Conflating the punchlines

New Journalism was a style of cultural journalism that favored using fictional techniques to tell fact-based stories, with writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Peter Matthisen each becoming the omniscient narrator observing, cataloguing and characterizing each telling detail of the events under review. The approach faded as something one claims as current, but the flashy prose style and application of novel-like strategies remains influential. The method has left a trace that seeps upward through the soil and is absorbed, as an influence, by a generation of journalists nee bloggers, historians and social loud mouths who may well be unaware that loud mouthed application of fictional narrative structure to actual events isn’t something that was always with us.

The New Journalist were post modern in their coverage of events-- whether the writers themselves were modernists in sensibility is irrelevant to work they did. The style defined, in the usual quarters, as the eclectic jumbling of categories and styles, the blurring of distinctions of generic distinctions, and transgressive of boundaries that were formerly considered sacrosanct, immutable, unyielding. Some years ago that sounded revolutionary and seemed a lethal theoretical blow to the constructs of the vaguely described ruling class controlling the conversation and the terms. There are masterpieces in the genre, yes, but a good amount of it reads agitated and shrill, written by writers drunk on adjectives and cheesy effects who tried mightily to goose a number of ordinary stories.

The work evident in Armies of the Night, The White Album, In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, and other sublime and less-sublime examples of the approach fulfill what's come to be the givens, and even clichés of post-modern writing. It's not unreasonable to think that writers normally considered Modernists would take what's thought to be a post modern strategy in order to achieve perspective that normally form would make more difficult. Carrying about the matters involved in a story hardly disqualifies a work, or a writer, from being a post modernists. The cool, ironic stance that is supposed to problematize the conditions of narrative formation seems more as a pose critics who have a curious aversion for writing that is meant to illicit a galvanizing reader response: it sounds more like a good rap than good reasoning. The conflation of the irrational of fictional dynamics and the reasonable presentation of vetted facts is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in, whatever slippery pronoun you desire to append it with. Being neither philosophy, nor 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 needs to be accomplished. New Journalism seemed, for many, not just history in a hurry but Philosophy on the fly.

The attack on modernism's' assumption that it was the light to the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is grossly over stated, it seems: 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.

New Journalists never never referred to themselves as "post modernists", and the style, now faded some what, has been absorbed by the culture as an accepted style for very mainstream consumption. The news story-literary-narrative scarcely raises an eyebrow today. But the judgment of history has these writers, nominal modernists perhaps, performing the post modern gesture, interrogating the margins of genre definitions, and making impossible to regard news reporting quite the same again.

Give them hell, Keith Olberman

Keith Olberman, host of the political news and commentary program Countdown with Keith Olberman on MSNBC, dedicated the entire hour of his show last night to a Special Commentary--read "editorial"--on the need and the requirement for major health care reform. It's about death, he proclaimed, his voice firm , with just a tinge of an outraged tremble characterize his impeccable syntax. The issue is about death and how we, as a country, as a culture, represented and served by a government ostensibly by and for The People, do what we can to humanely for-stall death, extend life, and improve the quality of life that we have. Death wins out every time, Olberman admitted, but the inevitability of the Grim Reaper's visit wasn't the issue. It came down, rather, to the battle between those who want to aid the sick, help the infirm, and make it possible for citizens to avoid illness and catastrophic circumstances when they can, and those who would rather the infirm just go away. It was a potent forty minutes or so , a well phrased, acutely articulated, wide ranging polemic that was in part personal testimonial--Olberman detailed his father's declining health as well as his frustration and dismay with the health system he witnessed in place-- and historical survey of the corporate bottom line at it's most mendacious. You can view the entire commentary here.

