Nothing to say about nothing at all

Elise Partridge’s sparse poem “Chemo Side Effects: Memory” , is a telling verse of someone trying to remember the precise word to describe the slightest detail of the slightest thing and feeling as a result the mild dread that a part of themselves has gone away, vanished as would nameless leaves in a stream rushing toward a storm drain. Her language is crisp, brittle, but there is a power in the skeletal telling that more robust rhetoric would merely have blunted with their compounded comparisons; Partridge has something here akin to an artist sketch pad, getting the essence of a situation, in this case a memory lapse and a growing alarm, in a few confident strokes. It is, perhaps, a skill garnered from years of writing verse with the linguistic cleverness and gusto younger writers feel they need to do, to transfer their book reading into the tight corners of their as yet unexplored lives. Partridge’s poem here reads like someone who knows the world they have defined, formed, created to their satisfaction; the task of this poem is to observe the poet finding her place in the world, to remember the names she had given the animals, the places, the things of her life.What we observe, of course, is something like a comedy, where the protagonist is frustrated in their task and gropes about the clutter, real and recollected, in hopes that the object, the word she wanted appears suddenly, magically, like a bright, shiny coin. It’s a touching sight to imagine, not without humor: Where is the word I want?

Groping.
in the thicket,
about to pinch the
dangling
berry, my fingerpads
close on
air.

I can hear it
scrabbling like a squirrel
on the oak’s far side.

Word, please send over this black stretch of ocean
your singular flare,
blaze
your  topaz in the mind’s blank.

Thinking, remembering, the pleasure of the poet, the reader, the talker of long phone calls and timeless coffee chats, the effortless act of bringing together experience, reading, emotion into new forms and communicating new ways of witnessing the world in the community of one’s imperfect compatriots, is now work, labor, Something that was always at the ready in the notated folds of one’s mind is now missing or renamed, misplaced somehow in the archives of one’s interior life. One’s brain has become an overstuffed closet where all manner of incident, sorrow, joy, growth, frustration has fallen out of their boxes and now overlap one another in an avalanche of obscuring imagery. But there is bravery inspire of this, the sort of reaction to fear we don’t speak of that often, that of making the brain behave as we think it should, however in vain our efforts seem to be. Partridge gropes for that thing she cannot name nor tell you what it means; this is a search for the Golden Fleece, the Gold Urn, the unnamed thing whose connection to a supposed metaphysical order, would reconnect the searcher to their path, the point they were trying to make, the directions they were trying to give, the emotion they were attempting to express. This is Calvinism on the intimate scale, the thinking that if we continue the search and beseech the elements with urgent humility, magic realism will take hold and what is causing pain and anguish is massaged out of countenance.

I could always pull the gift
from the lucky-dip barrel;
scoop the right jewel
from my dragon’s trove….

Now I flail,
the wrong item creaks up
on the mental dumbwaiter.

No use—
it’s turning
out of sight,
a bicycle down a
Venetian alley—
I clatter after, only to find
gondolas bobbing in sunny silence,
a pigeon mumbling something
I just can’t catch.

There is among other elements a dream quality to Partridge’s poem, a flickering tableau that seems to shake, vibrate and spin the harder the dreamer tries to slow the activity and locate a center of their thoughts. This has the effect of picking up a thick, large format magazine and concentrating on the fleeting images and text while they speed by as you fan through the pages as you would a deck of cards. The poem goes from being a stuttering, hesitating description of stymied intellectualizing and evokes something larger, quietly horrifying as one accepts the fact that everything runs down and everything gets lost and that everything, at the end of their use, are isolated . The last stanza, with its image of things and meanings being just out of reach, the “pigeon mumbling something / I just can’t catch…” is reminiscent of the kinds of dreams, the melancholic fabulation of our lives that takes place after we drift into the thorny wilds of napping, where we are young and searching for answers and yet burdened with several decades of memories and experience; we ask the strangely familiar things in our dream state presence who we are and the name of the place we stand, but the characters, whether family or, in a tip to Lewis Carroll it seems, pigeons who can’t clear their throats and speak clearly, all with hold the information, they are mute. 

