, murder, and dead-end spiritualism laced through it's deftly constructed narrative, it is a precursor of Allen's 2005 critical success Matchpoint, a good variation on the film maker's themes. But it is C and M that is the more potent film; the characters are complex and unlikeable and their respective fates embodies as Clint Eastwood's slogan at the end of Unforgiven ; "Deserves got nothing to do with it". Moral and ethical structures are fictions that work for us sometime; at other times they have no effect at all, with the consequences being incomprehensible to a psychology that prefers closure and a "just" conclusion to events and situations.The comedic and dramatic are finely twined around each other here, and one realizes finally that each is what makes the other possible. While there is an ongoing reference to a God who is blind as well as silent--the idea that the Deity has perished before his finest creation, Man, has is fascinating--there's a the perfect irony at film's end, the distinction between being in the world, committing acts and taking responsibility for them. The doctor who has his wife murdered by a contract killer suffers suffocating guilt for what he had put into motion, and feels himself twisting in the breeze coming off the abyss. The documentary film maker, dreaming of starting an adulterous affair with a woman he works with, does not act on his impulse and feels guilty for the lust in his heart. At movie's end, both meet by accident at a party and begin to talk , in a general way, about their state of being. The film maker is still burdened by guilt for his impure thoughts and regret for his failure to act on his attraction to his work mate; he is not happy.The doctor in turn, the man who entered into a successful conspiracy to kill his wife, offers up that sometimes it seems that life is one long catastrophe you're waiting for to end with some horrible , calamitous consequence, that the world you know will crash and you will be condemned, but that after awhile you notice the sun still comes up, household and work are still waiting for you to attend to them, the guilt and shame fades, you start to feel okay, and then, after a period, you have to admit to yourself that your life is actually pretty damn good. It's a choice and, I think, iconic scene from Allen's work, with the man who sinned in fact (Martin Landau) giving a big , smug grin while the film maker (Allen) , who sinned in his imagination alone, slumps in a pose of freighted self-loathing, punished without reserve for refusing to take the risk.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

A rowdy nap

This poem from Dean Young's collection Private Mentor took be aback. It was a jolt, a tingle, a shooting pain above the eye. It was as if someone had just walked across where someone was already buried, someone I knew.


The first time I saw my father after he died,
he kept knocking against the window
even though I was afraid
that the cat would kill him. At least crash-

landing on the sill and then knocking more
was an improvement over the mechanical
bed, no glasses, no teeth, only Holy
shit I’m dying on repeat in his mind,

his three terrified, disgusted, bored offspring
in the ozone waiting room politely ignoring
the bilge from the grief counselor.

They’d had bad dreams before but weren’t sure
they too were cinders shooting through the cosmos
from one oblivion to another.
One thought of his convertible in the parking lot,
was it locked? One discarded baby names on her list.

One became an anvil but if you asked,
No he’d say, he wasn’t hurting anyone.

Something green hustled by whose only job
was swabbing surgery floors so it was good

Dad’s spirit didn’t cling to him, it needed
some air. How can I remember a voice
so clearly but not a thing it said?

The shrinking was immediate. Once

I thought a frog in a puddle in North
Carolina, easy to hold in my hand,
possible to protect. I was wrong.
Then after the fawn coming pickpocket close,

he gave up for years until yesterday’s
black stone on the beach with his gentle eye
for which I’m grateful still, and cherish
then heave back into the sea’s honeysuckle.






A bit surreal, and well done, definitely Kafkaesque with the blend of bewilderment and institutional sterility. It's a comic poem, I would guess, close to a comic book logic, perhaps with a bit of prime Woody Allen thrown into the mix. The image of the spirit of the dead father hovering and drifting through the site of his death strikes me as something a family survivor would come up with as a buffer against the coming shock of a parent's death; let's imagined Dad as a spirit as new spirit ambling about just as he did when he was still alive. There is a desire, primitive and grossly selfish, to let everything fall apart and drop one's pants to moon the portrait of the dead patriarch, but it's hard to muster up the courage,the brio, when the spectral father is roaming around his old places of love and work, tending to things he hadn't finished . And the moral and economic center of the family shifts and we realize, at last, that we are fully adult. It's difficult to act like a child , even when the Old Man is gone, when you know you're acting.

When my family discovered my younger brother dead in his apartment in January of 2000 , we stood numbly in the parking lot while the police did their work. After a half hour of managing only tears and half sentences, I made a joke, referring to the time when my brother, bottoming out on drugs at the time, used to sneak into our late parent's garage located below their condominium."Well, now he can move back into Mom and Dad's basement" I said. There was silence for a second, and then laughter, deep, grating guffaws from four shell-shocked siblings. And then more tears came between the laughs and we ceased being numb and recognized the meaning our loud tears; grief and relief, mixed in gasping intervals. We would mourn the loss of our brother forever, and it was likely we were glad that wasn't yet our turn to be staring straight up at the ceiling or open sky, seeing absolutely nothing.