Someone said else that Olberman is a windbag, but he's our windbag, and I say God bless for being the one to bellow the truth about Republican greed and dishonesty and to dedicate a full program to discuss at length about Health Care. Olberman is a good writer--his prose assumes that viewers are able to follow compound sentences that contain more than one idea--and he is , contrary to those on the other side of this issue, sufficiently buttressed by the truth. Not a set of ideologically framed truisms and unvetted talking points, but facts. I thought his comment was forceful, powerful stuff, and the use of his father's illness and his own frustration with the systemic incompetence of our health professionals put a human face on the sort of corporate neglect which denies care to millions of sick Americans.
He was right to go straight to the unsaid bottom of the issue, that the whole shooting match centers around death, on the forstalling of it's onset and the improvement of life before it's arrival, and to deal at length at those entrenched interests who's priorities are for an increased number of subscribers paying monthly premiums and for paying less in payouts on an increasing number of claims. The comment veered here and there, of course, but this was purposeful, deliberate, perfectly illustrative of the calcified corporate culture that has no grasp of the human dimension of their business, the lives of the clients they nominally exist to aid in time of need.

Olberman is right to assert that the companies do not care for the well being of their clients and that only a ground swell from the public, tired of being duped into supporting policies contrary to their interests, is what's needed to change a medical system that will collapse upon itself. Olberman speaks truth to power. Go Keith!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Wine Critics v Rock Critics

Given the choice between listening to rock critics wax endlessly on garage centric one shot wonders who emerged from Decatur suburbs and wine critics swanning about about a particular pour's pretensions, bouquet, garish aftertaste or the quality of the buzz it might give you, I would have to select the rock snobs , dreary as they might be or become after a duration.

Rock and roll began as a legitimate grass roots alternative to the ossified white pop that had a stranglehold on post-forties pop music, and it actually is the case, despite rock criticism's sloven tendency toward self-fellatio, that something honest, original and artful might come through all that energy, anger and quirkiness.

Wine, to my view, is merely a form of hooch, and the sum of my aesthetic toward it's qualitative states were whether it made me gag or if went down the gullet without a fight. Art and subtlety and self-expression had nothing to do with it--wine was for getting a buzz, getting plastered, getting terrifically fucked up. In that sense, wine appreciation is democratic because alcoholism isn't a respecter of race, class, gender, or sums of money one might have.

The salient difference between the two is that rock and roll is something that sounds good, when it is good, sober. Wine, after you quite drinking and stay sober, is just something you learn to live without and wonder how the fuck you spent so many years being wrong for so long about what a great thing spirits were to one's quality of life.

Ashbery's mojo

It comes down to whether you appreciate the conflations Ashbery artfully manages as he penetrates the membrane between Steven's Supreme Fiction, that perfect of Ideal Types and their arrangements, with the material sphere that won't follow expectation, nor take direction. I happen to think that much of the interstices he investigates are results of artful wandering; Ashbery is a flaneur of his own musings, and the Proustian inspection provides their idiosyncratic, insular joys. Had I thought Ashbery overrated and a bore, I'd have turned my back on critical praise of him and left him cold; I have a habit of keeping my own counsel regarding reading preferences, as I'm sure all of us do. But continue to read him I do, over several decades.

Not a rebel, not a polemicist, hardly a rabble-rouser who makes speeches and writes incendiary essays against injustice, Ashbery is an aesthete, a contemplator, an intelligence of infinite patience exploring the spaces between what consciousness sees, the language it develops to register and comprehend experience, and the restlessness of memory stirred and released into streaming associations. Ashbery's are hard to "get" in the sense that one understands a note to get milk at the store or a cop's command to keep one's hand above their head, in plain sight. Ashbery's poems have everything the eye can put a shape to in plain sight, crowded and clouded, however, by incessant thinking, the cloud bank of memory. His poetry often makes you think that he's walking the strangely familiar yet alien streets and gardens of Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction, a terrain where Ideas are fixed and permanent and oddly anonymous; that our would be stroller has only human eyes to observe the objects of pure perfection, it would be natural to assume that they are vague at first, as though emerging from a persistent, shrouding mist, slowly coming into focus, achieving an acute sharpness briefly and then receding back into the cloud bank. That he can achieve this effect in his poems consistently He wrestles with the still-engaging problems of Aristotle's metaphysics, that the things in the world are only the expression of an Idea of that thing, which exists prior to manifestation. It's a slippery metaphysics, a guarantor of headaches, but Ashbery wears the problem loosely; he pokes, prods, wonders, defers judgment and is enthralled by the process of his wondering. Reaching a conclusion for him seems to mean that he is done writing, and no poet wants to think that they've used up their vocabulary.One might think that the mtvU audience might be more attracted to arch-romantic and decidedly urban poet Frank O'Hara, whose emphatic musings and extrapolations had equal parts rage and incontestable joy which gave a smile or a snarl to his frequent spells of didactic erudition. He was in love with the popular culture, with advertising, movies, the movies, he had an appreciation of modern art, he loved jazz and ballads, and he loved being a City Poet. He was more the walker than Ashbery, I suppose, or at least he wrote more about the going to and coming from of his strolls. unlike Ashbery, O'Hara loved being an obvious tourist in his own environment and didn't want for a minute for his poetry to leave the streets, cafes, and galleries where he treads. Ashbery is more the stroller who gets lost in his associations triggered by what he beheld. Ever more the aesthete than his fellow New York Poets, he was interested in things a little more metaphysical, that being that the reality that exists in the inter-relations being the act of perception and the thoughts that are linked to it, which branch off from the perception and link again with another set of ideas, themselves connected to material things observed and remembered. O'Hara was immediate, like the city he loved, while Ashbery allowed his senses the authority to enlarge his perception, to explore the simultaneity of sight and introspection.

