Saturday, February 19, 2011

 I don't think Americans are afraid of poetry;  that, I think, is an easy  way of explaining why poetr books don't sell and why it's difficult for a poet without reputation to get  himself or herself by wider audiences. Rather it's a matter of not many Americans, comparatively, think of poetry as a resource since we, as a culture, are not an introspective culture, but instead one that continuously looks forward to a future to be created.

Poetry, so far as the general reader is concerned, is a matter of one being alone with their thoughts and structuring their experience in a narrative form, a narrative that not only chronicles events along a time line, but also the nuance of experience, the fleeting sensation of something changing in their psyche. This requires making the language do extraordinary things to accommodate an uncommon interpretation of experience, and Americans, a people reared on the ideology of what can be done in the face of adversity, have no expansive desire to do something so impractical. Language is a thing meant to help us solve material problems, to achieve material goals, and poetry, a strange extension of linguistic twists and glottal clicks, clearings of the throat, a nasty cough, does nothing to put food on the table, put money in the bank, to further the quest to cure an endless variety of incurable diseases.

Poetry is immaterial to purpose, function, policy; the absence of larger audiences for poetry isn't about fear from a perception that it's a mode of expression that is the least useful among several the lot of us might select on a given day. There are those of us who would argue that poetry's lack of identifiable utility is exactly what attracts us to the form--I happen to think that , like Wilde, that all art is quite useless in practical application (save for the fact that I believe humans crave beauty in form and in expression) and adhere to Harold Bloom's running definition of what literature , in general, avails the reader : to paraphrase, literature (poetry) helps us think about ourselves. Americans , I think it's safe to say in the broadest sense, have no real desire to reside individually and psychically work their way to an "aha" experience with poetry as a conduit.

We do think about ourselves, but more in terms of accumulation rather than an inner equilibrium. The measure of a man is his wallet, not the subtlety of his thoughts, and this a form of fearlessness that borders on insanity.

Friday, February 18, 2011

What I Thought, What I Stole



A professor once point out that something becomes art once it is framed, no matter what that object may be. That was great, I thought, and spent the next couple of semesters elaborating on this notion over hot cups of coffee, pitchers of beer, book and record reviews I wrote for the college newspaper, and certainly, most certainly, on term papers I was required to write in my humanities classes. I was a smart cookie, indeed, smart enough to recycle someone else's solid point over and again in pursuit of status and good grades. The odd thing, though, is that whereas the bullshit that I produced as a young has been exposed as being dually pompous and naive, the idea of the frame is a solid one; it has the added benefit of being     true.
This idea originated with Marcel Duchamp as he exhibited his readymades, a classic dada gesture he offered with his ready mades, such as urinals hoisted upon gallery walls, and snow shovels on pedastals. The point , though, was that the object became an aesthetic object,denatured, in a manner of speaking , from its natural context and forced , suddenly, to be discussed in its very "thingness". The object becomes art by the lexicon we wrap around it, a linguistic default.  Duchamp intended a guerrilla action against the bourgeoisie and their monied, status  focus on works of art  with the hope of returning the population to  a state where perception hadn't been codified with price tag and a standing army. The notion, however, became the market standard, however, with Pop Art : art was free to wander around it's own forms and materials without having to address anything so  trivial as why we love Jesus or bother to own pets instead of raise children.

Whether the object is art as most understand art to be--the result of an inner expressive need to mold , shape and hone materials and forms into an a medium that engages a set of ideas about the world, or unearths some fleeting sense of human experience -- isn't the point here. Ironically, art, generally defined as something that is absent all utility, any defineable function, is suddenly given a use that is sufficiently economic, which is to keep an art industry in motion; it is the sound of money. DuChamp, and other dadaists who sought to undermine this idea of art and its supposed spiritual epiphanies for the priviledged few, instead furnished a whole new rational for art vending. 

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.

Monday, February 14, 2011

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.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

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.

Friday, February 11, 2011

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.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

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.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

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

Monday, January 24, 2011

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.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

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.

Thursday, January 20, 2011


Ricky Gervais is shown during the 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards, Sunday, Jan. 16, 2011 in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP / Paul Drinkwater)
.
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.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

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

This sentence has no period, is therefore timeless

There is  a well argued rationale for the lack of editing in Infinite Jest, that David Foster Wallace was in the tradition of testing the limits of a what a sentence, a paragraph, a page can contain before the onset of the concluding period, the test being that a sentence can drift, digress, take long turns and circuitous routes to the finish a series of ideas,but even digressions have to be pared down to the ones that will have an effect, even a diffuse one that. Wallace really isn't in control of his digressions. Every so-called postmodern writer has to decide , and finally know what effect and point, or drift, they are getting at. 

