Fuzzy thinking

Nothing lasts forever, we can agree, as we realize anything made by man falls apart in time, but there remains the question as to what sort of art, the vainest of ways to make a living, will last a generation or so beyond the artist's dying day. I'd say the artists whose work lasts are those whose obsessions are about their process, their art-making, not their notices, their contracts, or the amount of air kisses and flattery one of their shows inspires. History, however it comes to be made, and who ever writes it, is a metaphysical dead end the better art makers side step, and instead make the punch and panache of their invigorated wits count in the strokes of the brush, the curl of the paint scudding over the surface, the blurring and clarifying of forms, shapes, colors and its lack: painting, coming from the modernist angle that still seems a sound and malleable way of handling the hairier knots on the chain, comes as where the world ends, the limit of what the eye can see, the forms the eye is blind to but the mind, muddle that it is, tries to imagine in a sheer swirl of perception. It is about the essaying forth of projects that strive for a moment of perfection that suddenly dies with the slightest re-cue of temperature, it is always about the attempt to convey a new idea. The articulation of the perception may end in inevitable failure, but the connections made along the way, the bringing together of contrary energies made the attempt and its result worth the experience.  This seems to be the material that the shrouded groves of History recalls, the earnest and frenzied striving of artists who are too busy with their work to realize that history may, or may not, finally absolve them of strange rage for paints and brushes.

Things die, and no one knows why

It's September 11th, around 6:30 in the morning, and MSNBC is rebroadcasting it's real time coverage of the terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center that killed 3000 people nine years ago. It's dramatic footage, the emotions start up again, the rationalizations commence anew about what the world has come to, the chatter of news reporters, camera men, politicians, witnesses  fill the room. Nine years ago the air was composed of equal amounts of horror and incomprehension, so much death and destruction for reasons as yet unknown. No one knows why this happened.  A fatal guesswork became our national past time.

It's suitable , I suppose, that what Robert Pinsky has chosen to share with the poetry readers of Slate Magazine this week deals with the passing of people, places and things from our lives, suddenly, abruptly, without explanation. The poem has it's charms, although it dwells too much on how it sounds rather than what it conveys: it's a trifle too well made to be wholly convincing for a topic we are warned has no satisfying resolution.

Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why
Reeves Keyworth


Secluded in their cold arcades of rock,
embraced by a thousand reverberating kin,
bats have perished and are perishing.
The plowboy in the field, dreaming of love,
perishes, and the scorched grub,
disclosed in the moist earth.
Spiders and the spiders' children perish:
the hawk, the stylish dragonfly, the trout.
A beetle cocks its blurred eye
at the underside of a leaf and perishes.
The lizard perishes, and the famished fox.
The mule's body subsides and sours on a riverbank.
The worshipers perish and the mourners:
the strenuous celebrants, the terrier with his grin,
the best-loved child, the browsing herd of pigs.
The tongue perishes, and the eye.
Lamentation and praise, incantation, song,
the resolve of the wolf, and the wolf's prey—perish.
The grassland perishes in fire;
the ant drowns in a waterspout.
The bear, the bat, the water rat,
the woman leaning on her windowsill,
the protozoa sunning in their sluggish green:
perished and perishing. No one knows why.


People and things are essentially viewed here as leaving this life doing what it is they do on a daily basis; these are rituals, poems, prayers, beseechments and be-ratings that bring the collective voices to the highest pitch of vocabulary , these are raptures and negotiations and plans laid out and explained that clarify the meaning of specific actions , and yet there is intervention over all. For all the songs, odes, rants, rages and contract law , for all the daydreaming and scheming, for all the knowledge of the world and survival skills man and animal alike have respectively accrued, there is intervention, interruption, that point in existence when existence ends and whatever strategies that have been devised with the language of social and legal interaction no longer apply.

One's declarations , combined with the last set of gestures and positions one happened to be in, are instantaneously ironic as soon as one keels over, drops dead, grasps the chest, croons the rhythm of the death rattle; but why is it ironic? That's always the curious element of  things in this world, constructions of language that are intended to be blue prints for what it is we're supposed to build  in the community of men are turned into fancies and fantasies as soon as one reaches their expiration date. It is a moment of  terror, that microsecond when you realize that you've been negotiating and and auditioning for entrance to Heaven after the lights go out; death is a dark room we all enter . No one comes out the other way to tell us how good the party is, if there's an open bar, if your aunts and uncles are there with a list of things you never did for them. Terrifying stuff.
Keyworth's poem crystallizes the situation as we uses a rich language that skillfully describes the generalized world of everyday people  and creatures in the field dropping dead amid their daily rounds, but a language that cannot penetrate the last barrier between the world of appearances and reveal those things only God has an inkling of. And so it is with the commentators, Couric, Brokaw, the whole lot, talking to witnesses, experts on terrorism, first responders:  whatever the rhetoric happens to be, all they can really talk about is what they saw , how they reacted. Our life , Keyworth implies, is an attempt to create narrative that accommodates each instance, every contingent. That narrative is always destroyed.

