Bummer

No fan of corporate America here, but I am sorry to see that Borders, the second largest book store chain in America , has filed for bankruptcy protection. While various press releases and emails from company flack catchers assure investors, creditors and customers that stores will remain open and that Borders will remain a presence nationally as both booksellers and community gathering places, the company has also released a list of stores it intends to close as part of their restructuring. That includes two in San Diego, including the one Downtown, where it's been my habit to shop or browse after a movie or dinner. I noticed that the store was getting over the last three years--the store seemed understaffed, sections were getting skimpier in their selection and were ill kept, and the  contrast between the number of people sitting on the floor with a stack of books they were reading to the amount of activity at the cashier station was striking. The cashiers were rarely busy simply because people were not buying. Borders had turned itself into something of a flop house, a deadbeat central, ground zero for broke layabouts. And now downtown San Diego is about to lose it's one major large bookstore; even with the assorted things that was irritating about Borders, it was still a place where you could get lost in the stacks and find something to engage the mind above and beyond the streaming banality that passes as culture. And now that is about to be removed. It might be said that DG Wills Books and Warwick's are my bookshops of first resort; the last ten books I've purchased during 2010 were at one or the other of these fine stores. But there was a time in recent memory where there were bookstores and record store...s you could shop as a means of balancing out the sheer accumulation of material goods. The point is that communities in a city are impoverished and are made less interesting because they lack bookstores, even corporate ones. One less bookstore to browse in means more time of a corporately enforced isolation, IE, more time in front of the computer ordering things on line, removed from the hubbub and clamour that makes a community more than a collection of houses built between intersections and strip malls.

These poems by Gail Mazur

Gail Mazur

Gail Mazur loves the telling detail in her poetry, a quality that can make for an intense reading of somone linking  the fluidity of experience with the  silent witness of inanimate things that happen to trigger an associating spree. She fares less well with  "Hermit". One of her shortcomings as a writer is a tendency to prattle; we witness a strenuous comparison of human habits and the observed , repetitive activities of species of crab in their natural environment. It's been remarked too many times that the act of perceiving something changes the nature of the thing being studied, and here I'd had have to reason that the intent hasn't anything to do with the crabs and more do with the convenient wallow that are the poet's projected short comings. 
The title is the tip off, and the punch line comes at you too soon, too often, over to great a length.One might note the digressions and find wonder in how she deliberates on Aristotle and the ancient Greeks who first syllogized about their place in the world of appearances but the effect here is drift. There is awareness that the poet tends to imbue the natural realm with characteristics mirroring concepts one identifies human activity with, but this stepping back from the metaphorical apparatus originally mounted in place serves only, I think, to introduce more intellectual clutter, that crabs are actually subject to Darwin's terms of natural selection.The irony is something you see coming right at you, conspicuous as a Barnum and Baily clown on a Wall Street trading floor; it is not the hermit crab that resembles human, but the rather the reverse. All of the things like emotion, poetry, philosophical speculation might merely be expressions of species behavior who's base motives are to feed, propagate, survive. Arriving at this point is not unlike listening to a bad joke a hundredth time from a friend who can't remember that you've already heard it, a hundred times.But we arrive at punchlines again; they ought to be efficient, quick, punchy. The good poet knows when to stop. 
 One elaboration is too many , and a thousand is not enough.This seems a plain old case of someone falling into the mind/body divide, that time in any competent poet's career where they consider the intractable vagueness of the world their senses reveal to them, a cosmology tempered and flavored with the nuance of personal history and association, and the world as it is. Gail Mazur , with her poem "Figures in a Landscape", wandered too close to that precipice and falls straight to the bottomless bottom, perhaps stupefied by what amounts to the poem's punchline; our perception of a scene being beautiful and arranged in pleasing "natural" alignments are a frame we impose on the raw phenomenon, a meaning we assign it from our collective troves of useful metaphors and purposes. The scenery, though, is unmindful of our presence, has no use for our notions of beauty, harmony, or the disguised meanings our desperate symbolism creates. Nature merely is, constant, churning, violent in its cycles of destruction and creation. We are only elements among other elements, subject to the same conditions of survival and extinction as are forests, oceans, diminishing species. My principle concern here isn't the subject matter, relentlessly pursued as it has been and continues to be, but with Mazur's admittedly fine tone and style. Graceful and as carefully selected as her phrases are, something does not ring true:

We were made things, deftly assembled

but beginning to show wear—

you, muscular, sculptural,

and I was I, we were different, we had a story.

