Rand Paul's Rush Job

Rand Paul's campaign for Senate has received from legal representatives of the band Rush informing them that they are using some of the band's copyrighted music without permission. You'd link that it would part of that erstwhile libertarian's animal instinct to pay Rush the money required to lawfully use their music to sell his brand of anti-statist snake oil. I would imagine an intern, aiding a campaign advance man, cobbled together the soundtrack on the fly without a second thought to obtaining permissions, but the notion that creators should receive compensation for use of their work is such a bed rock belief in the firmament that you wonder how this slip, though minor, could have happened. The pun is obvious enough; who did the soundtrack preparations for the Paul campaign did a rush job.(Sorry.)Funny thing, since Rush are Ayn Randians. Unrestrained free-marketeers ripping each other off, go figure.Imagine a world ruled by people who take what they want with what ever cavalier strong arming it takes . Rush and Rand are a perfect match, by the way: the respective music and novels each has produced are big, clumsy, and chicken ranch dumb.

Booked up

Not one of us, I don't think, hasn't desired to write a short poem that could beautifully, succinctly encapsulate the essence of an impossible broad subject. The dominating desire would be, I believe, that one wanted to at least say something tht would make the reader nod their head in recognition, a accomplishment that would rise above yet another dirge abut the impossibility of our language to convey experience with anything resembling accuracy. "Books" by Campbell McGrath is such an attempt at the short and sweet lyric on a philosophical duty.This poem begins with comparing books to honey in a beehive, and continues for several lines with nothing less than a travelogue, a history lesson, a anthropological slide show. Linking the unlikely is always a refreshing activity when the things being connected have a plausible yet unexpected relationship the Inspector Poet notes and presents forth in grand language.Campbell McGrath has, at least, the grand language, as his transitions here are not glaring or tuneless; as he investigates the idea that true value, real beauty and shared assumptions of the sublime lie not on surface appearances but in essences that have to be patiently searched for--one must "dig" for the good stuff, one must go behind and beneath and beyond surfaces to reap the richness that might otherwise remain sealed-- he sustains a remarkably musical flow in his tone. But this makes the poem's pleasure a sonic one, a handy disguise that this is merely an ordinary idea even in a reader's most indulgent state of mind.McGrath provides no surprises, but rather merely surmises a number of narrative starts that are abbreviated for a series of convenient "for examples". I do have a preference for the tightly reigned in poem these poems, those splendidly woven odes where concision and illuminating word choice highlight a perception that would have been other wise lost in a stream of moments, but what McGrath has taken here is not a conceit, but a topic requiring discourse. Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery and , I insist, A.R.Ammons have been here before, merging, invading or ripping apart the civilizing reassurances whick subdue our response to raw experience.Each poet ,in their kind, have wandered among the imagined realm beyond appearances and offered up respectively visceral reactions. McGrath begins his poem with a simile and does not grow beyond that; he dares tread only so far to the edge and is not likely to be fully seduced by his muse. Sweet as it is, this poem is an itch he will not scratch, and that's an irritation on a whole other level.

Leslie Scalapino

Poet Leslie Scalapino has passed away, a great loss to American poetry. I had a good fortune some thirty-plus years ago to do a reading with her at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco at a reading organized by friend Steve Farmer, and I've been a fan of her writing ever since. Her particular genius was bringing language to the forefront and investigating how accounting for what one perceives isn't a cut and paste process as we would normally believe. Still, something actually more complex, elusive, wonderfully confounding. There is a sense in her work of experiencing many emotions simultaneously, and the notion of feeling the varied senses fire up in sequence. She presented her poems as variations on the small things heard, seen, felt: it seemed to me that it was the smallest matters for her that evoked the largest response. Coherence was more nuanced than what the mainstream culture would have us think. She was a poet of accumulating power. I am grateful to have read with her. I am grateful for the books she wrote and published.