Oddly enough, Ashbery is the more sensual of the two, willing to examine that even the sacrifice of immediate coherence. I’m not a fan of difficulty for the sake of being difficult, but I do think it unreasonable to expect poets to be always unambiguous or easily grasped. Not every dense piece of writing is worthy by default, of course, and the burden falls on the individual talent. Ashbery's writing, for me, has sufficient allure, resonance and tangible bits of the recognizable world he sees to make the effort to maneuver through his diffuse stanzas worth the work. Poetry is the written form where the ambiguity of meaning and multiplicity of possible readings thrives more than others, and the tradition is not a parsimonious use of language, but rather a deliberate expansion of what words pieced can do, what meanings they can evoke, and what sensations they can create. Prose is the form that is, by default, is required to have the discourse it carries be clear and has precise as possible. Poetry and poets are interesting because they are not addressing their experiences or their ideas as linear matters subject to the usual linguistic cause and effect; poetry is interesting because it's a form that gives the inclined writer to interrogate their perceptions in unexpected ways. The poetic styles and approaches and aesthetics one may use vary widely in relative degrees of clarity, difficulty, and tone, but the unifying element is that poetry isn't prose, and serves a purpose other than the mere message delivering that is, at heart, the basic function of competent prose composition.

"Next Life" by Rae Armantrout

Next Life, Rae Armentrout (Wesylan).  

Rae Armantrout is a poet of intensely private language whose seeming fragments of sentences, scenes, and interior recollections still read vividly, provocatively. A member of the Language group of poets whose other members include Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and Lynn Hejinian, among other notables, she has distinguished herself from the frequently discursive style that interrogates the boundaries between the nominal power of language and the contradictions that result when conventional meaning rubs against insoluble fact, Armantrout's poetry is brief, terser, more taciturn and pared to the essential terms and the sensations they conflate. More autobiographical, perhaps, more concerned with raising a sense of genuine autonomy from the words one employs to define direction and purpose, Armantrout's poetry is an ongoing inquiry about what lies beyond our expectations once they've been given the lie. As in this fine collection's title, what is the "Next Life"? What she leaves out is fully formed by its absence; 

 

We wake up to an empty room addressing itself in scare quotes. "Happen" and "now" have been smuggled out to arrive safely in the past tense. We come home to a cat made entirely of fish. --"Reversible" 

A good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion. Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a calm voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience and crisply discovers, underlines, and speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the intricate, acute image, half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed that expose an archive of deferred emotion. 

