Tears in the Landscape (a poem)

There are smiles for days when the road just drags on in front of us, a continent framed by a steering wheel, there are tears in the landscape, every farm is selling soap. Turlock is rumored to be good money, Stockton a joke, and everyone in Berkeley was dropping money because the jokes of the night were between the legs of make believe boyfriends.

I long for the psychedelic dungeons when smoking was as much as ritual as a right hand over the heart for a flag while a brass band played a song with nothing but hard left turns, hands raised in stadiums, fists clenched in sports arenas, communities of guitars and baseball bats. Like, she was looking at me like I had something she wanted, I was looking at her amazed that I was seeing her again for the first time. Under the bridge we played rape, where we both lost, thinking that there was a bed room here once. All that there was left to do was make money.


At fifteen, I grew a beard and thought it would be cool to be on the side of a turn pike, next to the tollbooth on the worst winter Ohio could imagine, sticking my thumb out with no luggage whatsoever, going somewhere, a blank stare at the driver. At eleven, the 7-11 clerk goes to the bathroom with a titty mag. He said the Frankenstein mask was welded to his face, and the clerk laughed at this, knowing it was Halloween and most people had one joke they would tell all night about the costume they wore, and he laughed even harder when he tore the ID in half and told the asshole to get lost before he got his ass kicked.


She was an art student who spoke with lots of dots and silences when ever she came to a point, but her hand drove me mad, and I drove her insane, the crash of tidal basin waves like some continuous unwrapping of gifts while we exchanged submissions, legs over the balcony, ass grabbing on the museum fire escape, walls holding assemblages of attenuated thinking that would never as concrete as the slabs we wrestled on, rashes and red roses for the love of art and body parts. I grew up in a town where you could see the mayor of San Diego a block from his condo at a summer night in a pay phone next to a donut shop.


He complained that the planet was doing jumping jacks, but all I could sense was stillness that more than things not moving, it was as though we passed through membrane in a rent of our thinking and now breathed along side a world our blood no longer pulsed with, all I saw were work benches, tool boxes, different sized wrenches, disassembled engines, sun coming through windows painted black, "It was a dumb idea to do acid in winter in a garage so no one sees us," I said.

John Lennon

Today is December 8th, the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination by that ignoble cipher Mark David Chapman, and as much as one wants to deny that they remain obsessed with the great glory of their fiery youth, a day of this kind makes me nonetheless want to meander around the old and overgrown ground of the past and wonder how things might have been different.But the motives are selfish, as they always have been with me, and I am less concerned with the winsome utopia Lennon wanted to bring us to had Chapman not found his gun and his target, but rather with the decline of Lennon's music, post-Beatles. My position is simple and probably simple-minded; Lennon was a pop music genius during his time with the Beatles, collaborating or competing with Paul McCartney, definitely at the top of his songwriting and performer game, and with the introduction of Yoko Ono into his life, we see a lapse into the banal, the trivial, the pretentiously bone-headed.

Yoko Ono did much to make Lennon the worst example of wasted genius imaginable. Though he did make some great rock and roll during his post-Beatle time, and wrote and recorded a handful of decent ballads, his artistry took a nose dive he never had a chance to pull out of. He was monumentally pretentious, head-line hungry, and cursed with an ego mania that overrode is talent. He stopped being an artist, and a rock and roller, and became the dread species of creature called celebrity; the great work that made is reputation was behind him, and there was nothing in front of him except brittle rock music with soft-headed lyrics, empty art stunts, and drugs, drugs, drugs. A sad legacy for a great man. The fact of the matter is that Lennon's greatness was possible in large part because of his collaborations, full or partial, with Paul McCartney. Both had native musical instincts that balanced each other: the proximity of one to the other kept them on their best game.

