Bachelder and Boyle Spoil the Party

Tortilla Curtain

a novel by TC Boyle

Culture clash is the theme in Tortilla Curtain , and leave it TC Boyle to go beyond the abstract curtain of statistics, policy wonkery and three-hankie tragedy mongering and provide the reader instead with a contradiction that is harshly comic; well off Southern Californians, nominally liberal in their politics, are forced to deal with an illegal couple who are in the most dire situations. It works to the degree in that the suburban pair preferred to have their causes at several layers of removal , preferring safe memberships in organizations forever raising money for non controversial progressive causes; a check or a credit card donation was the exercise of their social responsibility, an acceptable penance for what is largely a consumerist lifestyle. Boyle does not sugar coat, euphemise nor glorify the awful trials and fate of the Mexican couple that had stolen over the border looking for a better life. Against a backdrop of  sunshine, opulence and Conspicuous Consumption, Boyle tenders life at the margins, at the edges of glittering downtowns and cascading suburbs. Boyle is stinging and blunt in the way he describes the ordeals economic desperation that drives good people. He is unsparing at offering up a priceless, painfully recognizable banter of a privileged psychology that inspects the hard facts of injustice and responds by trying to worm their way out of any sense of responsibility for others less well endowed.

U.S.!
a novel by Chris Bachelder

Chris Bachelder is a lovable prankster who likes to turn the nicely fitting glove of literature inside out. while the rest of us are looking for meanings and various forms of significance in the interior decorating of conventional fictional devices--to this day, we all yearn to have poets and novelists to tell us The Truth-- Bachelder prefers to spray paint on the props and show us the cluttered backstage of these settings. And better yet, he rather likes in tying the shoelaces together of the pompous, the serious, the bizarrely sanctimonious. "U.S.!" has him imagining a world where the true believers in an American Socialist Revolution manage, through some vaguely revealed ritual of magic realism, to bring the dead activist novelist Upton Sinclair back to life; back to life the poor, steadfast, solemn socialist does, looking increasingly awful and putrid at the edges, going on the lecture trail, writing and publishing more of his cardboard narratives, trying to convince an amazingly uninterested citizenry the exact nature of what's killing them. Nothing comes of this, as expected, and the intrepid Lewis finds himself talking himself hoarse , only to find himself being killed violently and then ingloriously resurrected yet again.

A surreal fish-out-of-water story, Bachelder has a perfect ear for duplicating the static prose of the late novelists, and excels at demonstrating the striking contrasts between those who think that literature can make populations shed their entrenched and deeply rooted versions of Bad Faith and rise to the selfless cause of The Common People; this is a story of where the idea of the progression of history toward a final and just time, intersects with a culture where history does not end anywhere at all. Rather, it splits off into many tributaries, a crossroads every five metaphorical miles. Sinclair Lewis, tragicomic figure he is, stops at each of them, scratching his head as to which road to take.

An overwrought after taste

The problem with The Sweet Undertaste is the straining effort poet Philip Schultz takes to make it a significant, moving poem. Less poem than it is a narrative broken up with pained intellection and verbal padding, this tale of a WW 2 survivor suffering his end in a Stateside hospital seems like a small drawer into which Schultz tried to cram too much material. Perhaps a longer, more vivid form is needed for this storyline, a book, a novel perhaps, or a film where the thick language can give way to stunning, convincing visuals. We have is something that makes me think of the worst aspects of novelists Russell Banks writing, an absent sense of when to stop a description, of when to clip an adjective or a verb. Condensed though this poem is, it has overwriting to spare:

What accounts for the sweetness of human beings?

For the fragile, inexhaustible longing in the eyes

of the slowly dying, the sweet undertaste of

a tune sung in a moment of unutterable delight?