Used Books: paragraphs for slow Saturday morning

Underworld -- Don DeLillo
Yes, the novel sprawls over the years and the characters in sideways fashion, but DeLillo has managed sprawl to good effect before, and here he does not slacken in skill. The search for the baseball, about which not much is known is except rumor purporting to be History, big H, lays the ground beautifully for a series of stories linked by the search for a usable , recent past through the ruins of a society that flies in the face and faith of the search. Great satire, great prose--DeLillo is among the best living writers in English, I believe: there's not an ounce of fat. This is savvy and skill and sheer know-how that eludes our faux wonder child, David Foster Wallace, prematurely praised for too little work. DeLillo is our best living novelist.
House on Mango Street --Sandra Cisneros
A little jewel, from the point of view, in large part, of a small girl growing up in the slums. I don't know how other the author's work reads, and her poetry, from what I've read, is ordinary and quietly competent, but House is heartbreaking, where you witness the hardening of a world view before the young girl had any larger experience. A gem.

The Hours --Michael Cunningham
The intertwined narratives, connected through time and each related in some marginal way with the issue of Virginia Woolfe and her novel Mrs. Dollaway, is lovely, being about lose, desire, the great inability to frame an ideal and then live in it in a universe that is busy, intrusive, insensitive to inner life. Cunningham commands the Woolfe style : the stream of conscious that is amid thought in the ebb and flow of existence: we have , again and again, real images, concrete in detail and form, become, through character musing and more musing, become abstract, fluid, merged with the fleeting psychology of each passing moment. A good work.

A Frolic of One's Own --William Gaddis
I love the fact that the late Gaddis simplified his style, not a wit since the 1958 publication of his first novel, The Recognitions. Brilliant dialogue, which drives the novel, sans character attribution. The lawyer trade should duck under the table if they see a judge with this book poking from his robe.

Birds of America --Lorrie Moore An outstanding prose writer, this is a terrific set of short stories. It is a cruel error to regard her as a women's author, as her stories have a dimensionality that have the travails and emotions of her women characters' resonate with a congruent male readership.

Friday, October 2, 2009

The sourpuss returns

I stopped going to open readings about twelve years ago for a combination of reasons, lack of time foremost among them, but coming up near second was the weariness of being subjected to a continuous stream of encrypted banality. Not to grind this axe too long nor too loudly, what is most striking about the assembled grossness of over-reaching testaments it is no one seems to have had an interesting take on what muse-inspiring incident happened to them. Too often, too often indeed, the Epiphany moment seems to drive the earnest amateurs deep into the Archive of the Already Said Too Often, which dampens my enthusiasm for the notion that an introduction to good poets and their work will, by default, improve and hone the attributes of a readership who would likewise enjoy contemplating existence in unique combinations of metaphor and simile. Rather than broadening the perspective, as hoped, many become entrenched in bad ideas. It's like a cold one can't quite rid themselves of, I guess, doing so at last after rest and a vacation from taking one's seriousness too seriously, but the bad taste also acts like a virus, incubating for quite a while and effecting the senses in ways that seem to lay an irreversible tendency to grandiloquence, truism, bathos, rugged individualism. Some of this is inevitable during being human with the conceit of being sensitive creatures with something to say--God knows I am an insufferable jerk when it comes to the sanctity of my poetry, which is, let us say, looking increasingly hokey as I get older. If that were the case, the reader, and the listener, would have the sense that some fact, independent of the narrator's expectations, was acknowledged and that the speaker is ready to change their thinking. Yet another reason I gave up doing public readings as a matter of habit: my good poems are few, really, and repeating them bores me. The sort of tract many readers come across in airports and the shelves of bookstore self-help sections, though, resemble a poem less than they do knotted strings of re-fitted clichés that lacking the value of irony or circumstantial variation. These are more things one would say after an accompanying string of disasters and disappointments that work not to comprehend experience and, perhaps, gain a perspective on why things don't go according to plan, but rather to rationalize and reinforce one's attitude and manner of moving through the world. When all is said and done, Frank Sinatra said the same thing, but with more style and less pop-psyche cant: I did it my way… Not that Sinatra's croaking croon makes this a desirable way to go through life. We are who we, sure, but a large part of being human is our capacity to change our behavior based on experience. Existence is not something you experience passively, or an event that merely happens to you. It is something you participate in. One is powerless in controlling outcomes of events, but within the larger picture, we can change our actions, we can change the way we think. We do, more often than not, influence the results. We are who we, sure, but a large part of being human is our capacity to change our behavior based on experience. Existence is not something you experience passively, or an event that merely happens to you. It is something you participate in. One is powerless in controlling outcomes of events, but within the larger picture, which this poem attempts to present to us, we can change our actions, we can change the way we think. In doing so, we can, more often than not, influence the results one gets. Such poets come across as defeatists in a Hemingway ammo belt. Poetry is fun when it is good. This was not good. Those who write poems, I think, are obliged to write the poems they can, whatever their style, and that they ought not be surprised when they are criticized for using clichés and glittering generalities in place of real craft or inspiration. One's innermost thoughts, of themselves, are often not interesting as poetry. Whether the young poet admits it or not, they have a responsibility to express their inner lives in  fresh ways that it's exciting to readers in the outer world. Small thoughts are perfectly fine, and one need only inspect Emily Dickinson, or the Imagist poems of Pound or WC Williams for examples. Even the "less than earth shaking" poem has a bar to reach; it should nonetheless be exquisitely expressed. Those who participate in their lives are not passive, they are engaged with it. Even the shy, weak, infirm, modest and laconic among us take proactive roles in the directions we take, and take responsibility. Most of all, there is the capacity to remain teachable, to learn from experience and change behavior and mindset; this is what keeps people interesting and useful to their fellows. Those who refuse to change their ways, to use experience merely as rationale to reinforce ineffective methods to coping with existence, are jerks much of the time, or just irredeemably clueless. One stays away from these people, and their poems.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Rather have rhinoplasty than read poems this boring