The genius of the  Beatles' body of work versus the sketchy efforts from both Lennon and McCartney under their own steam bears this out. Lennon never found anyone to replace McCartney, and certainly never had anyone who challenged to do better, smarter work. Yoko certainly didn't give him anything that improved his music, and her lasting contribution to his career is to give him the errant idea that performing under your ability equals sincerity. It equaled excruciatingly inadequate music.What's amazing for an anniversary as seemingly monumental as this is the paucity of new insights, previously unavailable information, or especially interesting critical estimations of their estimable body of work. It's an exhausted topic. Scrutiny on all matters and personalities pertaining to the Beatles has been unceasing since their demise. We have, essentially, is reruns of our memories, repackaged, remodeled, sold to us again, and endless of things we already know intimately and yet consume compulsively because we cannot help ourselves.It cheapens the term, but “addiction” comes to mind.

There is nothing to add to the Beatles' legacy except perhaps add our anecdotes to the ceaseless stream of words that seek to define their existence and importance even today. It's no longer about what the Beatles meant and accomplished in altering the course of history or manipulating the fragile metaphysical assumptions we harbor, for good or ill;we've exhausted our best and largest generalities in that regard, and the task will fall to historians, philosophers, and marketers after most of us are dead as to what The Beatles and their songs are worth as art and commercially exploitable assets. For us, there remains only a further dive into autobiography, where we might yet find some clue and excitement as to how these guys became an informing influence on our individual personalities. John Lennon and the Beatles changed my life in a major and unalterable way during their existence, and this was something I came aware of only after watching two hours of CNN wall-to-wall coverage of the assassination. I broke down, tears came, I was a senseless, doom-stricken mess, even though at the time I loudly bad-mouthed the pasty, hippie-flake dilettantism of his later work.

None of what I thought I mattered in that instance.John Lennon was dead, and it was like losing some essential part of myself whose loss would never be filled with anything even half as good or worthy.He still mattered to me in my life quite even though I'd had what amounted to an argument with him over is politics and his music during the length of his solo career, but despite my best efforts to break off into new sounds and ideas and leave Lennon and the Beatles behind, his death hit as would the death of a family member. For good or ill, his work and the crude course of his ideas helped in the formation of values and attitudes that still inform my response to celebrity and events, no less than Dylan, and no less than reading Faulkner, Joyce , or viewing Godard films. The deification that he's had since the killing is the kind of sick, fetish culture nostalgia that illustrates the evils of unalloyed hero worship, a need to have a God who once walked in our midst. 

This bad habit turns dead artists who were marginally interesting into Brand Name , icons whose mention confers the acquisition of class and culture without the nuisance of having to practice credible discernment: every weak and egocentric manuscript Kerouac and Hemingway, among others, has been published, and the initial reason for their reputations, graspable works you can point to, read and parse, become obscured as a result. Lennon, in turn, becomes less the musician he was and becomes, in death, just another snapshot to be re-marketed at various times, complete with booklets containing hyperbole-glutted prose that , in essence, attempts to instruct me that my response through a period I lived in is meaningless.

The hype utterly refuses to let newer listeners come to their terms with the body of work. It is no longer about Lennon's music, it's about the promotion machine that keeps selling him. This is evil. Lennon, honest as he was most of the time when he had sufficient distance from his antics, would have told us to get honest as well and admit that much of his later music was half-baked and was released solely because of the power of his celebrity. This may well be the time for an honest appraisal of his work, from the Beatles forward, so that his strongest work can stand separate from things that have a lesser claim to posterity.  It's only business, nothing personal, and that is precisely the problem. Risky to assume what Lennon might ultimately have sounded like had he not been killed, since he could switch games suddenly and quickly so far as his musical thinking went. This was a constant quality that kept him interesting, if not always inspiring: there as always a real hope that he would recover inspiration, as Dylan had after some weak work, or as Elvis Costello had after the soggy offerings of Trust or Goodbye Cruel World. Even the weaker efforts of Lennon's' late period marked by his idiosyncratic restlessness, and the songs on Double Fantasy, domesticated that they are, might well have been transitional work, a faltering start, toward new territory.

It's laughable that Lennon might ever have become as lugubriously solemn as Don Henley, but there's merit in saying that Lennon's work might become on par with Paul Simon's: Simon's work is certainly more than screeds praising the domesticated life, and he is one of the few songwriters from the Sixties whose work has substantially improved over the forty years or so. If Lennon's work had become that good, on his terms, it would have been a good thing, though it'd be more realistic to say that a make believe Lennon rebirth of great work would be closer in attitude and grit to Lou Reed and Neil Young, two other geezers whose work remains cranky and unsatisfied at heart. Since his death, it'd been my thinking that Lennon would have transcended his cliches as some contemporaries had.

