Writing about death will kill you

A  dubious perks of being an older poet  is that you are allowed, it seems, with each year you add to write about death regardless of subject matter or choice of images. Death is everywhere, the world is fraught with things that are symbols for the lack of pulse or heartbeat, the bowel of cereal you just poured milk in stares back at you with big, sad eyes, as if to say farewell as you lift the spoon of Wheat Chex to you lips. 

Always death, that subject and intangible menace in the deeper shadows of the alleys, in the cracks between the shelves of the used book stores, seeping blackness dribbling in from old hotel hallways under grey doors, death, ever present, a fact that is a bider of time, a patient representative of perhaps an even vaster gasp of the Unknown, death is always there in the things and the places and within the people one encounters. It becomes a habit of mind, I suppose, to look into the rubble of architectural ruins or the long pauses between moves in a chess game between two old men and to visualize the void that awaits them and finally ourselves, and there is something to be said in the meditation on the subject of approaching the end of the line where one's ticket is punched , once and for all;indeed, I sometimes regard the day to day activities as performances of a sort, scenarios acted out, improvised upon, and I am the critic, assessing how well I met the standards of appropriate response to the world or getting keen on far I fell short.
The thought that my life would be no more,that there would no more matinees or encores leaves one breathless and in a vague panic if I park my ride in that neighborhood too long. 

Lucky for me that I push on, get on with the day, write a poem about those feelings that pushes death , that shadowy enigma, that uncompromising lack, to the margins and emphasize the life that is with me. Tragedies are constant and we consider their impact, we measure the loss, but we take stock of what we have still and stop watching the clock. For the moment, for this day, we stop fearing death, we learn to live with it, we move on and call a friend, we help a neighbor, we excel at our jobs, we create meaning in the life that still engages our senses. We find joy. 

Not that we ignore death, of course; I am leery of poems, though, that too quickly shifst the focus of their lines from what begins as one of a limitless prose description of a an urban locale into a bit of self-estimation that evaluates the present life against an imagined calendar that is quickly running out of pages.Alan Williamson's poem "No.1 Piazetta Calamandrei", wants something to be delivered to him with a bang, a crash of cymbals, an orchestral fanfare; his details too readily ooze the impending arrival of his private end of days. 

Does being you still mean walking your own mind
as if it were a tightrope? With anger rising
against those nearest you, as if they were depriving you
of some dearest hope?
What is the thing, the flaming-up or darkening,
that brings you peace?
No answers. But why does a sudden joy
go through me, at this thinning of the veil
between me then and now?
For a moment I no longer fear the death
that waits for me,
as if it were no more than the drawing of a just sum.
Pausing, as if to enter,
my hand on the great knob of the street door. ... 
 
This too readily finds dread in the    everyday things around him,  which would have been a good way to go had he not chosen to lard up the proceedings with so much thinking. The deliberation is too deliberate; Carl Sandburg or Emily Dickinson this is not, two poets who recognize Death, with a capital D, as a the huge bag of nothing ness it was. Williamson's poem is  bothersome because it dredges up so much worry and reflection triggered by trivial details, nicely designed and symmetrically pleasing as they might be to the eye; poetry , among other facets, concerns itself with finding significant things, images, notions in unexpected places in unexpected moments, but Williamson's writing finds too articulate; the dualism of a young man compared against his older self  laces whatever irony that might be had into a supremely literary echo chamber and cheats the subject out of the element of surprise.
The poem's  tone that reads as if it has been practiced, that is too say, rehearsed. I realize the poem is Williamson composing his thoughts about his own death and that he is attempting here to establish a believable objective correlative, providing a backdrop of physical things in the material world to enhance a poem about a moment in his interior life, but I think this fails because the poem the first person narration, all the references to self, put this in the league of whining complaints about encroaching infirmity. Any one can complain about their fading light, anyone can express regrets festooned with first person pronouns--a good poet, though,should have the craft,the instinct, the ear to get that across by removing themselves from the discussion almost entirely, to not pad what is already poetic.

Has anybody noticed...

I was relieved to find out that I wasn't the only one who thinks Tom Cruise looks bizarre when he beats a hasty path. After seeing the new film Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, I came across someone who asked on Facebook if anyone else thought if Cruise ran funny, a stylized herky jerky scramble, very kinetic with the arms making piston like moves up and down. He makes me think of toy that had been wound up too tightly and was thrashing about until unwound, or the the spring snapped. The only thing missing was the key in his back. Cruise is a problematic actor , of   course, rigorously stylized, overly assertive with those gestures and quirks of the head: the laugh is too quick and barking, the smile is too fast to appear and too tight besides, the eyes are bright and attentive, but you cannot shake the feeling that he thinks you're a mirror he's staring into. 