On good days we found comedy in that,

pratfalls and also great sadness.

Sun moved across the sky and lowered

until you, then I, were in shadow, bereft.

She describes the experience of what she witnesses from a distance,as if standing on a sidewalk and describing a store's displays through the display window, with some creative and overly acute details and glaringly "literary" words to shore up what the limited visage can furnish. This thinking, of making this phenomenological befuddlement make sense in a short verse, comes through a few stops along the familiar template, first with a not unexpected epiphany ("we were made things, deftly assembled..") that sets us up for the finalizing grand slam, that the scenery is real and not dependent on our scenario's to make them mean anything.

If no one looks at us, do we or don't we disappear?

The landscape would survive without us.

When you're in it, it's not landscape

any more than the horizon's a line you can stand on.

All well and good, I guess, but Mazur has belabored the obvious point that we cannot set aside our framing devices and see the world in-and-of-itself; as creatures of a culture through which we are compelled to achieve things with the knowledge of our own death, we need structure, continuity, community and the attendant virtues of purpose,love, unity of being. We create meanings that make the hardships worth the struggle; in short, we create of meaning-giving fictions to alleviate the constant dread that there is nothing beyond the biological imperative to eat, procreate, and die. Mazur , grace notes and all, reads more like a product tester's report. A brave face, perhaps, but this poem is territory others have been in as poets, with more interesting , intriguing revelations.
Would that more people read John Ashbery and ceased with demands that he make sense; the beauty of Ashbery's method of engaging the mind/body division is that immerses himself in, allowing his mind to navigate, with frequent brilliance, in the harbors and along the shorelines of Wallace Steven's world of Supreme Fiction. There are those stretches when the good Mr.AshberyAshbery, if not Mazur, it's the journey that energizes the poems.

Gail Mazur's poems have an easy elegance that can , in their best renderings, bring a number of heady matters into the same conversation without a sign of the stanzas tearing at the seams.Apparent one can read in a previous selection published on Slate,In Another Country, she has the ability to give form to a sense of sensations that you'd think would remain inarticulate and exist only as vaguely felt sensations: happy, sad, despairing, hopeful, what? She gives these sensations voice, a monologue. But as well as she brings her equivalent phrases for unnameable notions together in a smooth transition to a page , the transition is too pat, too eager for prime time. The conceits that drag her work down is the continued sense that the insoluble conditions she enjoys digging through for material find resolution in her over worked ironies."The Age" shows no shift in strategy and no modesty in the size of the unmentionables she tries to place a sign on; no more odes for an empty house, bring on the Temper of the Times!!!This would be fine, of course, but what irritates me is the implied exclusivity , the book cliquishness of this bit of zeitgeist mongering. You feel like a friend you came to a party with abandoned you with a group of others , none of whom you know, who are enthralled by a lone speaker who seems to be synthesizing everyone else's input into a discussion you know nothing about, touching on each tidbit and making them fit some clever if predictable irony grid work.

Title Bout

This was taken with a cell phone camera.

Which comes first,the title or the poem?  SometimPublish Postes I like to contrive a striking phrase  that sounds potentially ironic  in contrast to the poem it sits on top of, and  I would dutifully  construct some lines I thought hit all the marks that were spoken of in the string of writing workshops I attended or crashed in college. The preference was and remains a  title that describes s job title or a personification of disgusting habits, ending in "er";  the title might double as  the name of a super hero. Here is something I came across yesterday, written in the early Eighties on an old Underwood 5 typewriter. First came the title, then the poem to illustrate the power and punch of the heading:

Brick Layer

So full of words

that are thick with

abstracted lust

that buildings could be erected

composed of verbose skulls

with windows

that oversee the world

to the edge of  the map

and yet

overlook

the love that was

there all the time,

appreciative of curved air,

lost in a  four o'clock shadow.

I 'll pass on defending  the poem; it's awful, it stinks. It's  more an enthused gushing  than a composition ; I am not even sure what it means, and it scares me to attempt an interpretation of how these elements could work together to produce something comprehensible. It occurs to me that I might come up with some matters I'd rather not think about. A therapist might find something  useful in the reading, but not a readers themselves, as  most of  us have better things to do than reconcile an odd title with a smirking block of  private  punch lines.No matter, though, What I remember was becoming momentarily fixed on the idea of writing a title first and then composing a verse to go along with it and decided , finally, that my then-preference for elliptical, vague, surreal and punning verse would only become altogether unintelligible and dull if I continued.