The_Constructor
John Koethe

In another life I might have the time and inclination to stand up to Koethe's daunting allusions, but after attempting , more than once, to overcome the skim, the glance and the cursory read and engage the poems, I became listless and depressed; it was like one of those odd moments of hackneyed existential literature where the hero, me, is alone in some government office waiting my turn to speak to an official about something and discovering that I couldn't understand a word that was being said. Worse yet, though, was the fact that didn't care what anyone was talking about. A book of poems that creates torpor and apathy, the urge to crawl back into bed with pretend flu symptoms, does not encourage a recommendation. Maybe I'm just stupid. Or maybe that these poems really are that dull and dulling. I maybe be wrong. It's likely I have suffered a failure of the imagination. Or is it just as likely that John Koethe failed to convince me that his prosaic ruminations are interesting?

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Frank Gallimore's heart breaking elegy

Frank Gallimore's poem "Elegy for Miss Calico" got my attention and kept for several re-readings; something got under my skin. An itch one couldn't get to, perhaps. All the same, this poem is lovely, wonderful even, although it sets up a sad terrain of a homeless deaf prostitute making her way through the city using wits in place of the sense she lacks. Gallimore writes this with a particular empathy of someone who discovers the crucial truth of how sounds mold a sense of the world, and how language, the arrangement of specific words in intuitive yet musically sensed arrangements might create vivacity that exceeds what a normal array of the senses would give you.

When they fished her out, the eastbound roared
through necklaces of skyline, or so I remember,
or so I say. By rust-ravaged fronts, I sensed
a hustler's craft, device of handshake and for-the-best,
while there lay syringes by which to tune his happiness.
I used to watch his girls cluster like flowers on a mock-
terrazzo ledge, pressed on a barred patio. I'd watch her coo,
make mouths of inscrutable lingo for the long lash of his body.
And O the too-short calico dress, hand-me-down,
arranging itself on the breeze of his battered porch.


There's a hint of a Leonard Cohen song here, ah homage to "Suzanne" or another crazy lady he's come across in the lower reaches of the city who's mental infirmity he thinks may be a hint of divine clarity. But as Cohen has been the observer, sensual yet detached in the evocations of the poor making their way through the long shadows of urban disregard, Gallimore does not forget the weight the burden of existing as one does can be. There is gravity here, a physical gravity that is not about grace or profundity or suggested states of elevated being; it's about an observed life who's oddiments and quirky habits are signs of survival skills honed and codified; a life lived in the present tense, hard and silent, but nuanced with the touch of the surfaces of the world, the aromas of the earth, nuanced in dimensions that are inexplicable to the better heeled.This poem swims, skips, pirouettes, performs elegant dance steps across the long room, ram ping up the emotional impact of matching hard fact with accurate , fleet-footed allusions. The power of this poem is Gallimore's sure-handed refusal to affect the clinical detachment a generation of tone-deaf writing program graduates have shown us and instead dives straight into the heart of the sound of the words and the emotions they can evoke if joined in certain , intuitively sparked ways.

There is an admirable command here of the allusions, the metaphors, the sqarely arranged similes that places everything in a world that is colorful, full of smells and layers of history, both political, cultural, personal, which presents the city, the narrator and his subject, the deaf homeless woman, with the concentration being empathy, not sentimentality. I have been hard of hearing all my life, have had many operations to correct the situation and have worn hearing aids for years, and what draws me to this poem among other splendid items is the way Gallimore writes like someone who relishes the potential for words to create a music that inspires, saddens, evokes a richness of emotion; but I also admire the discipline of the poet for not overwriting. Empathy is his intention, obviously, but not at the sacrifice of aesthetic worth, The combination here makes this that rare Slate poetry offering: a poem that's truly unforgettable.