When I was done clearing my throat
hit and runs ceased being daily activities
and bullets left their chambers
to slide back into the box that borne them.
After the end of the world
home sales picked up
as if everyone desired a roof
that kept out rain
and false advertising.
Each time the flag waves in slow motion
while an unknown orchestra
strangles the national anthem,
I stand tall where ever I happen to be
and salute whatever floats just
above my head;
Tonight it is ceiling fan
that hasn't had a spin
since two and half car wrecks ago.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Ape shit
There is no place
for the books you purchased
with the last of your change
and remaining pocket lint,
you've sent your last dime
to a cause since drifting toward a cliff
where white caps break
below on a beach
of black sand that glistens
like diamonds under the moon,
all that remains of your wits
are the shavings
on the table
next to the coffee cup
and pencil sharpener.
for the books you purchased
with the last of your change
and remaining pocket lint,
you've sent your last dime
to a cause since drifting toward a cliff
where white caps break
below on a beach
of black sand that glistens
like diamonds under the moon,
all that remains of your wits
are the shavings
on the table
next to the coffee cup
and pencil sharpener.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Myth as theory
Myths, as well anyone can describe
them, are working elements of our personal and social psychology, and whose
elements are "modernized"-- better to say updated -- as a
matter of course. Declaring a goal to make them relevant to the slippery degree
of modernist convention sounds is an insight best suited for a Sunday book
review. Jung and
Campbell are ahead on that score, and Eliade certainly stresses the relevance
of mythic iconography strongly enough: current gasbag extraordinaire Harold
Bloom advances the case for mythic narrative ,-- borrowed in part from Northrop
Frye (my guess anyway) -- in the guise of literature, constructs the psychic
architecture that composes our interior life, individually and as member of a
greater set of links: the stuff helps us think ourselves, personalities with an
unsettled and unfastened need for a center aware of its adventures in a what
comes to be , finally, an unpredictable universe.
Bloom argues, somberly, that Shakespeare is the fount from which mythic forms find a contemporary set of metaphors that in turn became the basis for our modern notion of dramatic conflict, and argues that Freud's genius lies not in his scientific discoveries, but for the creation of another complex of metaphors that rival Shakespeare's for dealing with the mind's nuanced and curious assimilation of experience, the anxiety of influence in action, as process, and not an intellectually determined goal to navigate toward.
The point is that modernization of myth is something that is that is already being done, a continuous activity as long as there are people on this planet...
Bloom argues, somberly, that Shakespeare is the fount from which mythic forms find a contemporary set of metaphors that in turn became the basis for our modern notion of dramatic conflict, and argues that Freud's genius lies not in his scientific discoveries, but for the creation of another complex of metaphors that rival Shakespeare's for dealing with the mind's nuanced and curious assimilation of experience, the anxiety of influence in action, as process, and not an intellectually determined goal to navigate toward.
The point is that modernization of myth is something that is that is already being done, a continuous activity as long as there are people on this planet...
An associate was recently doing his best to demean
and diminish the status of literary critics at recent pot lock I happened upon.
He pointed me towards a computer monitor and told me the address of his book
blog. His most recent post was basically the same rant he was delivering at the
party I quote him thus:
Academics determine what is taught, but they do not determine what is "literary". Literary, like language, is determined by use.
Use by critics among others, I
think, not the general readership alone. Books can have an extraordinary appeal
to a vast public, and it is among the critics tasks to study what the basis of
the appeal might be, and then to make distinctions among the elements, to give
or detract value to specific works, their genre, and techniques. A concept of
"literature", a kind of writing that does the reader a tangible good
with a malleable knowledge that can be applied to one's life with good effect,
is a creation of a university system where critics had to justify the
systematic study of poetry, fiction and drama. The literary criteria have since
trickled down to the larger, popular discussions among the public, not the
other way around.
Academics hardly try to eliminate works from the ranks of literature: more often than not, the aim is to bring works into the fold, though no one, whatever degrees they do or do not hold, will ever be convinced that the mass and popular use of Danielle Steele will confer upon her literary qualities that will have her stock rise amongst academics, critics, what have you. This is an activity that comes from a critical discourse that makes such a conversation possible beyond a popularity contest. It’s not that the best criticism claims to create the things that makes writing ascend to greatness, but only that it gives those things names that make them comprehensible to a larger, curious audience. But the terms are not locked, not fixed: literature changes given the changes in the world its writers confront, and so the terms of discussion change to, lagging, perhaps, a bit behind the curve. It's less that descriptions of literature fail, but instead are forever incomplete.