The poet’s tone, calm and vaguely bemused, and her language and phrasing, which is elliptical yet precise, musical yet aware of how silence and pauses can mold cadence and provide the power of to the bittersweet nuance of Partridge’s punch lines, work splendidly toward creating a dread just under the calm surface. But she struggles on, soldiers on, and realizes that what she is doing isn’t a destination at all, but a journey; she responds to the blockade by writing a poem that is made of the things that she came across in her determined search for that precise word that would have nailed what she had initially started out to say. She had taken a detour and wrote a narrative, another chapter in a story she is done yet done with.While Partridge’s narrator gropes for the word and, metaphorically, attempts to get her footing, we have a sense of someone climbing a sheer cliff; the suspense becomes less than the original task will be fulfilled than it is by what force of will and ingenuity can this annoying torture be overcome with some kind of grace. There is an anticipation that makes you root for the hero who must suddenly contend with a mountain, of a sort, that keeps from completing a thought.

There’s an understandable desire to have the poem speak to us in full sentences, but there is something to be said for half-sentences and the barely articulated; in a far less grim comparison, the poem reminds me of a police procedural in which we see the detectives looking at a bulletin board full of snap shots of the victims and the suspects, newspaper clippings, Photostats of canceled checks, seemingly random things linked together with circles, arrows and yellow post-it notes giving us bits of a linking narration. What intrigues in that image, as in the poem, are those key items that are missing? In this instance, there what I feel an intensive effort to go back to the moment, the very instance, when her idea, the notion she was about to speak, eludes her ready grasp and she does a quick mental rummage of the memory, rummaging clumsily among the associations that intrude on her path for right term for an idea she has likely already forgotten.

A large part of why this poem appeals to me is because it creates the idea that as she comes across an image of her past , the contexts and sensations associated with it announce them announce themselves like emphasized photo captions. At some point she is off her determined search altogether and finds herself instead following associative string of personal icons and finds herself entranced, perhaps, but the murmur of the descriptive words, presenting themselves in a what it less a stream of conscious than it is a rough, fast ride on the rapids. 

The narrative that forms is piecemeal, seemingly related, people, places, things and the reflexive grasping for parts of the anatomy twirled and twined and otherwise spun together in a rush of sensation that reveals nothing, finally, other than all the compartmentalized detritus we have organized and placed in the mind’s cold storage easily enough becomes chaos and clutter again with the right provocation. Partridge’s intention, I think, is not create meaning or provide a comfortable lesson to be derived, but rather the sensation of an experience that, by definition, defies language’s ability to fully express.There is much here to discuss , I think, but I will say that I am in awe at how sharp a scene Elise Partridge has drawn with such a superb word selection and construction of phrases. There is modern jazz here, Miles Davis/Chet Baker, confident masters of their craft who know when to leave spaces, silences, who know how to build toward surprise.

The rocket's red glare

 This is one of the many crank rant poems I used to enjoy writing when the combination of coffee and cigarettes had sufficiently charged me and reinforced what my ego demanded a clean and sober artist must be in order to be interesting, expressive, a hat full  of cornball gestures: the personality I'm trying to project here is, please note, fictional and the intimations of wild things having happened with serio-comic consequences are created from whole cloth as well. This might blow my reputation as a poet who recounts hard living in funny and bittersweet couplets and rhythmically charged lines that simulate the rapid eddies of a Freddie Hubbard solo. Well, it might threaten what street cred if I had a reputation more expansive than friends, estranged drinking buddies, a few associate professors and members of my family who like what I do no matter what it is I put on the dinner table. I make stuff  up in half the stuff you'll find in my various chap books, anthologies I've been included in, the various blogs I fill with words that yammer and shriek a loud, if vaguely articulated discontent. 

Discontent with the skin I'm wearing, more than likely, as this current sheath is wrinkled, getting flabby and the joints ache worse than the linger effect of losing whatever person, place or thing that truly mattered to your existence. But don't think this a dishonest poem; I disagree with the notion that poetry in this age requires the poet to expose their darkest don't-tells. Poetry will not change behavior and will not make you feel better about being a shit heel; that is what therapists are for. 