The attempt here is to be discursive and conversational at the same time, an achievable balance we know, but Schultz's word choices, his enhancements of the tone he attempts to construct, undermine the sentiment. "The fragile, inexhaustible longing.." would ordinarily be ring true if a sparer sentence were written, but the two qualifiers, "fragile, inexhaustible" indicates indecision ; Schultz doesn't sound convinced that he ' making his case and opts to use both terms, connecting them with another term, "longing", meant to suggest a state of being, a condition of unmet desire, but which is , in itself, a vague, indefinite description. A more concrete image for the Uncle's interior life would bring us to a situation that is already complex, where there needn't be the flourishes that gum up the works. The reluctance to pare this back to more definite language results too easily in comically arch writing:

What accounts for the ignorance and hate

that chased him from the German side of Poland

to the Russian side, from the honeycomb of innocence

to the boomeranging cold of a cattle car rushing through

the moonless Siberian night

The rhetorical question is a set for a rush of language meant to pick up the pace and create momentum, like the stock film cliche of showing calendar pages flying off the wall as time marches on through futures none could predict, but the effect is faintly ridiculous in the lack of sure footing. We have,  I suppose, an attempt at film montage, verbs turned into adjectives as in "boomeranging cold from a cattle car rushing through the moonless Siberian night". I confess to liking "boomeranging", although it's an imprecise use; boomerangs, if properly tossed, turn back toward their point of origin, and the implication is that Uncle Sigmund is traveling in circles. He is, though, going straight ahead into the future. But the issue again is the padding, the added weight inserted to lend the descriptions urgency and impact. I would have jettisoned boomerang, moonless and have the line read as a bare depiction of a cattle car racing along the tracks at night. A more vivid,if an unspoken sense of the horror that awaits might have arisen between the spaces where the excess once resided. And yes, I would have dispensed with the "honeycomb of innocence", an awkward line, a self-parody of a poet stuck for a phrase. There is the tendency to think to that every line in a free verse poem has to ring with coinages, phrases that are quotable in other contexts. One might compare it to a virtuoso guitarist thinking that he is obliged to the most complex improvisations in all spotlighted situations. Monotony results, and the displays of craft, the insertion of particularized style, begins to have no effect. More Joe Pass, less Yngwie Malmsteen. 

...the unalterable fact that once a man has run for his life

never again can he sleep through the night, that once salvation

is torn out of us we continue to run, on one leg and two,

to crawl like a worm through the stony anonymous earth?

Some unifying truth about ideals and human resilience is being looked for in Uncle Sigmund's story, but Schultz doesn't bring us to the point of his realization about the culminating effects of adversity and aging , he begins to lecture us, a style that awards us with an awkward image of worm working its way through a "stony, anonymous earth". This approach gives this relatively brief poem a glacial pace, a thick brick of words. The hospital room at the end, I hope, has another bed next to the dying Uncle Sigmund, reserved for this poem.

A drive through an old neighborhood

Debating what constitutes authenticity is a nice way to chase your tail, but is a fun way to pass the time when there's nothing else making demands on your time. It's not a waste of time since it is a way for us to define and articulate What Matters in life beyond our bond with the Banks and the Legal System. It is what makes life a pleasure, and a large part of that pleasure is maintaining the capacity to be pleasantly surprised.I've preferred to remain agnostic in matters of musical taste; pragmatic might be a better word. Or perhaps my tastes merely change with time. In any event, I tend to think that anyone committed to trying to earn living playing music and performing, activities from which there are no guarantees of financial security (or even an audience) can't help but be sincere. One might dislike the motive or the personality, but the emotion is authentic enough. Better to consider whether the music is at least honest, or better yet, if it's done well: whether music, lyrics, voice, style work on their own terms, makes for a more interesting set of topics, and a more compelling record collection.  What those terms turn out to be might be, at first, seemingly unacceptable or contrary to everything you held as essential to quality. But to paraphrase a famous line contextualizing Modern Art, most original art forms seem at first ugly and horrible; they emerge ahead of the curve and the rest of the culture has to catch up. Not everything gets past the finish line, though, as a review of your record collection reveals. I'd wager we all have many albums from bands and artists we thought were heavy and groovy back in the day that now makes us scratch what's left of our hairline, wondering what we were thinking. It was after I slid into my forties where the other songs and albums by Zeppelin reemerged on my radar and revealed a band that was more diverse, musically, than the popular invective allows. Where I lived at the time, Zeppelin fans were just as likely to be listening to the Band, Van Morrison and CS&N, along with other folks "sissy" artists as they were the macho sounds of hard rock. Like the Beatles or Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin were studio artists, where the studio was the proverbial third instrument. Live, they were one of the worst bands I've ever seen--though they sounded pretty damned good when I saw them in '67 (?) on their first US tour with Jethro Tull--but in the studio, their music was finessed and honed, typical in those days. For all his faults as a faulty technician in live circumstances, he is a producer who brought a fresh ear to the recording process and came up with ideas that circumvented the routine dullness and rigor that's become the bane of less able hard rock and metal bands after his Zeppelin's break up.The only real bad aftershock of " Sgt Pepper's" and other "concept albums" from the period was the mistaken notion by other artists that there had to be one grandiose and grandiloquent theme running throughout both sides of their albums in order for their work to be current with the mood of the art rock of the period. The Beatles succeeded with "Sgt. Pepper", "Magical Mystery Tour", and, and "Abbey Road" ( easily their most consistent set of material, I think) because they never abandoned the idea that the album needs to be a collection of good songs that sound good in a set: overlapping themes, lyrically, are absent in the Beatles work, unless you consider the reprise of the Pepper theme song on a leitmotif of any real significance (its use was cosmetic), although musical ideas did give the feel of conceptual unity track to track, album to album. 