Even in an style whose hall marks are pastiche, parody and high-minded satire, craft still counts for something, and a sense of the form a book is taking, it's architecture, has to come under control, or else the eventual point of the writing, to study, in an imaginative terrain, some aspects of the human experience, lost entirely. Any working novelist, whether a genre-hack , a royalist, avant-gardes of most any hue, ought to be in control of their materials, where Wallace, with IJ, clearly isn't. 

That control is more instinctual than mechanical, and the ability to know when to stop and allow the fictional incidents resonate in all their overlapping parts. Wallace doesn't trust his instincts, or his readers powers to interpret his material, I guess. There is always one more paragraph, one more digression, one more bit of undigested research for him to add. It's like watching a guy empty his pockets into a plastic tray at an airport metal detector. 

White Noise is written, of course, in a spare and professorial style that some might find maybe too much so. I didn't have that problem, and thought the style perfect for the comedy he wrote. It's a college satire, and was a remarkable choice on his part to convey the distorted elements of the storyline, from the lush descriptions of the sun sets , et al. 

It's a prose style that is brilliant and alive to idea and incident: DeLillo has the rare genius to combine the abstract elements of a philosophical debate with imagery - rich writing that manages several narrative movements at once. His digressions meet and merge with his descriptions, and the result is a true and brooding fiction that aligns the comic with the horrific in a series of novels where the pure chase for meaning within systems of absolute certainty are chipped away at, eroded with many layers of a dead metaphor , slamming up against an unknowable reality that these systems , including literature itself, have claimed entree into. Heady, compulsively readable, vibrantly poetic.Mao ll, Underworld are among the best American novels written in the 20th century. 

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Animal Farm: barnyard epitath

One loves this book beyond all reason, but when might we
begin to use Don DeLillo's "White Noise" as a narrative warning
against the unassuming stance that the language of authority
is , in itself, the right one?
There is nothing like re reading a classic novel you first considered a masterpiece in high school some decades later, let us say thirty five years or more, and realizing that the book you esteemed has travelled less well through time than your memory would like. George Orwell, although a particularly potent essayist on matters of politics and culture, was a ham-handed prose stylist when it came to his fiction and, one might add, a story teller for whom the obvious moral is the only point to consider. The cautionary lesson is fine as it goes-- the roads to mankind's worst, deadliest dilemmas are paved with good intentions-- but it is such a safe position that taking issue with it is the equivilent to declaring yourself insane, untrustworthy, a morally bankrupt stakeholder in Bad Faith Futures. Partisans left and right nod to the sentiment and find new ways to bark at one another and , notably, contrive new ways to assume the Absolute Power both sentiments warn readers and voters against. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and once you understand this as the point of the tale that has farm animals standing in for the History of the Soviet Revolution and it's brutal goonishnness, one feels as if they're being clubbed over the head with a point that was clear to begin with. This is a dry , brittle parable, a fairly gutless morality play; we need be suspect of those books that are easily co-opted by both right and left wing ideologues as a metaphorical evidence of their more convoluted explanations and apologies for why things are they way they are.



Sunday, January 9, 2011

The Aging of the Ageless

photo by Scott Stewart / Sun-Times Media
Chuck Berry, 84  years old and, in my opinion, the Grand Architect of the great American art form we call  Rock and Roll, gave a January 1st  concert at Chicago's Congress Theatre where his age where his age, it appears, got the best of him more than once during the performance. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher was in attendance, and the frail on stage doings of an iconic rocker in his ninth decade were too much for her, as she reports here.  It was such a sad display that she and her companion felt compelled to leave. Her resulting story is more a sulk than a report; although she is not the paper's pop music critic, you'd still expect her to apply more perspective and less woundedness into her column.  It's gamy to announce yourself as a critic for a publication and then compose something that suggests your issues with mortality.

 A great writer, a superb stylist, a keen scribe with a skewed perspective can be forgiven and even appreciated for a skewed, personalized accounting, but these geniuses are rare in journalism, let alone criticism, and most of us lacking an interesting way of expressing their fears and funneling their emotions into their columns adhere to  the job description.  It wasn't about Chuck Berry or his music, his lasting art, but how morose she felt as a result of going.