Academics hardly try to eliminate works from the ranks of literature: more often than not, the aim is to bring works into the fold, though no one, whatever degrees they do or do not hold, will ever be convinced that the mass and popular use of Danielle Steele will confer upon her literary qualities that will have her stock rise amongst academics, critics, what have you. This is an activity that comes from a critical discourse that makes such a conversation possible beyond a popularity contest. It’s not that the best criticism claims to create the things that makes writing ascend to greatness, but only that it gives those things names that make them comprehensible to a larger, curious audience. But the terms are not locked, not fixed: literature changes given the changes in the world its writers confront, and so the terms of discussion change to, lagging, perhaps, a bit behind the curve. It's less that descriptions of literature fail, but instead are forever incomplete.
Literature, by whatever definition we use, is a body of writing intended to deal with more complex story telling in order to produce a response that can be articulated in a way that's as nuanced as the primary work, the factors that make for the "literary" we expect cannot be reducible to a single , intangible supposition. Use is a valuable defining factor, but the use of literature varies wildly reader-to-reader, group-to-group, culture-to-culture, and what it is within the work that is resonates loudly as the extraordinary center that furnishes ultimate worth, varies wildly too; there are things that instigate this use, and they aren't one determinant, but several, I suspect. A goal of criticism, ultimately, is not to create the terms that define greatness, but to examine and understand what's already there, and to devise a useful, flexible framework for discussion. Ultimately, the interest in useful criticism is in how and why a body of work succeeds or fails in their operation, not establishing conditions that would exist before a book is written.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Language of Joy
Speaking of times in twangs of alien regions
Which share memories of months and distant smells of dust
and oil rising from the black asphalt hours before the rains
came.
California is the vat of raw alloys where grand children
Meet each other in jobs that make no sense and compare notes
Over black, tasteless coffee about what it was their grand
Parents were saying, something in code that firmed up their
back
Bone and brought mists to their eyes.
We are too many years past the expiration dates of our lives
To think of parachutes when it's autumn by the Pacific Ocean
In a city whose best boasts are sand gun boats, warm air and
Cool breezes turns into a generation of rasping sighs in
lawn
Chairs nursing drinks under tourist’s umbrellas in the
neighbor
Hoods we moved into three decades earlier in expectation of
Making a mark on a locale of fronds that was as unknown as
Anything we wanted to do with our lives.
It's about gloom and rain and love of defeated weather that
Is a tempest we brave going out the doors of our homes.
It's about being sorry for the rich for being so
pathetically
Well off when integrity is the only thing on the menu.
In coffee houses in motels near county fairgrounds, dealing
With degrees of English and slants of the camera's eye.
It’s about the loneliness of standing in the same place
Long enough to see prodigal sons and daughters come home
With news of the war, a sinking feeling that gun boats
Are not enough.
Wondering what in the universe makes sense when you're
Bored beyond despair and philosophy is now a cable channel
Broadcasting into the clouds until everyone returns from
The beach, from the water of laughter from rivulets that
Comes in many streams, the language of joy.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Saturday, May 12, 2012
I saw the original Paul Butterfield Blues Band in Detroit, 1966 or 67 at
a no age limit folk and blues club called the Chessmate in Detroit
Michigan, and this was an event that changed my life forever. I bought
my first harmonica soon afterward and have been playing ever since.
Detroit is a fantastic town for Black music, with lots of soul, blues,
jazz and rock and roll, and the exposure to these kinds of music at an
early age influenced my harmonica playing. I listened to saxophone
players like Coltrane and Sonny Stitt and Coleman Hawkins, I listened to
guitarists like Johnny Winter, Clapton, John McLaughlin and Larry
Coryell, I listened to harmonica players like Butterfield, Musselwhite,
James Cotton, Sonny Boy Williams, Norton Buffalo, but mostly I just
played all the time, all the time, with bands, played to records, played
alone, all the time. I played until my lips bled, literally. My parents
thought I was eccentrc . I didn't care. I play everyday.
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/IhcFYXVNmJY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I played even at my worst drinking; i have been sober now nearly t wenty five years. I am now trying to figure out the way I play so i can do some instruction videos. I play entirely by ear and really have no idea how to convey my style to others. I would love to read or hear someone describe what is I do. I thank all of you for listening to me and your kind words. he only harmonica players I studied closely and made a concentrated attempt to sound like, ie copy, are Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite. Butterfield and Musselwhite were the first guys to introduce me to blues harmonica playing and elements of their respective styles remain in my own style 46 years later. What really helped me, though, was just listening to virtually anything I could get my hands on; in my case it was an ongoing obsession with guitar players. In fact, I picked up harmonica because I couldn;t learn how to play fast like Alvin Lee or Johnny Winter fast enough--I was just all thumbs and no patience. But it was with the harmonica that I found a voice, my voice, and it was with the harmonica that I found myself being able to duplicate riffs and effects from harmonica players and from a good number of guitarists and, especially, many, many jazz musicians, like Coltrane, Bird, Coleman Hawkins. This is not to say that I sound anything like the jazz musicians I just mentioned--their techniques and their vocabulary are certainly more sophisticated than what I currently have--but the point is that giving these guys hard, concentrated listens influenced my sense of phrasing, gave me ideas and notions as to how to skip around during an improvisation and not merely rattle off scales, how to be precise in executing my ideas, in how and where to bend, to slur, to insert chord textures, trills, triplets, octaves. I do tell others who are learning their craft to listen to as much music as they possibly can and to learn as many different styles as possible, to learn riffs from blues, country, swing, classical and to mix them all up, and to practice, practice, practice and after that, practice some more. And more after that. I place maximum emphasis on practice and playing in live situations because for me this is the most effective means of sloughing the most copy-cat aspects of your influences and moves you toward your own style.Having never had a lesson, having never learned music theory, having never learned to read nor write music, how I learned was by an obsessive preoccupation with listening closely to harmonica players, rock guitarists and jazz improvisors by the score and woodshedding for hours for decades on end. It's always been a one day at a time thing. Everyday in every way I get just a little bit better. On good days I even myself when I say it.