 1. "That's a nice red," you said, but now the world was different so that I agreed with a puzzled or sentimental certainty as if clairvoyance could be extended to the past. And why not? With a model sailing ship in the window of a little, neat house and with a statuette of an stable boy on the porch, holding a lamp up,  someone was making something clear-- perhaps that motion is a real character. 2. How should we feel about "the eraser"? "Rampages" wears one expression while "frantically" wears another: conjoined twins, miraculously separated on Judgement Day? Then "only nothingness" is a bit vague. But words are more precise than sight-- increasingly! 3. The old man shuffles very slowly, not between a crosswalk's white lines but down one of them. Like a figure in a dream, his relations to meaning is ominous.-- --

"Agreement" 

 These are voices of a consciousness that surveys several things at once; time is collapsed, details are suggested, associative leaps abound, and the phrase is terse, problematic. Above all, this is a poetry of concentrated power; what is spoken here, the dissonance between expectation and the manner of how perception changes when idealism greets actual events and deeds, are the things one considers late at night when there's nothing on cable, you've read your books, and only a pen and paper remains; what of me remains in the interactions, the negotiations, the compromises that constitute "making my way" in the world we might inhabit? This is a city of comings and goings, of people and their associations dancing and struggling with the invisible forces of repulsion and attraction; one seeks to transcend what it is that surrounds them, but find that their autonomy is merely a fiction shared only with the self when a community is lacking to applaud or argue with one's declarations of self. Armantrout gets to that minor and hardly investigated phenomenon of how all of us--as readers, writers, consumers, family members--create our dissonances in a manner that is intractable and ingrained. This is a fine, spare, ruminative volume by a singular writer.

Barry Goldensohn stops traffic

Barry Goldensohn is a poet of stylistic conflicts, one part a gifted lyricist who can raise a subject to a higher level--he can almost persuade you that so much does depend on matters, materials and emotions so small--and the other someone who loses their way in tangled intersections of language where metaphor alone does not suffice for effect. The downside of his work is that he often talks more than he ought to. He sinks his poems into odd arrangements of phrase that mark someone who is attempting to be original, memorable; I understand the attempt, but the mistake , I think, is the use of more words rather than accurate words. By "accurate" I mean the construction of images that are at least convincing of both situation and inspiration that would result in a stanza that becomes quotable, something that makes you stop and read the line again.Goldensohn's worst habits cause me to stop at his most glaring coinages.

In "Dissolving", a soul of "dangerous weight" enters the lake waters and experiences something akin to a weightlessness that suggests the burden of gravity has been removed as his girth displaces the water line ,if only a little. Anyone of us might have compared this description to a retrun to the womb, the legendary desire embedded in the lowest recesses of the male brain that wants to escape obligation and engagement, but the poet moves to move beyond the cliche by positing this awkward idea:

he swims
on his back in the female receptive position,A genuine conversation stoppr, this image.This is as awful a line as I've ever read in a poem by an established poet, it being silly, presumptive, altogether unevocative of anything he was trying about in this poem. There's a tinge of hubris , to my thinking, that a male can find an ingenious trope through which to draw a comparison between a woman's position in conceptionizing lovemaking and overweight male's sense of being liberated from his earthly bonds. Had this been Lawrence, the trope would be animated, passionate, full of bitter sweat, sores and a heart-racing ache that would imply that man and woman were changed and for a moment interchangeable during their coupling. This does none of that, and exploring a nervously mentioned notion within a larger narrative bracket wasn't Goldensohn's intent; let's grant him that. But while poetry isn't obliged to adhere to vetted facts, credibility is still the point. What sounds clumsy or dashed off stops the reader's investigation. But he makes matters worse; Goldensohn is a smart man and needed a space within this short poem to demonstrate his ability to riff along in excess of the need.

thin clouds
vaporizing fast in the sun's brilliance
with the water beneath him penetrated by light
and substanceless as air and he afloat
in nothing, one with the water and air and light
and the purposeful seeming union of atoms
producing a mind digesting meanings
like a ruminant disgorging from stomach to stomach
the sobbing face on the stair,


This does not sound natural in any sense--it neither convinces that this is something either seen or experienced first hand, but it does make you think of a conceit someone comes up with and works overly hard to make it fit.It's a unfortunate symptom too prevelant in this time-crowding era, that of a poet trying to have an experience. At best this sounds like an ad libbed pitch for a movie an erstwhile screenwriter might convince a studio to finance; the wouldn't such a bad thing, of course, since various ways of condensing narrative can be artful. Goldensohn, though, gums it up by thinking too much. Perhaps it might have worked even as a contrived situation, but what Goldensohn ought to done is to have considered shoring up his William Carlos Williams influence and edging away from the association-packed candenzas that hightlight A.R.Ammons orAlbert Goldbarth; those guys have a gift for the intellective improvisation from the conveyed image. Their insertions do not stop the traffic.