Dennis Hopper

The funny thing of it all was that this morning a work associate and I were talking about recent celebrity deaths, a habit many of us indulge in when more than one celebrity passes away. We'd had gone through the mentions of Art Linkletter and the actually tragic Gary Coleman when she asked me how Dennis Hopper was doing. I  said that I hadn't heard anything since I read that he was gravely ill a couple of weeks earlier.
A half hour later during a break I  went online to check on Google News headlines, and there it  was, Dennis Hopper Dies. It caused a chill. Hopper was  as iconic an actor as has ever come out of Hollywood, an intense student of the Method who's twitching, mercurial intensity got him involved in some truly landmark motion pictures--Rebel Without a Cause,  Easy Rider,Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, River's Edge. One might say that his trademarked style of performance, of finding the raw-nerved insanity of each emotion a scene called for and maintaining a sense of a barely contained contradictions within his  character, was something that limited the range of roles of might have had during his career.

His style  could at times be like listening to late period Coltrane, where the saxophonist pushed his technique to a sustained , shrieking harmonic emotionalism; the ability to get to that edge and maintain it over time was impressive, but it could also grate. Hopper's presence--a figure of narcissistic menace who was constantly evaluate what is in his world and abruptly, violently remove the people and things in it he no longer fancied-- had the good fortune to find use in a series of films that weathered the fickle preferences of studios and audiences.The appeal of Hopper's roles in this best work is that he seemed to be the person in the crowd who had realized the great possibility that the meaning of existence depended more on the quality of choices one made in good faith rather than adhering to an abstract moral framework one is intractably born into. It seemed that his most extreme creations--Frank Booth, The fried  Photo Journalist in Apocalypse Now--had come across the fine print hidden that  stated that our philosophies and our certainties are based on nothing outside our own invention. In that regard , one wonders what Hopper might have said of his own life, his own work,  his legacy of worthiness beyond his personal and career struggles to be honest, creative and helpful in the world he actually lived in. To over-stated praise after his passing, Hopper's lurking  spirit paraphrase the Photo Journalist's rant about the cryptic Kurtz:

 I mean, what are they gonna say when he's gone? 'Cause he dies when it dies, when it dies, he dies! What are they gonna say about him? He was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He had wisdom? Bullshit, man!

Nothing yet to be made of the day but some wet hair clinging to the nape of the neck, coffee that's too hot to power down, a groaning neighbor regretting last night's play-making. I type a bit, reach into my pocket and come upon a to-do list of things to finish. It was folded a dozen times, it seems, each crease deep as wrinkles in an experienced skin. I made the list a week ago. Every deadline has lasped, every task is incomplete. I hate myself for some minutes, sip at the coffee, cringe at the cold hair teasing the wet locks adhering to the back of my neck. Time to go.

Writer's block and the home made cosmology

Don DeLillo's novel Mao ll shows the writer at the height of his powers, a novel that highlights an individuals experience of seeing the coherence of his belief system erode and chip apart as forces, historical and economic, invade that area of life that had seemed safe for so long. Potent writing, one of those characters is a reclusive Pynchon (or DeLillo) stand -in whose absence of new work or public appearance has created a presence larger than literary reputation alone could manage: if we talk about the speed at which disparate events suddenly seem to converge and become linked through the slimmest of resemblances, this is the novel to start with. This DeLillo at his championship best--he is superb at amassing the telling details his characters surround themselves in a secure themselves with. Likewise, he effectively conveys how intervening events readily dismantle a homemade cosmology.

The novel's fabled author, sensing that he is nearing the end of his creative potency, agrees to come is seclusion to participate in a large public reading to support an obscure poet who has been abducted by terrorists ; he emerges from the world of the secluded artist who has control of his creativity and the consequences of his choices and reenters the world he withdrew from, the world he nominal takes his inspiration from, and is subject again to the ebb and flow of events he assumed he finally understood through a career of fictionalizing it. DeLillo here does some of the best writing I've come across about the practice of writing, or rather, the rituals of writing; the novelist is working on an eagerly anticipated novel that will place his long career in perspective, but the reader witnesses isn't a conclusion being achieved, but rather stalling.