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/IhcFYXVNmJY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I played even at my worst drinking; i have been sober now nearly t wenty five years. I am now trying to figure out the way I play so i can do some instruction videos. I play entirely by ear and really have no idea how to convey my style to others. I would love to read or hear someone describe what is I do. I thank all of you for listening to me and your kind words. he only harmonica players I studied closely and made a concentrated attempt to sound like, ie copy, are Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite. Butterfield and Musselwhite were the first guys to introduce me to blues harmonica playing and elements of their respective styles remain in my own style 46 years later. What really helped me, though, was just listening to virtually anything I could get my hands on; in my case it was an ongoing obsession with guitar players. In fact, I picked up harmonica because I couldn;t learn how to play fast like Alvin Lee or Johnny Winter fast enough--I was just all thumbs and no patience. But it was with the harmonica that I found a voice, my voice, and it was with the harmonica that I found myself being able to duplicate riffs and effects from harmonica players and from a good number of guitarists and, especially, many, many jazz musicians, like Coltrane, Bird, Coleman Hawkins. This is not to say that I sound anything like the jazz musicians I just mentioned--their techniques and their vocabulary are certainly more sophisticated than what I currently have--but the point is that giving these guys hard, concentrated listens influenced my sense of phrasing, gave me ideas and notions as to how to skip around during an improvisation and not merely rattle off scales, how to be precise in executing my ideas, in how and where to bend, to slur, to insert chord textures, trills, triplets, octaves. I do tell others who are learning their craft to listen to as much music as they possibly can and to learn as many different styles as possible, to learn riffs from blues, country, swing, classical and to mix them all up, and to practice, practice, practice and after that, practice some more. And more after that. I place maximum emphasis on practice and playing in live situations because for me this is the most effective means of sloughing the most copy-cat aspects of your influences and moves you toward your own style.Having never had a lesson, having never learned music theory, having never learned to read nor write music, how I learned was by an obsessive preoccupation with listening closely to harmonica players, rock guitarists and jazz improvisors by the score and woodshedding for hours for decades on end. It's always been a one day at a time thing. Everyday in every way I get just a little bit better. On good days I even myself when I say it.
Friday, May 11, 2012
late in this life
late in this life
in the night that surrounds me,
I check my email
and find you speaking
in italicized fonts,
asking me what time it is
and when does
life begin, after the sheets slide to the floor
or is after the
leave blowers heave wind and fumes
to no good purpose?
in the night that surrounds me,
I check my email
and find you speaking
in italicized fonts,
asking me what time it is
and when does
life begin, after the sheets slide to the floor
or is after the
leave blowers heave wind and fumes
to no good purpose?
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
TASTES
The poets I like have to be good
writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page.
There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of
typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience,
unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but because the writing is just plain awful,
being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of real feeling toward their experience, or,
most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliché choked
sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry
workshop. In either case, the visual look
of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good
writing always matters, and there are many, many wonderful poets whose works
have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately
leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled savant
garde has completely overtaken the conversation. Good poets must be concerned with
language, I think, since that is the stock
and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have
no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey
experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with
techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary
world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good
many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting
ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about
language itself, as a subject.The concern, boiled down crudely,
is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from a
imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing
that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter
and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made
our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us.
This kind of stuff appeals to the
idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough
frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an
grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work
of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake,
O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in non
sequiters , fragments,clichés, sparsely buttressed
inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed
to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to
perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.More often, this sort of
meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity
the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the
notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques
merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static
thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before.
I speak, of course, of only a
certain kind of avant garde; one I endured in college and have since survived
when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry.
With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be
smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something
that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of
airs. Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will
continue to be professional poets as long as there is grant money to be had, and will continue in
their own destruction of forest land.
THE POETRY OF BOMBS
—~--- —----
What kills me
aren’t the guns
you tote but your thinking
that’s in the chambers
and clips, the magazines
no one else can read
but still dread on hearing
what they report.