God as Hamlet

The stark differences in God's persona between Old and New Testaments had changed his mind as to what to do with the world he created, and it's reasonable to think of him as a Deity who is constantly changing, evolving. Otherwise we'd have a God who is static and incapable of changing; he'd be someone who'd be incapable of dealing with an continually unfolding cosmos which he put in motion in the first place. The Prime Mover, I'd think, must by definition be able to move again, and yet again, as needed , as his vast mind assesses, discerns and decides.

Process Theology, put forth by Alfred North Whitehead and others, deals with a bit of this, as does Norman Mailer in most of his writings, most recently in his dialogue with Michael Lennon, On God. God is a creator , small "c", in the sense of the artist, continuously involved with their process as they investigate the further reaches of their muse.

New forms are created from old parts, and not everything is a success, and yet everything is a needed aspect of a life that is fully engaged in a struggle against an all -defeating death. Things wouldn't just be moot, in the popular sense, they would stop being things at all. It may be a mistake to think of God as omnipotent ; if we are made in his likeness then our weaknesses are his as well, and this gives a vital clue that God is less than all-powerful and that he doesn't know the outcome of each and every matter before him. It's an attractive notion that God remains teachable by the very things he creates. There's a reason that it's written that God blessed/cursed man with Free Will, but I'm hesitant to say what that is. It has to be more than a curse he engineered in us all to cause us to stray from a path of righteousness.

Being Omnipotent and A Supreme Being, I would think, implies that there's more for a Deity to do than create Heaven and Earth and treat his subjects on the one inhabitable planet in the solar system as if the whole guise of existence is a reality show, everyone one of us literally, in some sense, waiting to see who gets "voted off the island". Or worse. I would assume that we are possessed with this cumbersome element because it is also in God's nature to choose to one thing, or several things, as opposed to doing one or several things to the contrary. And, of course, he could also do nothing and instead wallow and abstract about all the things he might do when his calendar clears , that is, procrastinate. This might be the reason for the lack of witnessed divine interventions in large public places since the Bible was gathered and codified as Church doctrine. In is image, we are ambivalent and decide on the basis of what crisis is most immediate I actually believe that FW is central to his Divinity, in the sense that he could choose to battle his creative power and simply do nothing.

The existential nature of God, though, would become bored and ill-tempered simply existing in a vacuum, and so he decided to create meaning for himself, much as we do in this realm. Free will is that thing that allows us to associate together and determine and define right and wrong, good and evil, and it is also that inspire given instinct, I believe, to empower us to fight the baser desires and instincts.

Kicking Mailer When He's Dead

It's time, I think, that the amorphous reading mob called call "we" slide past hurt feelings and admit that the late Norman Mailer did write more than a few books where talent outshone excess and ego. In my mind, anyway, and you can read my various pieces on Mailer's career and work in this blog's archive. His enemies, though, won't his credit for composing anything of worth than The Naked and the Dead, and lately, there is a buzz that it was a fluke, or, as Gore Vidal wrote, "a fake". Sour grapes, it seems. Sometimes the name doesn't have to be mentioned at all, as some dedicated haters will just dump a smoothly honed rendition of Mailer's sixty years of negative press in a belated effort to get their licks in. Norman Mailer cultivated turmoil and controversy with the publication of his 1959 combined memoir essay anthology Advertisements for Myself, where he declared, on the first page, in the first paragraph,

The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that I would go so far as to think it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years. I could be wrong, and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true interest to present myself as more modest than I am.