And no one knows why

96 Tears

It is sometimes the case that what you used to make cruel fun of when you were young emerges, years later, as a classic of the form. This is the case with "96 Tears", a strange mash up of rhythm and blues and Tex-Mex crossover. The lyrics are simple and straight forward, no ponderous analogies, no naive pronouncements about subtler states of consciousness, but they are mysterious, a little threatening. Why precisely 96 tears, and doesn't the middle section, with the beat and organ momentarily locked on meditative drone, seem a chilly dishevelment as vocalist Question Mark, nee Rudy Martinez, veers from acknowledging the source of his heartbreak and plunges into a revenge fantasy? ?'s vocals are archetypically nasal, juvenile, utterly teenage in it's flattened iteration of the world as being composed solely of black and white extremes. It's an especially young male cosmology, not unlike the quintessential revenge fantasy "Hey Joe", or, for that matter, John Lennon's alarmingly bilious "Run for Your Life". 96 Tears is a masterpiece of the sub genre and the mindset, an example where the most intense young desire becomes, quickly, a hunger for revenge.
We should also take note with the version done by fellow Michigander Aretha Franklin, who's hot, soul-motivated version of the song is something of a proto-feminist anthem; her protagonist acknowledges what wasn't working out, cuts her loses, and moves on, on her own terms.



http://www.ilike.com/artist/Aretha+Franklin/track/96+Tears?src=onebox

Two notes

e.e. cummings had a way of putting back in the politician's faces with their own politicized babble, but only after taking a hammer to it. Under all the huff and puff about God, glory and country stands revealed forces that would have us all fearful, in debt and apathetic to calls for change. How appropiate for the current climate; the poem, though, does not let us off the hook; we are complacent with the fools for letting them have their way. The shock of this poem is that there are many of us, these days, decades after this was written, who recognize our own voices saying moronic things like this.

“next to of course god america i

love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh

say can you see by the dawn’s early my

country ’tis of centuries come and go

and are no more what of it we should worry

in every language even deafanddumb

thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

iful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

they did not stop to think they died instead

then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

ee cummings

___________________

The benefits of our culture is that we can read, view or listen to anything that appeals to our  particularized sense of quality, and that as consumers we've the right to say what think about what it is we've bothered to invest time in investigating.  There are occasions, though, when who you're talking to isn't interested in the legendary exchange of contrasting opinions. Rather, some react as if you've insulted their personal Jesus. Worse is when  you find yourself accused of being jealous of what the truly gifted are capable of. My friend Jon used to say that you pay your money, you take your chances. Accusing a critic of a favorite writer's work of being "jealous" is cheap, dishonest, and a dodge from the issue that's raised in the first place, that some writers have books that sell more based on cults of personality than  merit above  personal confessions of blissfully indulged fuck ups.

 I say that  if you think the man is a great writer, there's the expectation that his rumored genius would inspire to describe , in his defense, how his writing clicked with you and opened up a world you previously knew nothing about.Not jealous  merely and profoundly fed up with several decades worth of cant and babble attesting to unsubstantiated claim to  greatness , a marketing campaign aimed not at perpetuating counter culture values and spiritual individualism, but to make his publishers and the owners of his estate more money.. We have, in many ways, a mechanism that is manufacturing consensus on the man's life and work, and those opposing the view constantly being shamed into submission.

Notes on "The Corrections"

It's not a book I hate, but it is one that I'm tired of reader’s reference as a "masterpiece": The Corrections, by the currently over exposed Jonathan Franzen. It was a padded family tragi-comedy that would sit well next to John Cheever’s two Wapshot books and John Updike's quartet of Rabbit novels without embarrassment, but there is something worked over in the writing.