Unearned Irony

“Unearned irony" is the deployment of a dominant narrative line that is the nominal subject of the story, while at the same time winking and whispering and nudging the reader that it's ,like, so weird. This eye-rolling irony dominates the book , and avoids the work needed to make real irony work, which is that real irony is the result of several situations in the narrative being developed, over time short or long, that result in nuanced epiphany where a character in the story is at odds with the "real world" he inhabits.

The power resides in the not knowing when the effect takes place: the point is that you're not supposed to see the irony approaching, best shown in The Recognitions by William Gaddis, or The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Carey. The effects here are worked for artfully. Eggers stops just short of announcing that he's being ironic.

A magician who shows how their tricks are done perhaps ought not to be a magician: maybe an editor. Or a literary critic. Now that would be ironic. For editors, it is precisely the job of an editor to make manuscripts into books, to eliminate the fat, to blue pencil digressions and areas of receding interest and, believe, send pages back for rewrite. The tendency is to let manuscripts, "experimental" or otherwise, get sent to the press without editorial oversight. It's a waste of perfectly good forest.

Wisdom needn't be the censor that kicks in after a certain age, but it can have the effect of giving one a sense of how an interesting life can be told in an interesting way, ironic or otherwise. Best of all, though, an acquired wisdom ought to avail one with a self-editing instinct and to realize the difference telling a story and committing coffee talk to paper.

Robert Penn Warren embraces his limitations

I came across a poem by Robert Penn Warren today, a writer I've read very little of since college; I was missing the voice of a teffific American poet. The poem was "To A Face in the Crowd".


This is a good selection from the cogent Robert Penn Warren, who was always leagues ahead of his rhyming peers in having the disciplining techniques work under his lines; with many a twentieth century poet unwilling to give up the ghost of rhyme, the effect was more special effects than expression. It sounded unnatural, at odds with a contemporary sensibility  who's collective idea of  poetic value wasn't in the martial law organization of words and their sound alike twins, but instead found the music in a vernacular , looser limbed speech. This is the sensibility I developed since I swapped out Bob Dylan for TS Eliot decades ago.

Warren, though, has a verbal since,a "flow", that wants to deliver the idea from murky origin somewhere in the rapidly firing imagination and the final , crystalized expression. There is no padding in this poem; it has a lean quality that brings out the emotional quality, the weariness of the speaker who is dually giving warning of one's idea of what one may accomplish in the world and the the bemoaning of a personal history of lessons learned the hard way.

....That shore of your decision 

Awaits beyond this street where in the crowd

Your face is blown, an apparition, past.

Renounce the night as I, and we must meet

As weary nomads in this desert at last,

Borne in the lost procession of these feet.

Warren speaks of , I think, along the lines of a cliche often attributed to John Lennon, as in "Life is what happens while you're making other plans." This is the theme I find in much poetry that appeals to me, the major or minor revelation that the author's scheme of things, his abstractions as to how the world functions and how he or she was going to navigate the currents they thought predictable and manageable, are themselves a comfortable fiction imposed on a phenomenon that is hard, unyielding to individual expenditures of will power. Warren says here that at the end of it all we all meet not as brothers and sisters victorious in transforming  history (in significant but more often trivial matters) but rather as veterans of the daily grind who have endured and survived daily rigors for no reason other than they had to. At this point, speaking to the moment of waking up from one's dream, one might finally make use of their imagination as it engages the world as it reveals itself, moment to moment. This is the point when life gets interesting.