Not that he doesn't try to do good work; his fans would cite  Eyes Wide Shut with director Stanley Kubrick. To tell the trurth, I didn't much care for Eyes Wide Shut, which I thought was a stiff , creaking attempt at necro-erotica. Cruise isn't the actor I would have cast for a role like this, but I think the main fault lies in what I suspect was the movies incomplete status. Despite what the studio and Stanley Kubrick's might claim, I doubt this film was finished. The editing is especially ragged and arbitrary, not something you'd expect from a Kubrick project. It was a supremely pretentious swan song from an already pretentious director.

Cruise's career work is slick, commercial and slick promotion, and it is one of the truly embarrassing things an audience member will ever have to do than to watch this two-dimensional action toy try to convey complex emotions or states ofmind. But he is, like a good many other screen personalities, effective as a presence if he is in the right project. The secret, I think, is to keep the story going moving along at a brisk pace that doesn't sacrifice coherence or allow Cruise the opportunity to get Hollywood on us. Spielberg, for all the griping one may do about him, knows how to keep a movie brisk and made Cruise the perfect protagonist in Minority Report. Interestingly enough, I think the pair also did good work in War of the Worlds.

got a letter from the IRS

I got a letter from the today IRS saying I owe them money from last year. Stunned by this, I rooted around for my return and my W2s  and other paperwork together,  and tried to make sense of  this rude how do you do. I  remembered filing everything that was given to me by my various employers for  2010, and yet here is they are, giving me numbers on particular lines in the   1040EZ form where they said I presented erroneous information. 

Now what? 

I didn't have a stiff drink, although the thought occurred to me; I remembered that I  tried doing that many times before, over and over, over many years, and all those things that I wanted to make go away went away for only a little while. When I woke up, or emerged from the  bog, as it were, there was three things for certain, a hangover, more wreckage from previous night's events I barely remembered, and those boogieman I tried to dissolve with a string of stiff drinks. I gave myself over to the IRS .

So I surrendered the whole game and gave them a call, waited a half hour on the phone, got a representative finally, he brought my return, did some work with a pencil, and said my return was correct, discovered the source of the problem, and told me what to write back in response. the upshot is that i don't owe them anything from last year. i didn't need to call suicide prevention nor change my sobriety date. I won't go into the insanely banal error on my part which caused the IRS computer to kick out a change in my 2010 return with the message that I owed them,but I will  offer this one tax tip: make sure you enter the various amounts of income on the right lines so designated. Don't lose two hours of a perfectly beautiful afternoon fretting more than a guitar assembly line.

__________________

Christopher Hitchens is Dead

Christopher Hitchens holds forth at D.G.Wills Books in La Jolla, California, 2006.

Christopher Hitchens is Dead: Iconoclast and public intellectual passes away at a Houston hospital after battle with cancer.:

The recently dead Christopher Hitchens was an ornery son of a bitch . That said, I have no doubt that he will be remembered perhaps the last of the great gadflies, a brilliant and fluid essayist who was fluent in the subjects of politics, history, art, literature, philosophy and, indeed, pop culture itself who could then effortlessly, it seemed, essay forth and parse the particulars of his subject with a quick, subtle read, reaching conclusions that pleased and displayed hundreds and thousands of readers world wide in equal measure. He was a contrarian, a supporter of the Iraq War, an aggressively eloquent atheist, a discoverer of elegance, grace and integrity in unexpected places, from unusual sources, defending his positions with a moral consistency that was rare, founded on a bed rock of values he developed as a young man active in the British New Left of the Sixties.

One wishes that he hadn't allowed his hatred of dictatorship and brutality to support a war that was immoral from the get-go; Hitchens argued as much that although the rationale behind the war was a calculated stream of falsehoods, the intentions were honorable none the less --to rid the world of an evil tyrant--and that we might as well go ahead and instill a Western sense of justice on a country that had not attacked the United States; that there were no facts presented by any credible accounts in our intelligence agencies connecting Iraq to terrorists , nor evidence nor discovery of the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction Saddam Hussein's possession mattered not at all to the intransigent Hitchens, who conducted his pro-war argument on a slippery slope; his willingness to ignore an immoral premise for a war of no coherent purpose , favoring instead a Higher Morality that has yet to justify itself in terms of an arguable Good Result that has been achieved is the mill stone that will hang around the memory of Hitchens for years to come. There will be embarrassed silences when this comes up, heated debate,exaggerated praise and gross condemnations. Eventually , of course, many things will be overlooked, forgiven or forgotten altogether and we can again appreciate the sheer brilliance of Hitchens the journalist, the gadfly, the pundit, the scintillating essayist, the uncommonly astute literary critic.