It might be sad to see a genius like Chuck Berry perform his brilliant songbook years beyond his prime, but reviewer Mary Louise Schumacher sounds more heartbroken that the musician/songwriter got old. She seems unaware that Berry's performances have, for decades, been erratic affairs. I've seen him three times in forty years of concert going, and found him sloppy and ill-prepared twice and inspired and exciting once. The film "Hail Hail Rock and Roll", a documentary about the rehearsals for a 60th birthday concert by Berry in St.Louis, is notable for the contentious arguments over event organizer and music director Keith Richards and Berry: Richards wanted a disciplined rehearsal time to do honor to Berry's songs while for Berry it was merely another money-grabbing opportunity.

 Berry did get with the spirit of his own music, though, and the filmed concert sequences show the genius behind Berry's music, but it also gave evidence that the man had "lost his art" long ago. Schumacher, I rear, failed to go to the concert with reasonable expectations, as Berry's crankiness is generally well known. A pop music reviewer should know this and temper their judgment. It would have been another knowing touch had she made the distinction between Berry and The Work he has done; he may have lost his art as a performer, but the real art isn't lost to the audience. It exists in his songs, which are on record and which we can rediscover and marvel at our leisure. However tragic his late life may be, Chuck Berry's contribution to American Music is immense.

Road to Perdition

I saw Road to Perdition with the aid of NetFlix and witnessed what turned out to be a significant disappointment. Director Sam Mendes seems to have spent an inordinate amount of time, energy and resources mounting the film and not enough time directing it. It has a an interesting look, particularly with its' near monochromatic hues and lighting that suggests the eye of a Dutch master, but this wears thin quickly as the plot and characterization fails to develop at either a credible pace or with interesting results.

There is nothing especially awful here, just stuff that is predictable, an offense made worse by sheer lethargy. Hanks does little more than grimace, Paul Newman, performing well in the first part of the film, has little to do afterwards except sit and stare into his lap with an old man's regret. Stanley Tucci and Jennifer Jason Leigh may as well be furniture here.

This was not  the best crime drama since "Godfather as a few critics I remember reading enthused.
Missing, of course, is the script that made the difference with Mendes’s' previous effort, American Beauty , which had an acutely sharp and cynical script from Alan Ball. Perdition is somewhat skeletal in what makes these characters tick, suitable for a graphic novel , yes,but still wanting for a movie. The plot here is adequate, I suppose, for the purposes of the graphic novel it's adapted from, but on screen, as is, the storyline is little more than a thin, cracking mortar between the cut stones of a huge mansion, ornate and impressive at first view, but revealing a crumbling structure the closer one gets into it.

Friday, January 7, 2011

About the Velvet Hammer


I drank at the Velvet Hammer a couple of times with my buddy William in the days of lesser light. The last time I drank there was some time in 1984 when I was sitting next to some old drunk hippie who started a conversation with what he thought of the Ku Klux Klan and what he'd like to do to each of them.

He informed me, in a language not this delicate, that he'd like to severe the genitalia of these KKKers and shove in the mouths of their mothers. I was intent on finishing my drink and let him prate with his alcoholic bile--it had the memorized rhythm of a nursed resentment that could be rattled off, word for word, at split-second provocation--until the barmaid emerged from the back room and said "Okay, Bobby, just leave the man alone and let him enjoy his drink." Bobby, who'd maintained a slurring, snarling Gordian knot of a grimace, a result, no doubt, of too many years of blown opportunities and short term day jobs and shorter-term love affairs, suddenly let his face go slack, all those tight coils of resentment giving to the gravity of his situation.

He stared into his drink while the barmaid wiped the counter and emptied a bucket of ice into the bar well. It was a cozy little nest of diluted dreams defied the SoCal sunshine during its years on La Jolla Blvd., Bird Rock's ground zero for bad juju. The Velvet Hammer was, by the time I rolled in for drinks years after whatever conviviality it contained had lapsed and sputtered, was an enclosed argument with the sunny side of things.The last thing I recall while sitting there in this dark lounge, was when I noticed that the only source of illumination seemed to be the stray beams of sunshine that came through the cracks of the bar's entrance.  It seemed no one ever walked out that door, nor walked out, seeming that way until someone opened the door from the street, a thirsty man gritty under a work soaked collar. The sunlight flooded the bar for a moment and the three of us stared into the glare, each of us hoping in a variety of ways that this was the moment when things either got better or stopped altogether. Either way would be an improvement than the moment we were in,  which was timeless and fatal.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Steve Cramer tosses a salad