Gagged on a clothesline

There is a bit of a buzz by  Tony Hoagland's commentary  in the September Poetry Magazine where he opines, in part,  that contemporary poetry is divided  into two types, the bong and the gong categories .The first  is the sort of poem that rings the bell, gonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggg!!!­, with a clarity of perception that is exacting, photographic. There is no mistaking what the writer is talking about, no ambiguity in the details, and one is surprised how a surprise ending arises from otherwise banal details .The latter being a diffuse, abstract, expressionist kind of ode that emphasizes the inexpressibility of the moment a poet might decide to write about, the escalating, entropy -bound speculation that comes after a deep bong hit or two. There are pleasures to be had in both approaches, of course, as those who are chronically clear and the others who prefer an obscurantist veil over their stanzas are actually are a varied lot, with their own ideas about how language needs to be subjugated to best reflect the author's quirky habit of mind. We the reader ought not be ashamed to have both Billy Collins and Louis Zukofsky on our shelves; what makes either of these poets, or the poets that come between them (assuming said shelf is alphabetized by author) interesting, intriguing, worth reading for whatever pleasures they can deliver are unique. We know the universal aesthetic produces a poetry that becomes nothing more than talking points and marching orders, don't we?  "Clothesline", though, seems to have been knocked out before it had a chance to get going and wound up unconscious on the permeable border between gong and bong poetics. The title, in fact, is ironic, as it is also the name of a notorious move in professional wrestling, where one fighter bounces an opponent off the ropes and catches with a fore arm to the throat to the rebound.

Poet Bohince is attempting to dredge up memories from a time in her life when what is revealed are only scattered images of places and time-bound details; In this case there is the association of safety, her mother's womb, of tight, warm, snug places where one felt secure and protected against an incoherent , violent, noisy commotion in the near distance, but what this poem lacks is the emotional cohesion that would make this associative pastiche compelling. This has the feeling of something that has been rewritten and revised continuously, starting at first as something of epic length, eventually whittled away to a skeleton of it's former verbosity, with vain attempts to flesh out the bare bones with imagery to make these meager lines become somehow evocative. Rather, it reads like some one who is attempting to accommodate suggestions from a poetry workshop:

Though I sloshed inside the machine
of her body, as our whites swam in a soft boil,
were wrung, hung,
then flew,

or tried to,into the pain and ultimate

forgiveness of pines. …

I realize that one can't really depend on a poem to make sense in ways those in supermarket lines might mean the term, but there is a logic, an intuitive sense that we demand; these opening lines are less organic than they might be, seeming instead to be the result of an edit that rid this sentence of a qualifying phrase in the center of the expression, conflating washing machines, wombs and clotheslines in one gamy sequence. Not that the clause would have fared better with an explication, short or expansive; it was bad writing to begin with, a clumsy entrance into a badly decored room.

Paula Bohince, in fact, seems the voice of the workshop, with the sort of inarticulate , choppy cadences that are intended to duplicate the moment of realization, the epiphany,

The Y branch hoisting the heaving line,
spiders who'd snooze
in undershirts. Shook awake,
would climb air.

My mother
who was there
in every crevice.

There is a built-in halting here, a manufactured pause that does not convince you that the speaker is holding their breath; even in print you can feel the technique being worked on you, you can sense the writer counting the beats between what passes for stanzas, one , two, three...line!, and then reading the succeeding sentences in a whispery croak, anticipating the appreciative sighs. Bohince straddles that ground between catering to audience expectations of what a poem should be and a cartoonish version of abstraction, in an effort to leave something for would-be critics to rave about . It fails at both, and it is an intensely unsatisfying poem. It's like tossing stones and twigs into a bowl of hot tap water and calling it soup.

"Salt Walter" by Peter Campion

Peter Campion has a  poem I enjoyed  posted recently in Slate, a lyric called "Salt Water" , a tract in which he does a skilled job of combing a number of different elements--a personal relationship, a landscape, an abstracted terrain-- and  persuasively reveals what the elements have in common without seeming even to try. It is the sort of effortlessness that tells you that this was something considered and redrafted a number of times--I can imagine Campion not writing a word for long stretches until the right one finally  came to him. That I admire, as one does come across a good many poems in a good many volume of poets who write things that make them sound as if they are still trying to get to the poem they imagined they had  in their possession. The result of that is a lot of  subdivided autobiography that amounts to only so much clutter--think of someone you know who talks too much of themselves trying to get along in the world.