Lennon and McCartney and Harrison's greatest contribution to rock music was their dedication to having each one of their songs be the best they could do before slating it for the album release. For other bands, the stabs at concept albums were routinely disastrous, witnessed by the Stones attempt to best their competitors with the regrettable 'Satanic Majesties Requests". The Who with "Tommy" and "Who's Next" and the Kinks, best of all, with "Lola", "Muswell Hillbillies" and "Village Green", both were rare, if visible exceptions to the rule. "Revolver" and "Yesterday and Today" are amazing song collections, united by grand ideas or not. I buy albums, finally, on the hope that the music is good, the songs are good, not the ideas confirm or critique the Western Tradition. The conventional wisdom is often wrong, but not always, and I think the popular opinion that Sgt. Pepper is a better disc, song by song, than Satanic Majesties is on the mark. Majesties had The Stones basically playing catch up with the Beatles with their emergent eclecticism and failing, for the most part. That they didn't have George Martin producing and finessing the rough spots of unfinished songs marks the difference. Majesties, though does have at least one great song, "2000 Man", and a brilliant one, "She's A Rainbow" For the rest, it sounds like a noisy party in the apartment next door. The album sounds like a collection of affectations instead of a cohesive set of songs. Cohere is exactly what the tunes on Pepper did, good, great, brilliant, and mediocre. The sounded like they belonged together.

Criticism vs Theory

Celebrity writers are writers nonetheless, and their notoriety doesn't reduce the value of there work, if the work is good. That is the real issue, I think, coming to a new framework that the worth of a work can be determined across the field: artistic, social. The situation is that postmodernism, as a writing style with discernible notions about how a tale will be told, has outstripped contemporary criticism's ability to discuss the work in any really meaningful, useful way. That was the point initially. While postmodern writers are actually engaged with the world through their writing, postmodern critics, a different breed entirely, lose themselves in undecidables and have turned vacillation into a pathetic , minor art. What  concerns me is whether the work is any good,  and the task for criticism, it seems to me, is to determine under what terms  are that bring the desired qualities to life, or instructs us, to a degree, how a writer's book is lacking. This is the short coming of much modern theory, in that "theory" has replaced what we used to regard as real criticism, the starting point at which a conversation starts. A good amount of literary thought of the last fifty years informs us that such a conversation, about what a text means or what can reveal about human experience at the farthest or most intimate edges, is impossible.

It's useful, I think , to separate  "postmodern" novelists,etc, from postmodern theorists. I propose that a new critical language be created to help us deal with the work of Pynchon, DeLillo, Acker, Burroughs, Gaddis, Reed, Kundera, Wallace, Eggers, a language that can see the links between postmodernism and other literary styles, such as Magic Realism, and expand the study as to how different cultures respond to their increasingly variegated existences. Pomo theory , as is, is nothing but a stop sign. A point among many is that postmodern writing has been around long enough -- since after WWll, I believe-- for a useful literary criteria to arise around it. The re-making and the re-re-making of those values are generally extensions, elaborations or, more radically, severe disagreements with standards that formed around a work while in nascent form. Modernism, as an aesthetic movement, among scads of others in history, had it's propagandists in it's early time, critics whose views remain bed rock, the base from which reformations are made.