Language created the
world
where tools can be made,
and now language lives
inside
the spare parts
whose instruction
manuals
are a poetry of rage and revenge
translated into an idiom of
technology that surveys the
outcome of another
kind of
Big Bang Theory..
It’s not about being
left alone any longer,
your message, inscribed
in manufacturer’s short hand
on casings spent faster than
a drunk’s last dollar,
Bullets whistle
the language
of your rights
as they pass though
the skulls of anyone
who happens to be there,
expecting nothing but
the light to change
and cold meal
warmed later in a microwave.
who happens to be there,
expecting nothing but
the light to change
and cold meal
warmed later in a microwave.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
“Watching the Telly With Nietzsche” by C.K. Williams. - Slate Magazine
A sad fact is that we are a nations of shut ins, finally, no matter how much our media informs us that we love to go places and see things and get to know the doings of the indigenous in neighborhoods not our own. Perhaps we are, to a large extent, desperate for vacation and the illusion of having enough walking around money to spend some days in a generic hotel room, visiting corporate water parks in all fifty states. Millions are the sort who just channel surf until the end of the day, from time we get out of bed to the conclusion of all things concerning the twenty four hours that has just ebbed away like so many dust motes floating half seen on a breeze in a darkening twilight.
This where millions of us have our discussions of things going on, things that have happened, the political low down, the double crosses,the trends and the fads that make us stupider and less likely to call bullshit when bullshit is served. This is , perhaps ,a rich source for monologues among discontents who are on their way out the door to the Big Room, and it has been explored to wonderful results in the work of Beckett--he had the genius to verbalize the death rattle in which the significant parts of a man's life is reduced to a repetitive , percussive stammer that never articulates as a memory truly forged.
C.K .Williams , though,in the grouchy poem linked to in the post title, merely seems in a hurry to deliver caustic comment on everything his gaze glazes over; everything is a target, nothing is sacred, nothing is revealed but a crank with a remote control and a room full of books. I imagine the cliched image of someone in a study full of books , piles of them, and and unsorted papers, unfinished writing assignments. The windows all have the shades drawn, save a tear or too that allows a thin beam to play intensely on a picture of an insane German philosopher who could never quite make himself understood.
Friday, May 4, 2012
"Variations (for Three Old Saws)" by Stephen Yenser - Slate Magazine
"Variations (for Three Old Saws)" by Stephen Yenser - Slate Magazine:
Poetry makes nothing happen, of course, but that this the point of it all, to have a medium that is the verbal concentration of the human mind struggling along in the world outside an individual's innate sense of exclusivity. Stumbling, bumbling, jaw dropping in amazement or reacting in horrified disgust, poetry in the modern sense isn't a means of argument, the vehicle for proving yourself right about how existence should be arranged and what those results would be.
Poetry undermines the permanent hubris that is humanity's great curse and introduces again to the grain of the cement that meets us when we fall.
It makes nothing happens--planes still fall from the sky, celebrities commit suicide, genocide rages everywhere, babies are born with or without soft music playing--but it does stake the sting from the Sucker Punch of Irony we meet when we turn the corner while looking other direction.
Poems about poetry making nothing happen, though, are nothing to be proud of; clever poems about being clever and concluding, outright or by implication , that one's verbal brilliance is inevitable, instinctual, an unstoppable music we make in-spite of group consensus or occasion, is the lamest, shallowest of vanities. It is, so this poem subtly implies, the condition of being human. No. It is the condition of having a bankrupt imagination.
If there are no ideas in things you can find, don't write.
_________________
"All poems are about poetry," or so the claim goes, but that has never been a convincing line of defense. In that sense, poetry is always about poetry the way all writing is about writing, in that a writer cannot advance the form unless he actively works against the standards and practices--even the theory of practice--that came before him. This view is deconstructionist, an old hat evasion that use to sufficed when a critic didn't want to discuss author intention nor technique. But poetry is a writing above all else and writing in general has the purpose of communicating something that regular discursive writing cannot--to take in the world and describe experiences in, whatever that happens to be. I think that we have a good many poets who would rather preen on the page than write something memorable.
_________________
"All poems are about poetry," or so the claim goes, but that has never been a convincing line of defense. In that sense, poetry is always about poetry the way all writing is about writing, in that a writer cannot advance the form unless he actively works against the standards and practices--even the theory of practice--that came before him. This view is deconstructionist, an old hat evasion that use to sufficed when a critic didn't want to discuss author intention nor technique. But poetry is a writing above all else and writing in general has the purpose of communicating something that regular discursive writing cannot--to take in the world and describe experiences in, whatever that happens to be. I think that we have a good many poets who would rather preen on the page than write something memorable.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
The ticket is punched and you're leaving, goodbye
| |
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away” is marred by his anger about David Foster Wallace
Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away” is marred by his anger about David Foster Wallace:
.It is the writer's job to be interested in his responses to events around him, but there is such a thing as creating a style that makes one's intense self-regard a bearable thing for a reader who otherwise might care less. Jonathan Franzen is a the author of several important literary novels and he does a fine job, over all, of casting his own personality as the model from which his characters find their motivating nest of bad habits and rationalizations; he is much better at it than ,say, Philip Roth, too often cited as the Next American Nobel Prize winner, who's creations sound more or less sound like the same person , albeit each with particular scab to pick. Franzen gives you the feeling that his characters , although different versions of his established personality, are actually the sorts of people who naturally be attracted to each other, for good or ill. His fictional universe is whole enough to add dimension and texture to gripes and rationalizations that would otherwise seem self serving.