As with the idea of sea air the title suggest, I find something unusually relaxed in Peter Campion's poem "Salt Water"; it is airy, not in the sense of being breezy or light headed, but rather in the sense one gets of going for a walk along a beach or perhaps being close to a coast line on a spring day. The world seems to assemble itself at will, spontaneously, the scents of the daily things--salt air, incidental gasoline aromas, meals on stoves --mingle with the bits of conversation , garish radio music, the slapping of waves against rocks adding a counter point to the persistent hiss of traffic that always closer than we want them to be in our perfect moments.

Campion allows this poem to breathe , providing space for his details, described in ways that are unusual but not grudgingly opaque ; there is the sense of something Suddenly Realized, a Wonder Beheld. It is a poem composed not unlike a classic Miles Davis improvisation over an old song that has been reduced to it's basic components that both solo and foundational melody seem an organic unity, moving in unison, perceived for a moment in its essence, in itself. An epiphany, perhaps, a string of relationships of oneself and another against a larger framework, composing a counter narrative than the practical instructions one might tell his or herself about getting from point A to B; Campion selects his words, his phrases the way the improviser selects his notes and assembles his phrases, with the effect being delayed somewhat, not immediate, gestating in memory until the stealthy metaphors or musical units recombine in memory with other sensory recollection. This is the poetry of surprise.


_______________________


A Slate reader who'd listened to the audio version of the poem (featuring Campion reciting his own work) asked the question about who started the trend of writers reading their stanzas in a series of stylized moans instead of letting the rhythms of the work direct the style of recitation. Indeed, Campion on the recording sounds like he's coming out of a very bad sleep.


I suspect it's an MFA program thing, beholden to what Ron Silliman calls the School of Quietude; roughly speaking, that would a school of poetry that places the extremely sensitive personal of the author in the center of the poem who acts as a passive conduit through which all the universe's particulars must flow. The poems of this style vary incredibly, from amazing to god awful, but the default style for reading the poems aloud is passive, as if the poet is overwhelmed by the sensation and is about to pass out. In some cases it seems the writers are trying to pass an extremely contentious turd. This is quite the opposite of Campion's poem: though hardly requiring an Al Pacino type of exclamation, one can, I think, up the energy and highlight the rhythm and music of the the work. A reader ought not sound as if sounding out their work is a burden. It makes the reading of the poem a burden in turn, for the reader.

"Skyline": helping Roger Corman improve with age

Skyline had an impressive trailer, but once you pay for you ticket, you realize that every bit of impressive imagery and special effect was in the ad. The movie , a bone bare variation of The War of the Worlds, has the most flat-line scripts of the year; the dialogue lacks even the campy elan of a choice Roger Corman picture.

Corman , King of the B Movies when he was the lead exploitation director and producer for American International Pictures, at least winked to the audience about how silly his horror and science fiction plots were; one need only remember the serial coffee house bus buy / Beat artist wanna be /serial killer in the director's goony masterpiece Bucket of Blood as he keeps uttering "Art is a hitchhiker catching a ride on the omnibus of art". This is said by the schlep several times, adding a comic jargon to the bizarre series of murders that occur through the movie. Corman's signature in his minimalist absurdities was his willingness to dive without flinching straight into the grungy strands and strains of pop culture without flinching, concieve  a rickety plot  device concerning Aliens, Alienated Teens, marginalized personalities a mere nervous laugh away from a kitchen knife homicide, a monster in a hairy mask going crazy in the halls of an unmonitored girl's dormiotory--and make a fast bit of   oddness that both amused amd distrubed; I always had the feeling that I was both the sophisticated viewer laughing at what was conspicuously idiotic, and that I was additionally the one with the abbrevidated interests that made exploitaters like Corman a success. This is to say  that his movies remain compelling after the shock value has worn off; Corman may well have been the premiere  American  Film Expressionist. After a time YOU get the feeling of what phrases and rationalizations might be cycling through the mind of a psychopath as he or she attempts to complete their obsessed missions in the world. The special effects, of course, are impressive to a degree, but you realize before long that that was the film maker's highest priority. "Skyline" has an an attractive veneer and can boasts some artfully composed images, but it is a sober minded, without a relief laugh, a monotonous series of sudden stops and starts meant to startle. We are merely annoyed.