No one was better on the subject of his own vanity and the presumptions of what his talent could do than Mailer himself, and very few others, even the most conceited of our best and worst scribes, were willing to go as far as admit that they wanted to change the world through their art. Only Ayn Rand comes close, I think, but the difference was that Mailer was an artist above all else, with an artist's inclination to follow a whim. Rand, locked into a philosophy cobbled together from misreadings of Plato and Nietzsche, couldn't break from her self-constructed jail of doggerel and dogma; Mailer strayed in interesting, sometimes illuminating ways, his vanity in tow, willing to be a clown, if need be, to produce the book, to advance to the next project. He had bills to pay. Conservative literature czar Roger Kimball blogged an extensive litany of Mailer's infamous deeds, and offered an acidic view of his major works; the essay, though, went online so soon after Mailer's death that one can't help but wonder if Kimball had it sit laying in a drawer, figuratively speaking, waiting for years for the author to pass on. It does read like a jealously kept collection of evidence Roger was saving so he could cast a definitive and finalizing negative assessment. I should mention, though, that a few days later the site, Pajamas Media, published a more balanced overview of Mailer's career by Peter Freeman who, though appalled by Mailer's antics, admitted that the wildman was still an artist and was capable of finely crafted writing. Good for them, for once. Those like me desiring lengthy evaluations that make the case for the overall success of Mailer's odd genius can find solace in Lee Siegel's critical summary of his work in the New York Times Book Review when he reviewed Mailer's final novel The Castle in the Forest. It's a smart fit, as Siegel, like Mailer, is something of a blowhard and in love with his own intelligence; all the same, again like Mailer, the man is smart and has the right take on what the novelist was up to with his practiced exhibitionism.

The latest instance is from Commentary Magazine; basically a compendium of the lowlife's of Mailer's public career, the piece declares, for the most part, that Mailer's body of work was, in its entirety, dull, the prolix vaporing of a delusional fool. The level of gossipy slander is high, and no real argument is made as to why Mailer's books, pace Naked and the Dead, are dead on arrival. Consider the source; Norman Podhoretz is still trying to settle scores. That his publication is arguing with a dead man heightens Mailer's value. I don't doubt many work boring, but I think it's more to do with your taste rather than with the late author's writing. Writers who are boring, dull, lacking ideas, verve and are unable to make themselves more captivating generally don't spend six decades in the spotlight of contemporary American literature, as Mailer had. Not that there's a consensus on his work and life; fierce debates about his books have been raging nearly as long as he's been a public figure. This nearly sixty years of contention by critics and readers, yay and nay, is not the mark of a boring writer. Boring writers are ignored and go unread. Mailer, to say the least, you paid attention to. I would reject is an all-encompassing pronouncement that Mailer is an awful writer, or that the majority of his work is dreadful and merely the extensions of a large, unclued ego. The fun in all this, though, is contrasting one's peculiar justifications for enjoying or disliking a writer (or filmmaker, poet, painter) and seeing what responses come forth that think differently.

There is something to be said about Mailer being the second hand and slap-dashed in his writings--I'm thinking of his foghorning pomp on the state of American theatre in his introduction to his play version of The Deer Park, his glorification of juvenile delinquency and his homophobic mewling in Advertisements for Myself -- but he did, for me, rise above was mere petulance and high octane assholism in his writing, which is to say in his thinking, that he kept me interested over the course of forty plus years of reading him. Of a Fire on the Moon, Harlot's Ghost and Why Are We in Viet Nam are written in three distinct styles, with varying dictions and pitches. It was a large plus in Mailer's column that he varied his tone to do the best service to a story. As much as one admired and even envied the rolling cadences and chain-reaction like flurry of metaphors of the style that characterized, his richest period, the sixties through the seventies, one had to find relief that the author himself seemed to have grown bored with addressing himself in the third person and proselytizing in a high rhetoric.

The briefer sentences, the barren, stark voice, the uninflected hiss of the language was the perfect foil for The Executioner's Song. He was not the perfect writer, but from the excess of his self-promotions and cracker barrel prophecies comes a voice unlike any other, and a voice as well with sufficient mastery to have produced a handful of masterpieces as well as a selection of egocentric subject groping. These are the works that Mailer partisans will have to contend transcend the late author's feuds, fights, wife stabbings, drinking sprees, and divorces. The hope is that his reputation as a writer catches his notoriety as a professional jerk.