A cigar is just a cigar, meaning, I believe, that it  still reeks inspite of interpretations of metaphorical worth. Likewise, noise remains noise.  Clangings by Steven Cramer is one such noise.I am leery of poems that explain what the title refers to , as it more often than not indicates a writer who is trying to let himself off the hook when confronted with a suggestion that the work , once inspected, not only fails to make sense in the literal , but fails at even providing a sense of anything beyond its own grammatical complications."...dissociated ideas conveyed through similar word sounds..." is what we're told this all means, and I say very good, you bet, but there is no poetry here, just symptoms. 


I have been a supporter of  and have argued vigorously for the work of difficult poets who offer a language, elongated or terse, from Eliot, Silliman, Dickins to Armantrout and David Lehman, who have a variety of ways of challenging the reader with efforts, experiments and projects that stretch and extend the power of metaphorical language .The difference between they and Steve Cramer's poetry is that this week's poet prefers spontaneous gush of short circuiting word salad while the others , speaking in the parlance of jazz snobbery, made better note choices. Uncivilized as it may sound in some quarrelsome corners of the small room that constitutes the poetry world, I can't shake the idea that the writing of poetry is  in the best sense heroic, where the mundane, nettlesome and lethal aspects of one's aspects serve not merely as the stuff to be treated solely as figurative snapshots of one's passing through their years as an imperfect , but rather of transcending those  matters and offering something that can be shared other than a grousing regret. Cramer is inclined to consider  speech , in itself, a poetry, as the results can, at times, resemble either habit of mind.  There needs to be something more. Cramer didn't bring it home.


 Every thing is there , suggested, run through associative puns and the like, but this is private without being alluring. It reads, I believe, as if it were the transcript of an intake interview for psychiatric ward. What might make for a good start for a therapist makes for a turgid grind for the reader to make sense of, with little reward for real music, sweet or artfully dissonant.


Cramer, I'm sure, is an honest writer, but there just isn't that extra dimension here to make this read like more than transcribed gibberish; poetry is an art and art, although it may be derived from mundane materials and the fetters of human existence, needs to be compelling beyond an explanation of how it came to be. What in the poem is a starting point for a discussion about how the language transforms a set of assumptions, does the rare thing and encapsulates a state of being that is problematic?  My guess is that we would be in a mood to discuss the sociology of the poem, the tropes and issues that go into making this standardized bit of alienation rather than have an operation that tried to appreciate the lyric qualities.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Flarf, belatedly


Flarf? Seriously? Sure, and we'll set up a Department of Crayola studies right after this already tedious digital in joke finally stomps the last shimmer of resonance from The Ironic Effect .Flarf is late in the game, I think, attempting to be something that Pop Art was during the Sixties, a species of Capitalist Folk Art where the commercial design of advertising was taken as worthy aesthetic principle by serious working artists; it presented us with Soup Cans, Colleges with goat heads, American Flags and raunched out car seats , products of design all, and served as a genuinely odd fulfillment of Walter Benjamin's much cited essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Benjamin had thought that mass production of aesthetic objects would cause the mystifying and distancing aura to evaporate from around paintings, sculptures and the like and allow the rest of us to appreciate, enjoy and be inspired by art in a way that didn't rely on a priesthood of critics and academics to keep us attentively dumbfounded with a theoretical catechism. This was not unlike Martin Luther's spearheading the Protestant Reformation, initiated but the invention of moveable type and the printing of the Bible ; the Catholic Church had lost it's exclusivity as interpreters of The Word, and Luther presented that all a worshipper needed as his own Bible and the courage to seek the God of his understanding. Alternative currents within alternative streams makes for intriguing footnotes in literary histories and can give reason for a Cultural Studies major to further beg the question as to how information glut and digital dispersion usurps claims to regional voices and the certainty of the distinct and original voice rising above the rabble, but we have , in essence, the return of the Dada Gesture. The point is to gum up the works and make farting noises in the back row while the admittedly stuffy conversation , quietest and post-avant, drones from the podium. Good for a giggle, but Flarf seems like an undergraduate writing program manifesto that managed to crawl out the Kinko’s copier and land on someone’s accommodating server.