This , I think, is worth reading for the same reason some recent science fiction movies are worth seeing because the computer generated animation sequences are  as spectacular as the stories that justify their use are insipid. This is honest poem because the attitude, the language, the tone that waivers between confirmed don't-give-a-goddamn and the  congealed frustration that threatens to become something louder ,  vulgar and violent. They ring true for me and reflect those days a time ago where going insane seemed a viable an option as any young alcoholic artist and poet could choose. Thankfully, I have survived the logic of the heated impulse and stayed around long enough to enjoy a more modest means of getting to the point. --tb

_____

 The rocket's red glare

how drunk could be get

before we began to

look attractive to the

flies that buzz around

our heads ,

against

the broad strokes

of red

and henna coded clouds

that set the horizon on fire

as the sun sinks

just a tip under the

blurred line of the planet

where earth and sky

are a duo

that play one masterful rondo

after another

one of us stands up

to God and his

whispering minions

that he is tired of

suffering the results

of a good idea

gone to bullet bursts

and fist fights over the change left
on cafe tables.

i raise my head from my palms,

stop studying the way

my shoe laces are

coming untied,

i gather a sense that

there is more to life

than gas , food and lodging

but would settle

for any thing

because i had

none of the above

and no love for curbs

and the drainage dreams

they inspire,

i ask

"IS THERE AN ARE ART SHOW

CLOSING SOMEWHERE TONIGHT??"

the other one of us

was still

drinking as he careened up the street,

one side to the other,

all the billboards

should read "tilt",

"LOVE STRAYS

AND STAYS ARID"

he yells at a passing bus,

i laugh, Jesus what a jerk,

i will take the bus

and play music in my skull

until it comes,

i will be serene and lean

on the vernacular

that's so spectacular

when I'm in the bag

and full of mean remarks,

i will behave,

i will be silent,

nothing will upset me,

i am invisible on the bus line,

but even as my mantra

is uttered and folded

into a vest pocket of the soul

over where the heart still beats

with what remains of

my sense of my self and

virtues beyond the

bulge of my wallet,

a car approaches

through the intersection,

it veers closer,

i sing to the streetlights,

the fixtures on the power lines,

the car slows down,

i'm on the twelfth chorus of "Cherokee",

something breaks in my lap

and then I am wet

with water

neither painful nor holy,

the car speeds away

into the slim v perspective

that runs right to the water's edge,

i am wet

yet am i blessed

in such a state,

i hum another chorus,

my lap drenched

with tap water and

bits of burst balloon,

and now it's dark

after eight pm in July

when the fireworks go off

from the end of the pier,

where i wanted to be

to make a phone call

under the rocket's red glare.

_____

EVERYTHING'S BEEN RETURNED WHICH WAS OLD

People who are cool are those who don't professionalize their names and become the odious species called "professional celebrity". Johnny Lyndon became a celebrity, famous for being the former Johnny Rotten. Grace Slick is cool because she retired from being a rock star when she realized she was too old too silly singing those old songs about the problems of youth. It seemed to her, shall we say, inauthentic. People who are cool are not, by default, nonconformist or anti-social or any of the other rebellious bullshit that is actually an identity we buy into by corporate marketing departments. Being cool is doing what you want to do, liking what you like, listening and reading and seeing what you want because they truly mean something to you; cool people really have no interest in trying to appear cool. I would ask why are writers for online magazines and pop culture sites so eager to condemn their fellow citizens for not being just like them. The Sex Pistols were the result of clever marketing no less than the Monkees were back in the day. There was an unrepresented generation in the music marketplace and Malcolm Mc Laren, in his fashion, created a product, of which Lyndon was part of, to fulfill a need. Or at least create a "want", as Chomsky would argue. Lyndon bright enough to be aware of the contrived nature of the Pistols, a band that wanted to destroy the machinery that produced manufactured entertainment that was no less manufactured by the same methods and reasoning, but on the cheap. Being a real punk, ie, a habitual jerk, he set out to destroy his meal ticket. He asked if the audience felt cheated, a manner of pulling back the curtain on a variation of the star-maker machinery, but his willingness to expose the hype became an essential part of what became his act (or shtick). He made a living a being the former Johnny Rotten, a low-rent Oscar Wilde. He may have been speaking his truth, and bully, but he wasn’t wit and he wasn’t especially enlightening. 