Franzen, however, is way too serious to be considered a serious writer of non fiction; what he finds time to write about between novels makes it sound that just being Jonathan Franzen is a burden. He treats his job as a novelist not as gift, or even a craft, but as task, an endurance of miserable labor done with the obligated resentment of someone charged with raising the masses from the murk that is their collective habit of mind.Franzen the nonfiction writer appeals to that part of the
audience who thing quality writing is a stream of associations, metaphors and
similes that defer the point the author assures us he is reaching. All the
divergences and deviations from the stated topic seem to me to be a ploy to
makes us think that there is more going on than we thought, or that the scribe
has done their homework and rigorously considered his expression. That is a
problem with having a superficially elegant style; you're generally able to
wing it, inserting any notion that occurs to you, making their intrusion
seamless, seemingly, because you've mastered transitional devices. This is the
reason I prefer Franzen the novelist, because it at least it a form where
making stuff up is required. Fiction, literary or popular, is the next best
thing for the compulsive fabulist, aka liar, as all the narrative inventions
are contained in a form where the contents have no fidelity to actual events.
Not that I think Franzen is a liar or a trader in shaded accounts.
Writing about your life as if it were fiction make for
remarkable reading experiences; there are number of writers who even went so
far as to refer to themselves in third person--Julius Caesar, Henry Adams, and
Norman Mailer. Melville fictionalized his persona in is expansive poems in
order to give a sense of how America is singular historical and cultural
personality made possible by an unprecedented diversity in the population--he
took on himself to speak for the collective Us as no one else could. The light
touch is needed, however, and one needs to know how little to talk about
oneself having an experience and how much they need to speak to whatever facet
of their world their guise as a fictional character brings them. In any event,
it is a device to bring a writer's ideas to the world, shame free.
It's a musty theater adage, one actor telling another, that you shouldn't let the audience notice you "acting". In that sense, Franzen is vainer about his status as a writer that he cannot help but seem as though he's preening even in his uncertainty. His persona is too large for the true stories he wants to tell; the art of writing literary memoirs, I suspect, is knowing when to drop the personal pronouns and concentrate instead on what one has witnessed. This is a key element in what has made travel essay writing, from Henry James, Mark Twain upward through Paul Theroux and beyond, a generally pleasurable experience. Franzen never actually convinces me that he forgets his status while composing --I suppose this writer regards his material the way a construction worker regards a large stack of bricks that need to be carted to another location on a work site. This should be done without fretting. Franzen frets and it seems he can't help himself.
It's a musty theater adage, one actor telling another, that you shouldn't let the audience notice you "acting". In that sense, Franzen is vainer about his status as a writer that he cannot help but seem as though he's preening even in his uncertainty. His persona is too large for the true stories he wants to tell; the art of writing literary memoirs, I suspect, is knowing when to drop the personal pronouns and concentrate instead on what one has witnessed. This is a key element in what has made travel essay writing, from Henry James, Mark Twain upward through Paul Theroux and beyond, a generally pleasurable experience. Franzen never actually convinces me that he forgets his status while composing --I suppose this writer regards his material the way a construction worker regards a large stack of bricks that need to be carted to another location on a work site. This should be done without fretting. Franzen frets and it seems he can't help himself.
His problem
as an author of autobiographical pieces is his attempts to make his life, the
writer's life, more interesting and dramatic. The writing has the faint aroma
of perspiration, the kind of stench that arises when you overwork the body. Franzen is unfailingly elegant in his prose writing--for purely stylistic reasons, he is one of the best writers currently committing words to a page , whether paper or computer screen. Beyond that, his writing grates because his default response, or reaction, to matters that occur in his life are that they are things that happen to him and that beyond his ambivalence as to how he should react/respond , there lingers a resentment that these events have gotten in his way, slowed him down, ruined the symmetry of his timeline. Franzen the non fiction writer is the kind of person you want to avoid because you're afraid you'll become more like them, a nervous dweeb who wants to be left alone and yet forever feels resentment because he feels good folks are ignoring him. He makes you nervous reading him because you worry that you might be more like him than you already know.
oh, come on now
“Foundling” by Billy Collins - Slate Magazine:
Former American poet laureate Billy Collins has a skill for writing about the small things that go on in his life, finding an effective means, more times than not, of tying the details of the banal and mundane into a more significant idea, lest those who assume poetry ought to be about “heavy things” feel left out of the conversation he starts. Collins is careful, though, not to get too profound and smartly lets the intellectually perplexing elements of his poetry recede and become texture in favor of something arresting, something cute being revealed, a sudden perception that wasn't there when the narrator started his discourse. It is a formula Collins uses well; the downside of it all is that it is clear that the good poet won't be digging deeper into the soil anytime soon.