The most glaring consequence in emphasising a few well tweaked effects is that the characters remain in a static situation--trapped in a pricey high rise condominium by convincingly repulsive aliens-- and that characters remain static as well. There are some attempts to bring some complexity to the character lives, with issues of infidelity and love vs individual survival filtered lightly through the inane banter , but none of this adds dramatic tension; all there is left to do is observe one character after another get gobbled up by alien creatures, watch the population of Los Angeles get lifted , Rapture like, to a serrated edged alien vessel, to wait for a surprise ending that's more dead end than brutal revelation.

Smoke

A man walks his dog but the dog holds the leash between bottom and upper rows of teeth that know chew toys and biscuits as distinct from the rest of the world contained on these few blocks to the park.

The man lights a cigarette  and drops the match in front of the swings at the playground where he sits on a bench, waiting for his dog to find a favored spot to remember in later days when it might be a kingdom for a friendly scent when there is only barking from behind the fences the two of them pass gong to and from the store or some such place near home.


It is winter the sun is caught in the bare branches of trees that have surrendered their leaves to the season, the light of the sun is cold on the breath, man walks dog in jerky steps, the dog raises his head and growls, drops the leash from his teeth, a car passes by and a dog in the back seat has head sticking out of the window, yelping against the wind the envelopes his face in a perfect wrap of jet streams pinning his ears to the back of his head,

The man's dog runs after the car, barking and baying along the street lined with snowdrifts and grey, runneld slush, gone into the cold, leash less in the cold gasping for the man's hand and the leash he swings like lariat catching cattle the size of boxcars.

Duncan Shepherd found distinctions

It is not altogether settled, among those who care about such things, whether the retirement of Duncan Shepherd from his post as the film critic of the San Diego Reader after 38 years of service is a cause for celebration or lamentation. The detractors of Shepherd, who are legion, contend, with wearying predictability, that he was a misanthrope who never found a movie to his liking, that he dispensed his black dots with reckless abandon, and that, most daringly, he harbored a deep-seated animus against the very art of cinema. I confess that I was drawn to his writings precisely because he was not easily amused by the offerings of Hollywood–at last, someone who dared to castigate the mediocrity that pervaded the screen–and I find the accusation that he loathed movies altogether to be a symptom of a reader who either skimmed his reviews superficially or failed to grasp his arguments. One of the delights of reading Shepherd was to discover his occasional praise for a movie that would otherwise escape notice despite its modest charm and crafty execution; he had a discerning eye for those filmmakers who could respect the genre they were working in and make it fresh without resorting to grotesque gimmicks. This is what good critics do, make distinctions, find exceptions.

It is hardly astonishing that the movie critics have been unsparing in their dissection of the movie version of Bewitched, given the dismal track record of television shows adapted into cinematic features. The presence of Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Shirley McLaine, and Michael Caine has not mollified the skeptics. It surprises me only marginally more than Shepherd found some merit in it. It is not a matter of someone making fatuous pronouncements for provocation. Shepherd is more fastidious than that; he sticks to specifics and illustrations, and compares the current movie with a host of other recent works by the same participants. It amounts to arguing that the movie is good because it is less bad than its predecessors; it is an inelegant way of making a case for a movie and a nightmare for studio publicists looking for a flattering blurb. But it gives the reader an intriguing glimpse into how one critic thinks popular entertainment should be conceived and executed.

Shepherd is, in my estimation at least, a masterful if idiosyncratic prose stylist, a peerless historian of film art, and a refreshing breeze of honest opinion when he renders judgment on a feature. He has an aesthetic he will not compromise, and the endless tide of grueling gimmickry has not worn him down. I am less exacting in what it takes to entertain me at the movies, and I am usually more charitable than Shepherd tends to be. That may only mean that my standards are more relaxed and that Shepherd’s love of the movie art is such that he deplores seeing the medium squandered on plots that would not satisfy the requirements for a dime novel. Yet I read him all the same, given that he is the sort of critical contrarian who makes a case instead of pontificating about what aesthetic absolutes are being violated. He is not a critic who bemoans the death of the movies; it is one movie at a time, wryly observed, and judgments rendered in witty and incisive fashion. He is the sort of man you dread to see on the opposite side of a debate since it would mean that you would need to shore up your argument to a sounder foundation.