He was guest VJ on MTV decades ago, post –Rotten and Pill and here he was easing into the one marketable guise he had remaining, the go-to “survivor” of a heady period at the popular culture margins. He was to introduce clips from newer bands and comment briefly when they were done, a negative bon mot before the station cut to one of their endless streams of commercials. After a Jesus and Mary Chain video had played, the image faded and the camera opened up on Lyndon’s constipated visage. “Oh, that was awful. They are so derivative of the Velvet Underground…” I might agree with Lydon if I knew more about the JAMC songbook, but the remark had no impact, no sting, it cut to nothing at all; he seemed bored with his whole act of being the cynical, seen-it-all rock and roll revolutionary who must manage simulacra of disgust to sustain a paycheck. Not hip, not cool. Capitalism wastes nothing, even the shards of the artifice someone has blown up with some subdued version of the truth. Remember Marcuse's idea of "repressive tolerance"? That was the idea that democratic capitalism is so insidious that it has an organic function to nullify the revolutionary potential of various cultural and social upheavals by permitting those ostensible enemies of order full legal expression of their style, their manner, their ideology. The goal is fairly obvious, you negate revolutionary change by allowing those who expose and espouse radical transformation to vent and argue their position and allow the creative expressions they generate to emerge more or less unmolested. Everything we create is transformed into product or material that can be used to manufacture variations of the false utopia we bought into in the first place. Nothing is wasted. The smashed idealism we tossed out is reassembled and given a new coat of paint and then sold to someone else who is trying to trust the authority of their senses. Che, Lenin, Mao, Trotsky and Karl Marx himself adorn t-shirts, mugs, and keychains  manufactured in Free Trade countries at what amounts to slave wages, the rebel-yell tradition of rock and roll is codified and neutered with a Hall of Fame, and what could be instructive criticism for those of us to change our behavior and get involved in the politics of their lives is made irrelevant by being turned into feel-good cynicism suitable for coffee mugs, shirts, greeting cards and witless situation comedies. Johnny Lyndon is a tool, a professional celebrity, and his greatest accomplishment is in creating a generation that had no greater desire than to be professional celebrities as well.  

The whole withering -away- of- the -state endgame in Marxist theory was a pie in the sky, I think, a trope that replaces Christianity's doctrine of Eternal Life in Heaven with a promise that amounts to the same thing. Happiness and fulfillment are forestalled until certain unattainable and unverifiable conditions are met. The transformation is never witnessed as advertised. This seems to be same with how things are sold to customers--you are not perfect or really at ease until you own this. Again, we never really see the transformation of ordinary people into extraordinary ones, but we can witness the accumulation of useless things, received wisdom, dime store attitudes displayed as philosophical distinctions. Being hip or cool, it seems, seems to part of this whole mentality that there is an exclusive club one must pay to join in order to get a glimpse of the heaven they’ve taken out a prescription to. This is the reverse of what being cool was all about, which was living a life that was modulated to not absorb the static, babble and decaying artifices society put upon you, to conduct oneself with a knowledge that horrible violence and obliteration can be visited on you any second and, with knowledge of that, make life meaningful by making authentic choices as to what you want to do and to take responsibility, full claim, to the results (and consequences) of those actions. Creative commitment is what that is called, an element in the overly abstruse doctrines of existentialist thought.

The dean

RobertChristagu, rock and pop music critic for the Village Voice for  37 years before new owners fired him, is  my favorite critic next to Lester Bangs. Bangs was about an emotional connection to the music, and the appeal (and its occasional downfall) became was that how he wrote about it became confessional. This livened up his style but also made it drip with self-pity that was too much to plough through.Bangs in his best moments at the keyboard were the best writer that rock music's odd history of critical discussion has ever had; no one came closer to the giving a language to the emotions a good song can force to the surface, bursting through our hard defenses to keep the insecurities away from public observation. Good writers did that. Christgau is a good writer, but he is not one who moves me to weep so slightly when the subject is Madam George from Van Morrison's Astral Weeks album, something Bangs accomplished with his essay from the Greil Marcus edited anthology of essays Stranded.  Robert Christgau could write, but his interest, his passion was the brainstorm , the making of connections after realizing who influenced who in the long chain of musicians who took from one another and made adopted sounds their own. His was the excitement of trying to determine what was the hood of the music that made him think harder as a citizen and made him want to ease into something more sensuous than work. Christgau is the more traditional critic in that he was interested not in how pop music created from the sources it draws from, but how it creates something new and how that new thing contains new ways of talking about human vanities and virtues and outright vices.  He wasn't , I don't think, a critic interested in the Marxist critical notion that art needs to form a critique of a system and have us imagine a more perfect state, his main concern was in if the music , under its own rules, was relatable, memorable, honest in its fashion, if it gave a compelling account of a moment of experience, sensation, a mood. If there was a critique  mounted in a band's method, fine, the thought, so long as it worked as an element making up the sound that bands are trying to sell us. A political position did not get artists a passing grade. He didn't follow the conventional wisdom of the critical establishment, such as it was: he was too busy looking for an unaffected expression. What he makes him refreshing is that he wears his taste openly, has always refused to see artists as philosophers or priests, and he 's always had a healthy skepticism about those bands and artists who otherwise receive loud and automatic accolades.