Franzen, for all his long, virtuoso sentences connecting the minutiae and detritus of this miserable family reunion into a readable prose, the shadow of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon loom over his shoulder; the paragraphs are rather too packed, too often, with every scrap he can remember to put in, and there is, fatally, that hint of delirium that made the both the Gaddis and Pynchon use of the insignificant so alluring. The Corrections falls short of the masterpiece its admirers want it to be because an editor wasn't brave enough or assertive enough, to force Franzen to downsize his landscape. It became a trod, and what might have been a powerful and painful comedy became instead a blunt and painful to endure. I suspected Franzen had somewhere in the writing crossed a line and had begun confessing a host of his own traumas , with other names attached to the recounted deeds and results; the novel has that seamless, unstoppable quality of a monologue professed by traumatized sole who keeps on naming names of those who've slighted him , regardless of the topic under discussion, who will only incidentally, mechanically distance themselves from the details with a passing qualification of "I'm just saying" , or "maybe I'm wrong". And yet the recounting continues, recollected again, and yet again when a new analog occurs, until your consciousness shuts down like a machine responding to symptoms of over heating.

I had read How to Be Alone a few years later, his memoir/ essay collection where he writes movingly of the passing of his parents and the clash of his youthful idealism becoming tempered by the undisclosed facts of Life; but the poignancy seemed a matter of effect, of a certain manipulation of the narrative points; his telling in the memoir read as if this were one of his novels. The bleakness was too literary for comfort; not that I think Franzen dressed up his own memories, but it occurs to me that he has made a decision to treat his life like it were bleak comedy whose last chapter had yet to be written. I understand this, somewhat. I used to wallow in my depressions and despairs and exaggerate the hurts and aches that befell me, knowing this gave me ample material to write about. I lucked out, however, as even I became bored with the style and tone I inflicted on countless pieces of typing paper. Franzen has lucked out as well; he managed to get paid.

Twitter replaces literary criticism

Jonathan Franzen's problem is that he's been typecast as Jonathan Franzen, Serious Novelist, and the burden of having that media-installed millstone around your neck is that discussions about you generally cease to be about your actual work , nor even about your reputation. Rather, what people will talk about is your celebrity and whether you're worthy of possessing this dubious gift. Jodi Picoult has a real beef about the media's slant toward white male writers, but her response to the focus on Franzen is sour grapes --she , already a famous, best selling novelist-- is essentially complaining that  she is not famous enough.

One wonders how egregious Picoult considers the over-estimation of Franzen to be. In the not so distant past, critics and novelists between projects would vent their gripes against their fellow fabulators in long, detailed essays and cranky squibs--Mailer, Vidal, Dale Peck , et al, named names, staked their territory, and at least provided readers with a series of elegant resentments they could argue with.

 Picoult hadn't the time for a major essay , nor the patience  to write a half way literate blog post. Instead, she succumbed to instant gratification and communicated her resentment on Twitter. While she did create a buzz, her argument exists as a bumper sticker , not an indictment. It's a midcult expression of a very real inequity. She comes off as someone who is not so much against Franzen and male writers as much as books where the prose is a step above the diffuse, swooning  romances she prefers to construct. 

Brimhall's brimstone

"Through A Glass Darkly"  is a title suggeting a tour of dark, depressed places is upon you, and poet Traci Brimhall does an effective job of bringing on the bleakness.This poem is effectively hermetic, an evocation of a consciousness that is incapable of dealing with the external world. The world is treated as if were nothing but a continuing series of loud, violent sounds coming from the other side of a lock, if infirm door; there is nothing described here that is actually seen or observed, with Traci Brimhall's slippery similes giving evidence to a mind that cannot stop processing the sounds it hears, the odors it detects, the shadows it forces into murky configurations. We might say this brain cannot turn itself off, to cease speculating and reinterpretation the world beyond practicality and arrive at the common agreement we collectively and loosely refer to as "reality". As the world does not settle in and reveal itself, the paranoia rises. Brimhall does a quite a good job of making this seem as if the universe this person habit-ates is in continuing conspiracy, constructing a plot that is infinitely complex and geared to singularly sinister purpose.

The last time I visited,
............you said you trapped a dead woman in your room

who told you to starve yourself to make room for God,
............so I let them give your body enough electricity

to calm it. Don't be afraid. The future is not disguised
............as sleep. It is a tango. It is a waterfall between


two countries, the river that tried to drown you.
............It is a city where men speak a language

you can fake if you must. It's the hands of children
............thieving your empty pockets. It's bicycles
with bells ringing through the streets at midnight.

You could say that Brimhall goes a simile too far to invoke this series of nightmare, similar to an old comedians adage not to do three jokes in a row on the same subject. Twice is placing a stressing emphasis on a conceit, an idea that might otherwise get lost, three times becomes a lecture; in this sense, the final analogy Brimhall deploys, the bicycle bells chiming through the streets at midnight, nearly derails the poem's half-awake surrealism. Beware the additional flourish, the needless decoration, the detail too many, especially if your writing prior to that moment was tight, concise, effective. Quite beyond the readership getting the point, one risks revealing a straining for effect.