Three decades into his job, and his reviews are as brutal if elegantly phrased as ever. He does catch you surprised, though, and finds sensibly lovely things to say about films other critics have attacked like packs of hungry dogs. He gave Prince’s star-writer-director vehicle Under The Cherry Moon three stars out of his five-star rating system, appreciating the film’s look and measured style and the director’s ability to create a fantastic sense of place without making a mess of the art he’s trying to create. Likewise, he awarded five stars to Walter Hill’s seriously under-estimated Streets of Fire. Among other comments, he cited that virtually every other critic missed or chose not to discuss, that the ostensible rock and roll fable was actually a Western with its narrative conventions set in the mid 20th century America. Shepherd’s discussion of the Hill film is more nuanced than I’ve given here, but let it suffice that he was right about both films.

The Fate of the Novel: Franzen Frets So We Don't Have To

 Jonathan Franzen is a major novelist who seems fated to be remembered for being a weenie as much as being an important writer. In his June appreciation of Christina Stead's 1940 novel, The Man Who Loved Women", the stress-tested author feels at ease to share with us his suspicion that ths thing we love, The Novel, is an affection of vanity, not practical need.

" ...haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about."

I found myself rather stunned by Franzen's smugness in having it both ways; at times he wants to defend the literary novel from the barbarians who would turn the form into a fast food for the shrinking reading taste for reading, and now he hints that he thinks the Novel in general is a dated, creaking contraption. The eclipse of the novel, the death of the novel, the erasure of the novel are things that have been argued before, and lo, here we are, still reading novels and talking about them, arguing about them, still trying to minimize their importance. Tom Wolfe argued with typical bombast in his anthology of New Journalism that fiction had become irrelevant because reality had outstripped the novelist's imagination, and that the narrative techniques of he novel were better used for non-fiction.

The fiction writer's concept of the world had become a sorry trove of self-reflective theory and it was up to the journalists and the historians to properly tell the tale of our time. Wolfe, of course, desires to be the Dickens or the Balzac of our time, and considers the nineteenth century ideal of precisely capturing the surface the surface of things to be enough for those tasking themselves with working the long quills; to know a man, merely observe what things surround him.

To dare to think that a novelist could render a character's interior life negotiating the flow and flux of the external world (to say nothing of the task of making an entire cast of main characters just as complex) amounts to a terrible heresy against the storyteller's art. Or at least Tom Wolfe's version of what a story teller is; but we remember, Wolfe is a journalist, finally, not a story teller, he is beholden to the 4 W's, who, what , where, when. Pesky novelists, though, strayed beyond the bemoaning and constraining tide of naysayers and they continue with their stories, dealing with people and their complexities, and readers continue to read them. The only task of the novelist, I would say, is to put the reader in the respective shoes of a set of characters in a world they , the reader, might not otherwise experience; the notion is to live a little fuller without having to buy a plane ticket, to experience the world for a period in a way that has nothing to do with what one's instinctive resistance to change instructs us to do. Novels matter. Fiction matters. Arguing that they don't is a species of tedious grand standing. It's a rumpled horn section bleating the same old chord changes on a song that's old and sticks to the table top like a grime-primed coaster.Jonathan, Tom, take the lampshades off your heads.

You had me

You had me at "no so fast"

when my mouth ran like a faucet

that filled up the sink, 

you had me between centuries

I asked when the moon would be full, 

you  had me in stitches

and unconscious for days  ,

 you had me in hospital clothes

with a blood and iron on my breath, 

you had me with my marker,

the document I signed

with needle and thread,

 you had me going for a minute,
you had me guessing along,

you had me the way a fat man has an appetite,
you had me for lunch,

you had me rewrite the love letters I wrote you,

you had me going for a moment,

you had my heart 

and I never got it back.