This poem found it's way to the bottom of my desk drawer and remained there for thirty five years , until yesterday, and the lesson, I suppose, is that poetry isn't the sort of assignment writing or occasional writing I can do; like it or not, I am restricted to when the mood hits me, when the muse decides to visit and have a cup of coffee, and after the writing, if the poem has any merit, it gets fitted for a title.

The trend is for poets to name poets with phrases that have virtually nothing to do with the subjects the poem actually take on. The trend is also to write poems where each line is suitable for a title; this gives the reader an interesting mixture of captivating indirection or smashingly inane cliches and truisms. Titles should read like description of the last thing in this world you expect to see before you die and cease caring about poetry or the braying arrogance of the boneheaded and tin-eared.

Dead on the Page

I used to dash off fast poems from an Underwood 5 manual typewriter and then quickly show them or read them indulgent friends who were kind enough to put with my assumptions about how flawless my  writing talent was. The response wasn't always pleasant;  one friend told me that the quick verse I had him read made him think that I spent no more than ten minutes writing it. 

 "Slow down" he said, and handed me back the sheet of paper .

Pain I Did Not by Sharon Olds has that ten minute feeling to it, something produced in a hurry, not an inspired hurry.

I've read this a few times and sought out some of the subtler virtues, but nothing I could come up with got beyond the gut feeling that this is an awful poem. It is awkward in the first sentence, yes, but it is awkward through out the paragraph--I can't bring myself to dignify this piece as anything other than a botched diary entry. It has the dull , familiar echo of a traumatic experience one has pondered and talked about for an inordinate amount of time that has lost its resonance ; rather than helping to recognize the variables involved in a recent history of erring assumptions , disappointment and bad guesses, the grim sequence of words and deeds said and done as people grow apart, and then move forward with the next chapter of one's life, it instead becomes standard operating procedure.

When my husband left, there was pain I did not

feel, which those who lose the one

who loves them feel. I was not driven

against the grate of a mortal life, but

just the slowly shut gate

of preference.

Olds perhaps wants to suggest  the stammer of someone reaching within themselves to find phrase formations to give voice to things she’d rather not talk about, a sidelong approach to the sensitive  parts of the living memory,  but there is a stumble here;  she gives us  fog when a clear situation should be visible. The summation comes first of all instead of developing organically from a sequencing of  events and words—the concrete is subjugated to a murky tone that is announced instead of presented. Olds evinces a conceit that  mental construct precedes materiality; there are no things  but in ideas.

And so he went

into another world—this

world, where I do not see or hear him—

and my job is to eat the whole car

of my anger...

There is the attempt to add a mystifying layer over banal detail , the effort just goes slack. It is the same as the mumbling teenager who can’t explain why he or she lied to their parents ; the poem , like the teen,cannot look straight in the eye.  There is a sense that this abstruse memory of dissolution has something to do with a car that was a potent sticking point between her and her ex husband, and that the car here should operate as a metaphor for the narrator having to accept what has happened, to stuff her resentment, to  regret the emotional qualities she invested in this thing that’s come to symbolize their life together. Bad writing wins out, though, as the phrase “ eat the whole car of my anger” is comically overwrought  and resolutely imbalanced; it is not a phrase that comes off the tongue without the reader sounding as if they’re prone to emotional bombast. It also provides misdirection that undermines any potential effect—one can’t help but make light of  phrase that invites snickering  remarks auto-eroticism or, more cleverly, whether the poet’s imagined meal  was an Oldsmobile. The last item, to be sure, suggest  a self-consuming obsession with what went wrong, but that suggestion lacks power due, sadly, to  ill-fated wording. What you end up discussing here is what Sharon Olds meant to say . This is poem requires not an interpretation, but an autopsy.

The poem hasn't a clear insight or a perspective altering metaphor or image in it; the inclination here is not clarity but rather obfuscation. The rationale,perhaps, may have been to give this wedge of irritating syntax an air of abstraction, the hope being that the unmoored and imprecise metaphors might add mystery to this misery and hint at larger traumas within the family, the neighborhood, the culture at large.

 Credible abstraction,though, evokes at things larger than the concrete particulars on the page; Olds simply had nothing to say and appears guilty of padding this poem with the extraneous , the gratuitously odd. It is pretentious and dishonest , from the readings. Something leaner, starker, more skeletal would have suited the topic; a marginal wave of regret , post-marriage, needn't be propped up with a writing style that only buries whatever idea might have been worth a poem of its own.