There are revisions, a retyping of notes, editorial changes, alterations of format, more research to do, more cross-indexing to be done before the manuscript can be submitted to the publisher and the judgment of history. Death, of course, is easily detected presence here, hanging over the composing and collating procedures like some  cloud threatening to rain, but DeLillo defers reference to the inevitability and concentrates instead on the intensity of the busy work the novelist and his assistant engage in during their work sessions; there is a focus on the details of narrative and the word choices that serve as  background noise, a loud music of a kind that keeps the lurking notion that there are no more words to come after this book is completed and out of his hands. Getting started again, becoming interested in a new idea to the degree that one is willing to subject themselves to another span of time of research, writing, and revision. Mailer had commented while he was writing his final novel The Castle in the Forest that he was "...going to finish this novel, or it's going to finish me," summarizing perfectly the process of writing as an activity that requires every resource one has to commit to a book they think needs to be written.

One does feel used up and empty after the last correction is made and the manuscript is shipped out; the prospect of starting over again for the next book is daunting, and the idea of  starting a new work late in life, admitting the possibility that one might die before the work is done is a frightening prospect. One does not want to be found in the midst of their unfinished business, whatever it might be. The stalling tactics of DeLillo's fictional novelist become understandable: delay the completion of the book, extend the length of one's life. The question, though, is whether the quality of life, on those conditions, rises above being a kind of stasis-defined Limbo. Is a life predicated on the non-engagement of one's creative instinct worth sticking around for?

Happy Birthday Mr.Zimmerman

It was Bob Dylan's birthday the other day, and I had the pleasure to attend a tribute performance of his songs , featuring a curious mix of renditions of obscure Dylan songs and versions of more familiar ones that were, in a word, problematic. The gathered performers, singer-songwriters all who obviously feel their debt to the iconic man is something that they cannot repay in full, obviously had fun with their choices and their occasionally idiosyncratic arrangements. The results were mostly enjoyable, although there continues to be the knee jerk habit of praising Dylan's songwriting beyond good sense. Dylan has been in the music game since the early sixties, his influence on other performers is second only to the Beatles for the unalterable game change he brought to rock and pop music, and it's astounding that that through the decades, weathering fads, trends and  several years of bad road, he remains relevant. But that he remains a touchstone younger generations model themselves after isn't the same that everything he's written is equal to the best work; some of it is , in fact, slapdash, repetitive, and unconvincing as narrative vehicles.  

It's often pointed out by critics   and the occasional  academic like Christopher Hicks that Dylan's writing shares with legitimately Canonical figures like Pope and Milton a life's work that reveals the gathering perspective of one who has outlived their foolishness and impulsive certitude; perhaps, Dylan remains a songwriter, not a poet , and his lyrics are locked into the bare chord essentials that have been his preference since "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan". His melodic range is limited, and part of the problem with the weakest of his later songs is that there isn't musical cue to give the artist a hint of when to wrap up his subject. Instead, one chorus follows another , with little variety in a song's melodic logic to indicate when a subtler, terser phrase is needed, when a more vivid refrain is required.

A consistent tension between melody and lyric creates interest, and makes lyrics quotable. Too much of latter day Dylan is not quotable, but are, rather, prolix, a longish bit of daydreaming in the vaguest of locales. The vagueness would be fine if there were a more evocative word selection, but too often Dylan writes what seems like an interesting commencement upon an intriguing passage, only to quickly bury it with insipid qualifiers and disposable asides. What I keep wondering is whether if Dylan had advanced his musical vocabulary--The Beatles had, The Rolling Stones had, Elvis Costello had, Dylan acolytes all--would his lyric chops likewise seen an elevation in quality and variety?

While pondering that at the concert, a performer on stage was attempting a version of  "Like a Rolling Stone",  a miserable experience. It came off more as a Ricky Lee Jones parody than a tribute to Dylan, with an arrhythmic mix and match of tempos and grating blues inflections and melismatic improvisations on the famously acerbic words that made no connection with the surreal rant that is at the song's center. It was an indecisive version, full of stops and starts and wasted vocal gestures--voice and guitar seemed not to know what the other was doing; it was like watching someone try to park too large a car in too small a space. Dylan's best songs deserve better.