Postmodern criticism went wrong when the discipline mistook itself for philosophers, or linguists, or cultural anthropologists. The result of this detour has been a mess of unreadable prose whose authors aim to disguise the fact that they've nothing to say. I am for postmodern literature, but I am aghast at postmodern literary criticism. Now, I think, is the time to convene a new project, a better way of dealing with the huge body of work by an interesting population of writers. It's time for a re-making, and re-re-making after that.

Critics without a malleable framework are talking only to themselves, finally. The value of criticism is in how it deepens the reading: an ideal criticism, I think, ought to be the sieve through which the variety is taken in and studied.

This is ultimately about discourse: discourse needs to go somewhere, though, needs to have results, because it is about trying to figure what ways there are that we may engage each other in ways that are honest and mutually satisfying, whatever market system you think this goal is possible under. The exact problem with postmodern theory, the intellectual and not the aesthetic texts, is that it's turned into a self-conscious wallow (often disguised under the rubric of being "self-reflective") that brandishes the idea that an awareness of it's own social construction somehow advances bold, better human freedom. What it does is make the nominal partisans of just causes weak and immobile, ready to have their own conventional wisdom used against them.  by a foe that's true to its own cause enough to use any weapon it can lay its hands on in order to make the world theirs and sterile under one Totalizing God, who, I suspect, isn't likely to have much truck with language theory. 

I don't think understanding ever stops.

ROCK AND ROLL MADE ME STUPID!

Like many another clueless air guitar rebel, I sang in a band during the Seventies, a strange assortment of druggies, layabouts, alkies, and genius geeks who all loved hard rock. I was the singer, and the songs I sang ranged from Trower to Led Zep to Deep Purple to Mountain--I had a miserable voice, but I was the one who could get a raspy tone and volume, so sang I did. No one seemed to mind, most likely because they were usually as drunk as I was. In any case, Dewar and Trower were the perfect combinations of singer and guitarist--there likely hasn't been a collaboration this good since Rod Steward and Jeff Beck or Paul Rodgers and Paul Kossoff (in the late, great band Free). Trower, additionally, is about my favorite British blues guitarist--he broke the Clapton mold his fellows got snared by and developed his own sound; I think he's pretty distinct from Hendrix, even with the similarities. I've seen him pass through town in the last few years, and the man plays better than he ever has. Yeah. Great stuff. The saddest day of my life, though, was when someone who'd recorded one of my band's kegger gigs played the gig--we sounded awful. Even the time-honored honored rock and roll aesthetic favors attitude over expertise; we sucked, in turn, long, deep and hard.

A bag full of agitated electric razors would have sounded better than the clamor we were producing, out of tune, atonal, thumping, with a guitarist who was fried on cocaine and rum who managed to make his guitar sounded worse than car alarms screaming in a West Virginia mall. I, in turn, had the timbre that sounded, to be kind to myself, like someone who was clearing his throat over the loudest microphone on the stage. A crazed dog would have told me to shut the fuck up. I didn't stay quiet, though. At best, the rhythm section, a bass player and drummer who wouldn't be out of place in a police line-up in Hooterville, sounded like two winos having a knife fight under behind an abandoned coin laundry. We knew we were the shit.

 That night we had a gig, and what I did was drink more and scream harder. My voice was gone the following morning, and I could talk or eat shellfish for a month. But I pressed on, I continued, a true believer in my own capacity as a post-blues revenge howler who could tear a hole in the ozone with one ball-squeezing shriek. I was in a band in the Seventies that played hard rock, butt rock so-called, and I was the singer, not that I could sing, but it's not as if any of us could really play either, save for a guitarist who had chops, no ambition, and a taste for coke. Everyone in the band is missing in action, including me, but the fact that my phone doesn't ring with queries from these guys hasn't diminished my lifestyle. Between groping other guys' girlfriends, stealing drugs and records, and not paying back any of the borrowed money I promised to pay back in merely a couple of days, it's just as well that bad news that's over thirty years old remain the tragic history it has so far remained. Our song list:

Hot Blooded

Mississippi Queen Bad Motor Scooter

Tush /Waiting for the Bus / Jesus left Chicago

Heartbreaker/Rock and Roll/Goodtimes Badtimes

All Right Now / Wishing Well

Superstitious

I Just Wanna Make Love to You (FOGHAT VERSION)

JEANIE JEANIE (remember Automatic Man?)