At his best , Hitchens despised cant, bullshit, received perceptions and championed intellectual honestly fiercely, fearlessly. He did not pussyfoot, he did not apologize, he presented his case, he bulldozed his opponents with hard reason , deep reading and seemingly perfect recall of vetted facts in their sources. One may have disagreed with this Hitchens on various matters and be on solid ground with their opposition to his views, but shame on he or she that dares confront him with a sub-par set of counter moves. You had to up your game to engage this man, you had to up your game to Olympian heights. You also had to succeed in not passing out in the thin air of Hitchens' altitude.

Christopher Hitchens, a damnable son of bitch, and a pleasure to read over these past twenty years.

humbug

Humbug.

A consistent gambit in the postmodern bag of tricks and pranks has been the idea of pastiche, the piecing together or the layering over of unlike elements, a mix and match of contrasting aesthetics and purposes that, when rendered successfully, are supposed to stun and bewilder the audience; the more grandiose hope, in a generalized apology from academic critics, is that an audience member is supposed to confront the limits of the filters that. The suggestion was that consumers would become aware of how our popular arts present a conveniently small and cozy version of the world where there is structure and rationale for all events, but this is a reach, at best, for most of the practicing post-coders out there that have made the laziest of ironic art.

It always occurred to me that all this pastiche making was producing was sometimes amusing, too often ugly and pointless poems, films, and artwork. 

It seemed more the gesture, the off-hand flick of the wrist instead of the stylistic signature of intelligence that shrewdly weighted the materials at hand. Sometimes, of course, it is nothing more than two things joined in willful defiance of whether anything makes aesthetic or intellectual sense; the result is more primal, cynical, and vindictive even, such as Bob Dylan singing Christmas songs.  The convenience of untutored "avant gard" thinking in our ranks might claim genius for Dylan's scruffy vocal and equate it with the thorny rasp of the best blues singers, certainly artists in a style that has redefined the modern ideal of good singing. I wouldn't compare this to an old blues singer: they can at least carry a tune. Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Bessie Smith, even genius spawn Tom Waits can rise above the melody line with their rattled vocal equipment and lend the lyrics the qualities of nuance, texture, rhythmic interplay with the instrumental arrangement. What's most notable about Dylan's singing, once you get past the oddness, is the flat reading; it's grudgingly workmanlike.

 There isn't a traceable sense of joy, spiritual uplift. Even the comfort of ironic distancing, the Brecht's alienation effect, is lacking.  There is little, if anything, epic about this. This is something that was conceptually brilliant in 1970 when he released his four sides of deliberate schlock "Self Portrait", with different vocal affectations, orchestral arrangements, vocal choruses, odd song selection and a host of other purposefully non-Dylanesque elements. That was precisely the point, I think, as Dylan never had much patience for those who would make religion and political philosophy from his songwriting; it was like he wanted to confound his idolaters and see if they could perversely turn this mash-up into a further message from the Godhead. I understood that immediately when the album came out, but the listening stopped being funny long before side one was over with. It is one idea that depends entirely on the ironic effect it's trying to sustain. 

It was a burden to listen to, the Middle Of the Road playlist ; it was a prank that did not pay dividends for taking it seriously. It was a prank that was also an entreaty to the gathered fans who interpreted what he did or didn't do, said or didn't say as gestures signifying the movement of history; I'm not one to put words in the mouths of men or women greater than I , but here goes>"Knock it off, you guys."The concept has not aged well, and repeating the gimmick here just strikes me as a near tragedy. It is schlock, and it doesn't matter whose name is on it. Dylan, I think, is up to his old game of screwing with the heads of people who take him too seriously. He may love this tune, love singing it, but I still think his intention is to throw another wrench into the mechanics that insist he is something more than a brilliant songwriter.

GEORGE WHITMAN, RIP

George Whitman at D.G.Wills Books in La Jolla, California

To Boredom by Charles Simic

TO BOREDOM
I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.
I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.
A day would last forever,
Making pellets of bread,
Waiting for a branch
On a bare tree to move.
The silence would deepen,
The sky would darken,
As grandmother knitted
With a ball of black yarn.
I know Heaven’s like that,
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed. -
-Charles Simic, New Yorker 12/10/07

A fine, chiseled ode here. Boredom is those moments when you find yourself that seems to make you heavier with a lethargy that seems to have grown hands attached to big, brawny arms that grab you around the chest and drag you to the floor;ennui turns to terror, as you're too lazy to fight and a passing thought turns into a concrete, concentrated panic over teh notion that the floorboards and checkerboard tile might fall away and the metaphorical hands and arms would drag to a hell where every second of the eternity to come is the precisely the agony you felt on the worst day you ever had while wandering those years in the material world. Time stands slows to an inch worm's slither and there is the feeling of being suspended between dimensions. Charles Simic is a great poet and gets it right about heaven as well; eternal perfection is without dynamics, variation, a constant state of equilibrium.