Billy Collins' Neighborhood

Former U..S.Poet Laureate Billy Collins has made a career wrenching irony from the small things and people that occupy his corner of the world, something akin to Fred Rogers trudging into his apartment, talking to his unseen friend, and then revealing the unique wonders of the banal things that one might find in a single, middle-aged man's drab apartment. Collins' narrating presence booms all over his verses, soft, pleasant, melodious voice over a moderately amplified microphone, complete with windscreen, characterizing the houses, the workmen, the rote tedium of daily tasks done in homes and in small-town business districts.  It is not long, of course, before something makes the narrator expand this universe with an intervening sigh, a deep, worldly intake and release of air containing both stress and relief, like someone taking a bong hit, proceeding then to speak of those human conundrums that refuse to allow our lives to remain restful and fulfilling without interruption.  This neighborhood is a ganglion of bittersweet recollections, unpronounced love affairs, deferred passion, a corresponding universe of small matters, petty concerns twined together with a writer's straining sense of whimsy. I imagine this world as similar to a perverse Twilight Zone episode where the residents of a nostalgically named small town --Willoughby, anyone--live in knowing the terror of the Writer who lives down the street who stares out the window, lurks in coffee shops and public parks, observing, jotting notes into a notebook or typing them into a laptop, returning to his study by mid-afternoon and composing his scenarios based on what he has seen; inevitably, the procedures, made up of minor tragedies, crashing irony, practical jokes, or static sadness, materialize in the town, among the residents, a citizenry compelled to enact and fulfill the musings of a writer who is incapable of doing anything else other than reshuffling his templates, mix-and-match his scenarios. My problem with Billy Collins and this poem is that his pieces and t his poem end with a "characteristic Billy Collins twist," which is another way of saying that it reads like dozens of professionally constructed verses he has produced. In theory, a twist in a story is a turn that we didn't see coming, but if the twist is "characteristic," it stops being a surprise. The trick of anthropomorphizing nonhuman things--and that is precisely what it is, a joke--is ultimately a tedious way of talking about human vanity as age encroaches and one's last days near. It is the kind of poem that Collins dispatches with the uniform alacrity and craft a thrice-weekly op-ed columnist produces a quickly drawn essay; the repeated tropes, the favored conceits, the reiterations øf conventional cleverness --are soon enough revealed. I admire Collins the way I admire grade B film directors, who can produce endless fare with slight variation in quality. He is a poet who is vigorously the same after all this time.

 A vision of hell, I imagine, with the neighborhood transforming with new poetic unfoldings that are, in fact, a punning variation of jokes and anecdotes that have already been told. For the residents, I imagine living in the town of Billy Collins' evil twin controls. What began as a refreshing change from their daily lives has become a bother, a terror of mediocre surprise, the case when the Unexpected becomes the norm. For the reader, it is the kind of thing that makes you want to have been over the poet's shoulder while he wrote the poem in question and told him to stop.  "I've heard this joke before," you would say, "you need to write food reviews rather than poems. Please stop."

"Make it stop," a voice chimes in from the poem being written.

The clock runs out

Few things will make you cut to the chase faster than a death sentence, something that informs Chidiock Tichborne's poem "Elegy"; confronting the fact that everything he has seen, said, done and felt in his life is soon to be brutally ended, Tichborne takes stock of his own life. The poem is a rapid succession of self-appraisals, an accounting of a life that is in the middle of all things, projects unfinished, personal affairs in flux, an existence of mind and body absorbing experience that hasn't lived long enough to achieve accumulated wisdom. Where age and the sheer volume of life's deeds can bring one to a maturity one could call a defining wisdom--when the large personality of youth becomes right sized and the large propositions a youthful enthusiasm have been tested against a world that was, in large part, indifferent to youthful spirit-- Tichborne abandons fancification, elaboration, grandiose rhetoric and chooses the monosyllabic tone that quickly admits his vanities, his unfinished condition. A dedicated Catholic, one imagines he wanted to meet his God after committing a final confession to the paper he wrote upon, his only witness.