Former American poet laureate Billy Collins has a skill for writing about the small things that go on in his life, finding an effective means, more times than not, of tying the details of the banal and mundane into a more significant idea, lest those who assume poetry ought to be about “heavy things” feel left out of the conversation he starts. Collins is careful, though, not to get too profound and smartly lets the intellectually perplexing elements of his poetry recede and become texture in favor of something arresting, something cute being revealed, a sudden perception that wasn't there when the narrator started his discourse. It is a formula Collins uses well; the downside of it all is that it is clear that the good poet won't be digging deeper into the soil anytime soon.
Meanwhile, he is allowed to wallow and offer his readers the laziest example of his approach, in this case, a poem called "Foundling." The narrator strays across the page writing in mock wonder that he is given a life of writing things down, things seen, heard, felt, with it in mind to compose a poem for an audience that wishes, presumably, that they had the depth of perception the man holding the pen possesses. It proceeds as a typical poem-about-poetry, that retrofitted banality that serves the writer well when they have no clear idea of which way to do with a poem they've started--it is the equivalent of a jazz musician's fake book--but it becomes ridiculous by the last stretch.
How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,
jotting down little things,
noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,
then wondering what will become of me,and finally to work alone under a lamp
as if everything depended on this,
groping blindly down a page,
like someone lost in a forest.
Aspects of Collins' audience-ready poetry bordered on the trite and ephemeral sentiment of greeting cards and books of spiritual feel-good, but there was a slight trace of cynicism. This realism kept the poems from becoming merely therapeutic. Collins remembers clearly, with snapshot clarity, being a baby perturbed at being abandoned, outside, on a winter's day, in a sewing basket, defiantly sticking his tongue out at the sky, his first act of defying fate and all other Higher Powers. Then the clever ending, the response of the invisible gods, a snowflake falls and drifts toward him. However, this conceit is unbelievable even for a form as permissive as poetry, where the only real rule is whether you have the chops to pull off an idea. Collins has chops, but they need sharpening. Cute, of course, but this is a cartoon, and not a funny one either, not clever, not thought-provoking, just time filling. I think of doodles one draws on notepads and then tosses into the trash can when the boss enters the workspace. This should be shoved in a drawer and then forgotten about. Billy Collins can do better, we know. He ought to have known better as well.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
More Nugent: I'm 'a black Jew at a Nazi-Klan rally'
msnbc.com Entertainment - More Nugent: I'm 'a black Jew at a Nazi-Klan rally':
I grew up with Ted Nugent, literally, having seen he and his
band the Amboy Dukes for a few years in Detroit during the Sixties, and later
when he broke out nationally during the Seventies.
He was always a motor mouth with a reputation to live up to and, being one who apparently needed to be noticed in any easy way he could devise, made it a habit of saying outrageous contrarian things that were geared to upset the easily distracted and bring happiness to the frustrated, the stupid and the permanently gullible.
He is a fine and distinctive guitarist, to be sure, but his claim to artistry is made irrelevant by his self-creation of being a cartoon character and carnival barker disguised as a political demagogue.
Nugent is a narcissist and sociopath who hasn't the slightest hint of decency in him--he will only double down and triple down on his bombast and stupidity so long as he and not ideas are the center of attention. I would have more respect for this gun-infatuated, faux survivalist fruitcake had he, for all his big talk about supporting our troops, had actually gone into the Military and served his time in the Vietnam war.
Nugent the Warrior has no backbone other than the crusted coating around his ego.Nugent is another gasbag fraud, a member of the loathsome GOP crowd of Chicken Hawks, IE, tough talking warmongers who haven't served a minute in uniform. Nugent made millions as a famously sex-crazed rock star while other young men were getting shot up in Southeast Asia. Ted Nugent is a cowardly, repulsive fraud.
He was always a motor mouth with a reputation to live up to and, being one who apparently needed to be noticed in any easy way he could devise, made it a habit of saying outrageous contrarian things that were geared to upset the easily distracted and bring happiness to the frustrated, the stupid and the permanently gullible.
He is a fine and distinctive guitarist, to be sure, but his claim to artistry is made irrelevant by his self-creation of being a cartoon character and carnival barker disguised as a political demagogue.
Nugent is a narcissist and sociopath who hasn't the slightest hint of decency in him--he will only double down and triple down on his bombast and stupidity so long as he and not ideas are the center of attention. I would have more respect for this gun-infatuated, faux survivalist fruitcake had he, for all his big talk about supporting our troops, had actually gone into the Military and served his time in the Vietnam war.