Still, what the poet does here is admirable and there's much to be said for the decision to tell the patient's tale through the accounting of a witness who themselves can only relate the narrative scheme based on what they've seen, what they've heard, what they've been told by the patient. The narrator can only relate with the information that is at hand, the intimate details that have had time to play on the senses and resonate in larger pools of association; there is a sense of the narrator attempting to comprehend the interior life of the patient being visited, as if a key will appear if the imagination cleaves with the right set of references and provides a clarity that would other wise not be known. The tragedy of the poem, though, is that language itself , alone , cannot provide clarity, liberty, the full balance of self-actualized well being, as there are those things and issues, schizophrenia among them, that cannot be changed by linguistic wit. Metaphors only generate more metaphors, and the only thing that changes are the nature of the metaphors themselves.

What Walt Whitman did

Loathe him or not, Walt Whitman heightened our sense of the spoken word and prepared the ground of poetry that would slough off the tired, oppressive, once-revolutionary techniques of generations past. Whitman's reputation rests on perhaps a few dozen poems from the thousands he wrote , butand it is those few dozen poems that galvanized generations after him to set their own terms, standards, conditions. it is that latter tradition that got my attention, and it is the one that recognized the musical power of a cadence not so contrived in it's elevated aspiration. I can understand an appreciation of the old masters --Shakespeare and Shelley knock me out each time I consider their work--but I prefer a poetry that is involved in the current zeitgeist and which conceives a sense of wonder (above and beyond what mere senses alone can convey) that is not merely a grandiloquent
nostalgia.

Power Lunch

Lets meet each other

between the pauses

and stammers of our speech,

reach across a stable table

we've yet to spill drinks upon,

all these years we've been

walking in and out of
each other's dreams

and we still can't see

the moon nor the sun
we we most need them,

we can't argue with a map,

we cannot shake a finger at a class ring,

we shouldn't discuss the soup we cannot reheat,

I will put down my phone

and walk five hundred miles

If you lay down your laptop

and sing like you used to, 

 it will a bag lunch over the expressway,

soda and pocket pitas on  a pedestrian bridge
enclosed in steel netting,
old times and short laughs
watching cars drive to smoke stacks around the bend.

"Pocket" by Matthew Zapruder

This seems to be more chatter than literature, more posing than poetry, seeming to be an appealing cross between Billy Collins and John Ashbery. I mention Collins because there is the inordinate concern from the author with his position among a set of everyday items he finds himself among, and Ashbery adds the spice of indecisiveness; the narrator's mention of a hard , tangible thing introduces a new thought.


That new thought circumvents a monologue on the previous set of particulars that might have been interrogated by the poet's wit, and so forth. Pocket, in essence, is an effective, if not so tidy metaphor for what a pocket actually contains--the wallet, the rubber bands, the loose coins and alien scraps of paper and mystery material, the lighters, the keys, the cell phones, the comb with the clumps of matted hair; all are things that have only one thing in common, a pocket they've been crammed into and retrieved from, an accident of unpurposed circumstance. Poets, however, are the culture's engines for meaning creation, making a connection through narrative invention the as-yet unperceived connections between things that otherwise haven't a relation other than location and ownership.


Zapruder approaches this subject not as a treatise on the pocket, but rather an impressionistic evocation of it being a negative space, a black hole of a kind, a place where stray things get crammed until a further determination is made, a fate that usually winds up being the loose change dish, the file cabinet, the desk drawer, or the trash can. This winds up being a clever, chatty analogy for human consciousness itself; our waking lives are operated as a place where experience is crammed , willy nilly, into an infinite closet where what we've done, tasted, gone is all stored in no discernible pattern but who's culminating weight eventually demands witness and explanation. Zapruder's bemused pocket philosopher begins to speak of and muse about pockets and their contents, but his attention is distracted to something else he his reminded of, a sight or a sensation of scant relation to his starting premise.

I like the word pocket. It sounds a little safely
dangerous. Like knowing you once
bought a headlamp in case the lights go out
in a catastrophe. You will put it on your head
and your hands will still be free. Or
standing in a forest and staring at a picture
in a plant book while eating scary looking wild flowers.
Saying pocket makes me feel potentially
but not yet busy. I am getting ready to have
important thoughts. I am thinking about my pocket.
Which has its own particular geology.
Maybe you know what I mean. I mean
I basically know what's in there and can even
list the items but also there are other bits
and pieces made of stuff that might not
even have a name. Only a scientist could figure
it out. And why would a scientist do that?
He or she should be curing brain diseases
or making sure that asteroid doesn't hit us.
Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate
is 9.4%. I have no idea what that means.