DAVID BOWIE, R.I.P

 The biggest problem with David Bowie's music was that his songs sounded nothing alike album to album. Those of us inclined to classify musicians into categories with definitions that sharply defined (and limited) a discussion of an artist's range had a hard time with Bowie, who didn't play their game. Bowie was his own man, listened, read, and viewed what it was he liked in the broad spectrum of the arts and literature and, surely, skillfully, often brilliantly, brought the elements to bear on the music created, which was mesmerizing, challenging, subtly , artfully layered with a crosscurrents of musical influence. His genius, above all the other talents he possessed, was as a synthesizer. Apart from the majority of other rock musicians who took from a variety of sources but seldom rose above the feeling of being merely clever and, Bowie, in fact, produced something new. Rock, rhythm and blues, folk, Kurt Weil, science fiction, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Philip Glass, Philly soul,musical theatre, Blue Note-style jazz, the proto-punk of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges--these were sources that caught Bowie's ear and which he brought together in relationships that, in their best expression, gave us a stirring, unsettling, daunting form of pop music that was of itself, a stand-alone body of work that influenced artists to come. There seemed to be nothing he wouldn't try, and the results were not always his most captivating work. I wasn't a hardcore fan either, and was, in fact, annoyed by what I regarded as his pretentious manner. He seemed, in some sense, an eclectic master-of-none. But although not an instrumental virtuoso nor a composer/lyricist of dazzling harmonic and poetic gifts, he radiated the aura of the divinely inspired amateur, the savant who could be figured out how matters worked musically and theatrically. He applied what he knew, bits and pieces and whole swaths of information about varying aesthetic principles and the styles that fall within the standards, and composed something unique. New sounds emerged, new ways of applying the eternally persistent rhythm of popular music took hold. I remember a caffeine-fueled bull session in the Mesa College Cafeteria in the early to mid-Seventies when I offered to the late Reader music critic Steve Esmedina, a Bowie partisan, that the future Thin White Duke hadn't had an original musical idea so far in his career. Blubbo, his preferred endearment, didn't argue the point, stating smartly that what's fascinating , exciting , worth talking about in hipster circles and beyond was his particular genius as a synthesizer of genres and emerging trends and taking command of the materials like any true artist would, deconstructing, reshaping, fusing styles and sensibilities together into new kinds of sounds, the influences intact and vital-- Broadway musicals, hard rock, funk and disco grooves, experimental electronics, William Burroughs and Bertolt Brecht--while having Bowie's characteristic imprint on it all. My smart ass assertion was false from the start, since what David Bowie was creating fusion music in the truest sense of what "fusion" is, taking different elements together and coming up with something new, previously unseen or unheard. I could go for the obvious Miles Davis comparison that's lurking in the wings of this career praise, but instead I'll stay with the deservedly much-discussed element of style and fashion in the late artist's work and say that he was one of those creatures radiating the personality that could try on any outlandish article of fashion from any designer's rack and wind up owning the style, making it his; something of great value was added when he liked a style and wanted to work with it. 

The famous quote attributed to Ritchie Blackmore about accusations that he stole guitar riffs from black American blues artists that "the amateur borrows, the professional steals" is instructive. The amateur treats what they've borrowed with too much gentleness and respect, as though they might drop the expensive China they've dared lay a finger on. The results are a species of gutless pretentiousness that glutted an awful lot of art rock in the post -Sgt. Pepper years, music by those who hadn't an idea what they were doing nor the imagination (or nerve)  to pretends they did. The thief likes something and just takes it without permission, absorbs into his or her being until it becomes part of their nervous system , adding their own licks, reshuffling the influx of music styles heard , assimilated, until there is a sound where constituent parts of rock drums, jazz keyboards, atonal guitar skronk, horn funk and Euro serial music emerges, a sound that hadn't roamed over the airwaves or blasted the clubs and concert halls of until the moment when the Thief, the absconder of musical forms, decides that he or she is finished in the creation and releases into the world, fresh, loud, moving as no music before it.This is what Bowie had done, loving art enough to abuse the formalisms that defined the length and limitations of a genre and make them do more than most had assumed possible. We are living in a world of music that has been formed in large measure by Bowie's decades-long search for new music he wanted to work with. But living long enough to know better has its benefits, certainly, in that I found myself liking quite a bit of what Bowie was putting out. If the whole Spiders From Mars period seemed and arch, overwrought and lumpy collection of influences associated by force of will rather than inspiration, inspiration came soon afterward; the songs became looser, his choice of collaborators was unexpected and gave us music that was unlike that we'd heard before, his sense of what styles were emerging was always ahead of the curve. Best of all, he was one of those who could not just bring unlike elements together; rather he fused them in the true meaning of the word "fuse", he made something new, unique, unlike anything else. Bowie was pretentious to a degree, but his, after all, was a career of making the what he imagined become real through music. He was an artist, a master of artifice, a man who , though revealing little in the way of self-revelation or even an arguable view of the world listeners could construe as a philosophy, Bowie's tales of skewed characters relating the consequences of their life in a world malformed by each one of the seven deadly sins had a lasting, lingering effect all the same. He wrote for effect, and the effect was profound. Even so, his music had many more hits than misses and even the lesser efforts, the slightest of his concepts, demanded attention and truly did not bore, the cardinal sin any popular artist can commit. It is Bowie's greatest work we will be playing for the years to come, the decades yet to pass; his influence will be felt in much of the pop music yet to be written, sung, recorded and sung again by young men and women looking for a hero. His influence, I think, is nearly as extensive as that of Elvis, of the Beatles, of Dylan. He prepared popular music for the 21st century in more ways than I can count at the moment. His loss is a major one. RIP.