Nugent the Warrior has no backbone other than the crusted coating around his ego.Nugent is another gasbag fraud, a member of the loathsome GOP crowd of Chicken Hawks, IE, tough talking warmongers who haven't served a minute in uniform. Nugent made millions as a famously sex-crazed rock star while other young men were getting shot up in Southeast Asia. Ted Nugent is a cowardly, repulsive fraud.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
KILL YOUR IDOLS: Anti-Rock Revisionism
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A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics
Edited by Jim Derogatis and Carmel Carillo
(Barricade)
The problem with the generation of rock critics who followed the late Lester Bangs was that too many of them were attempting to duplicate Bangs' signature and singular ability to write movingly about why rock and roll stars make terrible heroes. Like many of us, Bangs became disillusioned with rock and roll when he discovered that those he admired and was obsessed by--Lou Reed, Miles Davis, Black Sabbath--were not saints. The discovery of their clay feet, their egos, and the realization that rock and roll culture was a thick cluster of bullshit and pretentiousness didn't stimy Bangs' writing. It, in fact, was the basis of Bangs transcending his limits and finding something new to consider in this. Sadly, he died before he could enter another great period of prose writing. "Kill Your Idols", edited by Jim DeRogatis, is an anthology that is intended, I suspect to be the antithesis to another inconsistent anthology of thematic rock commentary, "Stranded", the Greil Marcus edited collection where he commissioned a number of leading pop music writers and asked them to write at length about what one rock and roll album they would want to be left on a desert island with; it's not a perfect record--then New York Times rock critic John Rockwell chose "Back in the USA" by Linda Ronstadt and couldn't mount a persuasive defense of the disc--but it did contain a masterpiece by Bangs, his write-up of Van Morrison's album "Astral Weeks".
His reading of the tune "Madame George" is a staggering example of lyric empathy, a truly heroic form of criticism. "Kill Your Idols", in reverse emulation, assigns a group of younger reviewers who are tasked with debunking the sacred cows of the rock and roll generation before them; we have, in effect, pages full of deadening sarcasm from a crew who show none of the humor or sympathy that were Bangs best qualities. Bangs, of course, was smart enough not to take himself too seriously; he knew he was as absurd as the musicians he scrutinized.
"Kill Your Idols" seemed like a good idea when I bought the book, offering up the chance for a younger set of rock critics to give a counterargument to the well-made assertions of the essayists from the early Rolling Stone/Crawdaddy/Village Voice days who are finely tuned critiques gave us what we consider now to be the Rock Canon. The problem, though, is that editor Jim Derogatis didn't have that in mind when he gathered this assortment of Angry Young Critics and changed them with disassembling the likes of Pink Floyd, The Beatles, the MC5; countering a well phrased and keenly argued position requires an equally well phrased alternative view and one may go so far as to suggest the fresher viewpoint needs to be keener, finer, sharper. DeRogatis, pop and rock music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, author of the estimable Lester Bangs biography Let It Blurt, had worked years ago as record review editor of Rolling Stone and found himself getting fired when he couldn't abide by publisher Jan Wenner's policy of not giving unfavorable reviews to his favorite musicians.
His resentment toward Wenner and Rolling Stone's institutional claims of being a power broker as far as rock band reputations were concerned is understandable, but his motivation is more payback than a substantial refutation of conventional wisdom. The Angry Young Critics were too fast out of the starting gate and in a collective haste to bring down the walls of the Rock Establishment wind up being less the Buckley or the Vidal piercing pomposity and pretension than, say, a pack of small yapping dogs barking at anything passing by the backyard fence. The likes of Christgau, Marcus, and Marsh provoke you easily enough to formulate responses of your own, but none of the reviews have the makings of being set aside as a classic or a landmark debunking; there is not a choice paragraph or phrase one comes away with.
Even on albums that, I think, are over-rated, such as John Lennon's Double Fantasy, you think they're hedging their bets; a writer wanting to bring Lennon's post-Beatles reputation down a notch would have selected the iconic primal scream album Plastic Ono Band (to slice and dice. But the writers here never bite off more than they can chew; sarcasm, confessions of boredom and flagging attempts at devil's advocacy make this a noisy, nitpicky book whose conceit at offering another view of Rock and Roll legacy contains the sort of hubris these guys and gals claim sickens them. This is a collection of useless nastiness, a knee-jerk contrarianism of the sort that one overhears in bookstores between knuckle dragging dilettantes who cannot stand being alive if they can't hear themselves bray. Yes, "Kill Your Idols" is that annoying, an irritation worsened but what could have been a fine project.
The collection would have benefited nicely if they had the budget to afford writers not so much identified as rock critics but rather as critics in general, beholden to no particular canon in any medium, knowledgeable enough to understand what's in front of them and honest enough to cry not just tripe when tripe was served, but to demonstrate, by example and judicious mockery, the pretensions of the artists under scrutiny. I am thinking of Martin Amis or James Walcott, two able and incisive critics who's collected essays respectively rise far above the sludgy monotony that too soon overtakes the assortment DeRogatis and co-editor Carmel Camillo offer the public for a price.