I have no idea what that means, he says, and still he goes on to the point of exhaustion,  talking as the details of old thoughts and half memories occur to him; there is a Beckett-like element here, the need to speak and create in words the objects that no longer reflect the good graces of personality or resonate with one's history in a community. One's words, in essence, are bricks in a wall  against the yawning dread of being an anonymous cipher; in a way, this monologue is a way for one to announce that one has arrived, one has been here, one does not wish to be anonymous after decades of struggle and argument .What I enjoyed here is the notion is that the narrator is talking over himself, interrupting his own narrative. This is thinking unmoored and rudderless, without a sail in the stream of conscious. Where the focused writer excludes particular facts and associations on a subject and selects those materials that are germane to an argument that's already formed (or for which there is a formula one tries to follow), Zapruder's is stuck trying to talk about everything that comes to him before he fades himself; there is rather nice line at the end of the poem, of the black box beeping for attention at the bottom of the allegorical sea the airplane has crashed into.


some little of this work resembles the masterful associative drift of John Ashbery, but it would be another New York Poet, Frank O'Hara, that Zapruder has a closer kinship with. Like O'Hara, Zapruder's narrators are alert and lively in their being in the world; they share the same intention of responding to their experience as it unfolds. Zapruder,though, is more meditative, though, and figures less to form a a full fledged tale, as O'Hara was able to do, and instead produce a college effect , with elements both sublime, banal and even ridiculous finding a footing in the same sentences, a gesture made plausible by an internal punning. The names of things are parsed, the definitions are said aloud, something else comes to mind, a segue is created to keep the music going. There is an improvisational element in the poems, and and there is much to recommend to Zapruder's particular ear for assembling a nonlinear discourse with oddments that do not jar or clash without a satisfying effect. There is , I suppose, the need for some readers to demand conventional metrics, rhymes and devices as a means to have poems conform to a role of explaining or reaffirming an abstract and usually wistful notions of something Perfect and True behind the appearance of things.


The pocket, the consciousness, the deep and limitless sea, all repositories of things that are crammed, stored, secreted away under cramped covers, limitless lost things with stories that have stories we imagine that we're required to tell. Poetry, chief among our narrative methods, can only tell so much until we become part of the accumulated backlog . We cannot tell these stories quickly enough, we don't have enough time nor people to listen to what we've done and what we think about it all. And our cell phones are beeping, people calling with news they just have to share with us, this moment, right now.

It's a gas, gas, gas

This is what you get when you give a Rolling Stones classic some real vocal fire power. Thelma Huston's gospel-edged rendering lifts the song from the back alley , saloon slurring that made Jagger's original a masterpiece of bottle cap fatalism; Houston's sonic wail is transcendence over tough details. Jagger seems stylishly situated in his droogy ways. Houston is empowered by her survival and goes onto the next level, someplace other than the neighborhood that did her ill. 

Her accelerated interpretration aligns her in spirit with the John D.Loudermilk song "Tobacco Road" (and the same named Erskine Caldwell novel) , where the narrator has become stronger for the travils visited upon her (or him) , that they will leave the place of their birth and brutalized upbringing in order to  make a fortune, and then return with a  wrecking ball and a blow torch. Houston might not be that vindictive, but she does seem just as motivated as the protagonist in the Loudermilk song.

The funny thing about 'Tobacco Road", though, is that best known versions, by the Nashville Teens and Edgar Winter's White Trash, undercut the emphatic rage of the lyrics. The Nashville Teens, from England,  sound like a bunch of mumbling , pre--droogy  proto slackers who radiate a slump shouldered uninterest in expressing their emotions, let alone articulating their desires of revenge . The Edgar Winter version highlights the band leader scat-screaming , weaving his histronic garble with the blues-bronchitis rasping of co-lead singer Jerry LaCroix; it's a drawn-out, in concert performance that is about as evocative as the typical drum solo by a third billed band at the Sports Arena during the Seventies.
Perhaps there's an unreleased Thelma Houston version of the song locked in a vault that might yet make the light of day. It should be said here that I prefer Houston's version of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" to Aretha Franklin's version, recorded some years later.  The dancer in this video, of course, are absurd and unfunky.

THELMA HOUSTON - JUMPIN' JACK FLASH

www.youtube.com

Thelma Houston appearing on the British television show "The Price of Fame" sings "Jumpin' Jack Flash", which she recorded on her classic album "Sunshower". The album was produced and arranged by Jimmy Webb and released on Dunhill Records in 1969. This was Thelma's first solo album before signing wi...