The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,

The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,

My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,

I saw the world, and yet I was not seen,

My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

The effect is breathtaking, the succession of assertion and counter-assertion, of thesis and antithesis, a vision of a man who is finally seeing the grain of the brick and realizes the smell of the meals he will no longer see nor taste; this is the mind of someone who's life is cleared of the material things that typically get counted as aa successful life and who realizes that he will no longer have the luxury of taking things for granted. He prefers direct address of his situation and impending demise--the larger words, the crackling syllables, with their river-run rhythms and swashbuckling cadences, are significations that are hollow. The future has been brought to him, not he venturing into it. Those consequences of his actions have caught up with him. The poem is chilling, magnificent in its blunt clarity. It brings on the feeling of a weight being placed on your shoulders, increasing by noticeable degrees as you walk, it removes the passion one had which made life a pleasure, hobbies and crafts and philosophies that dissolve as the corridor that comprises one's life narrows and becomes darker.

The remarkable thing about the time is how beautifully if tragically, the piece demonstrates how a man can summarize his life in spare metaphors when coming against a literal and non-negotiable deadline. In a strange way, it reminded me of those times when I had t move very, very suddenly and I had the task of what to take and what to discard; sentimentality took a back seat more often than not while going through boxes of stuff. Once, even my record collection had to go, all 900 something discs--I simply had no way to transport them, no place to store them, no one to leave them with, no time to sell them. I gave them away to the first associate who would take them. It was, though, liberating, having all that vinyl gone in one quick flush, as I had no reason to resist CDs and CD players. I have a thousand of them by now, deep into jazz and blues, my music of choice from my mid-forties forward. Perhaps Tichborne wanted to arrive at Heaven's gate without the bulging pride that besets a life of enduring disease and bad weather; he perhaps sought to be liberated so as to be as pure as Heaven is described. Tichborne's poem makes you feel as if someone had just walked over your

Eyes Glued Shut

This caption is dedicated to my friends Barry and Janet.

Eyes Wide Shut, the final film by director Stanley Kubrick, came to us with a hype that suggestively alluded to matters of infidelity, necrophilia, an orgy,  intense , bad-faith sex between an eventually naked pairing of Tom Cruise and his then wife Nichole Kidman. The highlight of the film, it seems, was that we did view Kidman nude, a sleek figure one encounters in drawings by fashion designers, but the movie itself, intended to be ominous, exhibits all of Kubrick's faults and very few of his strengths. The movie is an uneven enterprise, impressive technical competence here , pretentious art gestures there; I have the suspicion that Kubrick actually died before he completed the film and that what we have was finished by c...ommittee. I am not a fan of Kubrick, but I do think that even his most portentous efforts had, at least, a "finished" quality, a well tailored fit. Kubrick could finesse his films to the degree that it was easy to overlook the vacuum that seems to habitually occupy the center of his themes. "Eyes Wide Shut" attempts to approximate the interiority of Schnitzler's novel and exhibits a topic drift; what ought to seem like incidents that, while insignificant in themselves, build to a culminating crash of tones, instead seems like the tale told by someone who cannot finish a sentence, let alone deliver a punchline.

Keith Olbermann will rise again

Salon writer Niall Stanage adds his half penny to the much ado surrounding the abrupt departure of liberal firebrand Keith Olbermann from his MSNBC program. Olbermann is a narcissist, is smug, is a loud mouth, is a ranter, is, in brief, arrogant, and that makes the fretting Stanage woozy. He writes that he is glad to see Olbermann off the channel. I think the writer is a hand wringing Pollyanna, shocked, he says, that someone on the left that uses emphatic language and dares his opponents to vet their declarations.  Olbermann's accomplishment during the eight years he presided over his Countdown program was that he turned the national discussion regarding the political future of America into a real  discussion  . The monopoly on public attention was over.  

Keith Olbermann is a blowhard, a loud mouth, an advocate with a blow torch to underscore his points, but he was our blowhard, our loud mouth, our pyrotechnical fighter, and to that end he advanced his causes admirably, bravely and, as with anyone loud enough to speak the truth to the choir of tin soldiers ceaselessly repeating the half-truths, distortions and outfight lies of the rancid power mad Right, one accepts the bluster as a price of having someone on your side who pulls the covers, relies on facts, gets it exactly more often than not. Olbermann is hardly an unquestioning toady for the Democrats--his criticism of the Obama White House on everything from the lack of a public option in the Health Care Bill to the failure to close Guantanamo as he promised during his first Presidential campaign have made waves and created stirs; he has a political edge, he makes his arguments forcefully, he relies on facts rather than false presentations, he punctures the arguments of those less well acquainted with the truth and the facts that come with it. Fox News is a channel full of bluster and deception; we need Olbermann to be our counter blast, to lay out the case for change, to set the record straight, to not allow the mean and the habitually short sighted to get away with an their falsehoods unnoticed. 