Dancing Madly Backwards (remember Captain Beyond?)

Too rolling stoned/The Fool and Me/Day of the Eagle/Man of the World

Hellcat (Scorpions)

Dirty Love (Zappa)

Thumbsucker (Mountain)

Hiway Star/Space Truckin/Black Night(Deep Purple)

Supernaught (Sabbath)

Bang a gong

Rebel Rebel

There were hundreds of hours of rehearsal in a floating crap game of a scene, going from one band member's parents' house to the other for what were really drinking parties. Things usually got destroyed, and sometimes we made it all the way through a song. We even played a few dozen times. I was drunk most of the time so that I could scream the few words I actually knew to each song, somehow, truly, thinking that I sounded just like Robert Plant or Paul Rodgers or Rod Stewart or any of my swaggering, macho strut heroes, only slightly aware that for all the half-skips sash-shaying I took for masculine intimations of heterosexual power were in fact very much a swanning display of featherless fan dancing. To the end of my time in front of the microphone, twisting my vocal cords into twisted knots of scraping rasps and glottal whispers, I was convinced my style was akin to the greatest belters blues and soul music gave to the white world for worship, Ray Charles, yes, Otis Redding, oh yes, Little Richard, fuck yes! It was a small beer that I never knew what I sounded like, the grunts and groin-splitting yelps buried under layers of un-tuned amplified guitar, farting bass lines, and the endless thrash of a speed freak drummer. Someone once recorded one of our gigs on a reel to reel at a San Diego State Frat Party, and it was a gross, hell-bent, auto accident cacophony, fuzzy and sputtering with feedback and wrong notes and crowd noise and breaking glass: the noise hurt the inner ear: the MC5 without conviction. I was singing, all right, but I sounded like I had two wool socks crammed in my mouth, screaming in muffled horror while a serial killer approached me with a blade. I sounded drunk. The band sounded drunk. The decade was drunk.

Exit, stage left

There was a Kathryn Maris poem I wrote about a bit ago, Lord Forgive Me , which I liked because she managed the near impossible, to write about drinking that avoids the predictable bathos, and knee jerk tragedy that clings to the subject matter.

Alcoholism is such a prevalent condition in marrow of our history and culture that it has assumed the worst thinking of nearly any one's heritage. Maris, though, managed to write through her particular scenario without a hint of self pity or the hoary glorification of the outsider spirit being too sensitive to live the world sober. Not lacking a point of view, the poem was free of cant, getting to a complex emotion irresolution without the expected props. She didn't attempt to make anything "happen."  The lack of the expected stage props in the poem made it a tougher vision. It was more powerful as a result.

Her footing is less sure with the current poem she has in Slate, The Witch and Mcduff Exit My Neighbor's House .  (Note: The small "d" in the title's "Mcduff" is as Slate published it. I assume it is the author's preference).This is more ramble than verse, a formless gruel of would be allusions pretending toward irony. Yet another poet finds herself tangled in the learning that was supposed to aid them in discerning the world more clearly, more deliberately. Maris doesn't get her props out of the warehouse where she stores them.

It's a complex trick that she's attempting here, translating a daily set of occurrences in terms of theatre that she's obviously obsessed with, but for all the framing devices she uses to emphasise her boredom, her encroaching ennui, the poem feels false. It seems that she had laid her references out on the floor like they were incidental things--bottle caps, pens, loose change--and tried to connect them in an interesting pattern by linking them with a length of string. It's less a map to this character's divided self--her distance from the actually lives of her neighbors and her being engrossed with the fictional personalities she superimposes on real people--than it is a strained gathering of author names and literary terms.

 Where ever Maris was trying to go with this poem, she did so without a map. Now she's stuck in an awful, indecisive traffic. This is what happens when you try to make things happen without having an idea of what your driving at.