The collection would have benefited nicely if they had the budget to afford writers not so much identified as rock critics but rather as critics in general, beholden to no particular canon in any medium, knowledgeable enough to understand what's in front of them and honest enough to cry not just tripe when tripe was served, but to demonstrate, by example and judicious mockery, the pretensions of the artists under scrutiny. I am thinking of Martin Amis or James Walcott, two able and incisive critics who's collected essays respectively rise far above the sludgy monotony that too soon overtakes the assortment DeRogatis and co-editor Carmel Camillo offer the public for a price.
A moment and then another moment
She crosses the street after standing at the
corner for minutes that seemed nothing less than hours. He watched ,thinking of
lyrics to write. She stood at the corner, jabbing the button of the pedestrian
signal box, looking across the street as if to see if perhaps a store she
wanted to get to before they closed might have flipped the sign over in the
door, from "open" to "closed".
As if she could see through
all that traffic.
I know, he thought, a song about a guy watching a
woman trying to cross the street while he tries to imagine a lyric he might or
might not write. The irony, he thought, or was it just laziness? All these
bagels are cold and hard as tile. He lights a cigarette, dumps the match in his
ash tray. The woman is across the street, and vanished into a parking
structure.
"May I have another Latte?" he asks a
passing woman carrying a tray to the cafe service station.
"I don't work here" she says without
breaking her stride.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
“Aardvarks” by Philip Schultz
“Aardvarks” a poem by Philip Schultz
It’s summer and the Jitney is packed,
every seat taken, except for the one
across the aisle, in which a man
has barricaded his window seat with
a briefcase and jacket, an act meant
to confront others with his superiority.
Munching chips and guffawing at
a YouTube video of an obese woman
riding a scooter down a country road,
towing a younger obese woman
in a wheelchair, he reminds me
of a neighbor’s dog that would steal
and bury our dog’s bones, then growl
defiantly on his side of our fence.
Pythagoras believed our souls ended up
inside the bodies of animals selected
as rewards and punishments.
The three giggling girls behind me,
stretching their legs into the aisle
every time the shy attendant passes,
forcing him to stutter apologies
in a Slavic accent—poodles, probably.
Pythagoras also believed the shapes
of numbers symbolize our significance.
Well, sequestered here between work
and family, thought and dreaming,
I’m probably some kind of numinous digit
slowly evolving into, say, an aardvark
hurling down the highway inside a bus
camouflaged as a vodka bottle, on its way
to a barricaded future on the far side
of a fence where all our significance is buried.
These lines seem to exist only to deliver the image, an interesting image, that of being an aardvark in the guise of a name brand vodka secreted in a suitcase or carry on bag while on a bus barrels down the highway into the vanishing perspective of lost America. It is, I suppose, a tasty line, full of added detail and nicely fitted in the typical murmuring cadences that typify Philip Schultz's inconsistent output, but what the poem tries to be, observational, quick witted, free associative in the effort to connect classical learning with otherwise banal detail, lacks the feeling of effortlessness.
A poet like Billy Collins, whom I have a grudging respect for--although his work remains within boundaries that keep out the dark and allow the clarity of vision to fairly burst wide as would sunlight into a dark room from an opened door--has the discipline to chip away at the construction and the comatose syntax and offer a poem that is clean and as close to the perception as possible: his twists and his turns sound to have been genuinely arrived at, in the moment.
Thomas Lux, who I believe is likely the best lyric poet writing in America, has a similar compactness of expression, not chintzy and crabby, but musical, deft, melodies of lilt and carriage that evolve strangely into darker moods, deadlier perceptions. His material is often the grim and ironic string of unintended results his subject's best ideas, plans, emotional outlooks bring them. The point, to be sure, is that these two poets have works that actually do something--they have an effect that turns the beautiful and the tragic and even the banal goings on in daily life a matter of surprise, perception, the realization that personal narrative is a consoling myth that , while comforting and enabling of the creative artist to produce compelling literature that resonates subtly with a readership, what happens in Life-As-Is will not obey a wholly owned plot outline.
Schultz's poem commits no great sin and is not offensive in any sense; it just seems as if it's composed of a string of false starts that don't add up to anything powerful . It's not even interesting, in total, as minor and fleeting riff with language's ongoing struggle to capture the moment, free of cant and well worn stylistics. It reminds me of someone who talks at length, impromptu, producing a stream of words until an idea, a point actually emerges. I would be interested to read what Philip Schultz might do with that last few lines, that image, and apply it to a less gabby framework.
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The Atlantic a month ago ran a pig-headed bit of snark-slamming prog rock as "The Whitest Music Ever, "a catchy bit of clickbait...
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