The departure of Keith Olbermann from MSNBC seemed inevitable, at least to me, as media behemoth Comcast takes over the reins of NBC Universal,the company that was Olbermann's nominal employer. Olbermann was a Methuselah with a bullhorn shouting truth, bolstered with vetted facts, in an arena

where what passed for political analysis had long gone in only one direction, from the right.

Olbermann was the first to talk back to the chorus of barking seals that make up the conservative  Greek Chorus, and he got attention. Olbermann's willingness to break with the pack and undermine the criminally contrived rationale for war laid out by the Bush Administration drew an ever increasing audience, and encouraged others of similar mind to not shirk their principles with mainstream disguises; liberals and progressives wore their politics as a badge of honor and asserted their patriotism.

Thanks in large part to Olbermann's  brave efforts to give rationale and coherent alternative critique to the group think that brought this country into unjust wars and into a recession, the other part of the discussion, the progressive community, is now part of the equation, an American vein of belief that will not again be marginalized. Of course, MSNBC became popular as a result and was a desireable acquisition in a media takeover; the loudest voice, the most intense believer, had to go. Whether Comcast had anything to do with Olbermann's abrupt departure will or will not come to light as more on this sad event gets unveiled, but the fact remains is that MSNBC retains a host of potent left-leaning voices in Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell and Ed Schultz. Olbermann, however, was the wordsmith, the history buff, the live wire, the heartbeat of what this network has been for millions who wanted their political discussions accompanied by facts and a knowledge of history. One wishes that Olbermann finds a new slot from which to shine his bright light on the doings of the powerful , and one prays that MSNBC refrains from making itself a toothless shadow of itself.



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Just a note to say that I think Ricky Gervais comes off like a smug asshole. How many maladjusted goofballs have you known who suffer from the delusion that it's their task to Speak- Truth- to -Power with stream if pedestrian vulgarity who haven't the slightest inkling that those they would enlighten would prefer to slap the shit out of them?He attacks all the sacred cows that need to be slaughtered, but in this day what is considered sacrosanct is profaned on a regular basis, but better wits. Gervais seems to be the last one on stage on an unending amateur night, telling his dirty jokes to a room full of empty chairs. There is something desperate in is need to offend, to be shocking, to seem edgy. He is, finally, as big an example of Grandstanding Moronics as Dane Cook, a comedian who would be funnier if he practiced Mime in an unlit supply closet.

Write until the fumes ignite.

T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound had their own style of the mash up --classical and pop styles and a preferring a diffusion of coherence rather than writing a series of unifying metaphors--in ways that would better express their idea of the fracturing of reality and the destruction of purpose in culture. The New Journalists weren't really the mob--mobs cannot , by nature, be democratic nor fair nor be able to devise a fair and just politics. I'd say they were more the guys at the end of the bar who stopped opining about the way things ought to be and got off the bar seat to enter an argument that started without them; they were going to straighten folks out. As it goes, they did provide an interesting alternative narrative line to what gets called the Movement of History, a choice , up close view of the insanity, the ugliness and the egomania that was chewing at the margins of the Great Society and it's aftershock. Realty is both an individual and a collective endeavor, yes; whatever it may in fact be in God's mind, we , as a species, cannot conceive of reality without a narrative line, a script. We are all stars in our own movie and everyone else is from central casting; reality is close to being a multiplex theatre with very thin walls between the auditoriums. Dialogue and sound effects bleed into each other's plot lines.

Pound and Eliot are interesting contrasts, one a windbag, a blowhard,a buttinski, a motor-mouthing gab-bag who happened to have some brilliant notions of how poetry can be made aesthetically and personally viable again, the other being a depressed, crabby, self consciously rigid individual who's view of the cracked surface of culture gave us some haunting images that perfectly convey the despair and longing decades after they were written. Both were closet autocrats, of course, and very conservative--neither was a fan of corporations nor capitalism, and it wouldn't be so hard to imagine the current strains of the right wing characterizing these fellows as left wingers. A strange set of long-view bed fellows; two anti-Semitic, totalitarian inclined poets who wind up writing stuff that dovetail comfortably with a Marxist analysis on the effect of capital on human relationships. Everyone brings their own dynamite to this party, blowing up the same thing for the same reason, but with each with a Jesus of a different name.

You're right about Thompson, he was not an intellectual , nor a particularly sharp analysis of what he was covering, but his strengths were in noticing things people did and characterizing them in a critical, sarcastic light that revealed an ongoing quest for power, naked and virulent under all his subject's noble rhetoric. I