Gore Vidal, Anyone? | The Weekly Standard

Gore Vidal, Anyone? | The Weekly Standard: 'via Blog this'

1. Esteemed literary biographer Jay Parini has  published his anticipated work on the late novelist/playwright/essayist and gadfly Gore Vidal , Empire of Self  . The book, we are correct to assume , is a nuanced and well researched story of a brilliant and complex writer who, while viewed sympathetically by Parani, is given, all the same, a warts and all treatment. A man of prodigious verbal gifts and frightful intellect and attendant wit,he was a mass of bad habits, bad faith, duplicity, opportunism and ,not surprisingly, a writer supremely engrossed in the pursuit of his own needs, desires, feuds. The title more or less gives away that bit of what is actually an engrossing story of a remarkable, if problematic artist,, but that seems to be the case as biographies of our greatest artists, poets, philosophers and politicians continue to come out; everyone great person's closet of skeletons gets air out sooner or later.

Not surprising,the he conservative The Weekly Standard  takes the  opportunity in their review of Jay Parini's biography of the late author Gore Vidal to ask a question they've been dying to put out there for decades: will the reliable acerbic scourge of the American Right Wing be remembered, if at all , more as a minor league celebrity irrelevant beyond his time than he would as a writer? Now is a convenient time for them to put it out there and attempt to influence the collective thinking about Vidal-as-author. Not surprisingly, Parini's biography highlights a problematic figure in Vidal, someone who , though gifted with fierce intellect, quick wit and an imagination that often times approached genius, was a self-obsessed , vindictive, cold and generally nasty personality who was likewise beset with foul combinations of alcoholism, paranoia and a penchant for conspiracy theories that were absurd on the face of it. 

His is the case with many great artists who die after a long life of deeds and misdeeds and, certainly , a good amount of work. Vidal on his best days never rose above the station of being a human being cursed and/or blessed with conflicting impulses he indulged with equal fervor. But DH Lawrence said it best when he advised that in the art of fiction, at least, one should "trust the tale, not the teller." To that end, Vidal's novels are uneven, as are the bodies of work of most writers I've followed who are/were prolific in their imaginative out put, but Vidal's is the the case where there is enough solid narratives , invention and courage that his standing as a good,smart,challenging read are is rather firmly cemented ."Burr","Creation", "1876". "The Pillar and the City", ,"Lincoln"...it turns into a respectable list, very respectable. Although generally well  reviewed as a novelist for most of his career and someone who was able to land a good number of his books on the New York Times Best Seller Lists, he has, I believe, been given the short shrift in critical estimation for his fictional work. Like his friend/nemesis Norman Mailer , who had been cursed with the left handed compliment that his journalism was more brilliant than his novels, Vidal was subjected to the dismissive summary that while he was a literary essayist of very real genius (a view I won't argue with),his novels, from his boldest and most daunting pieces to his less worthy pot boilers, lacked the poetic grace that marks novelists of established  greatness. There's a habit among too many of our critics to mistake grandiloquence with eloquence, prolixity with sophistication. 

Vidal's genius in his strongest fictions was to take an impossible amount of historical information,subject it to imaginative reinterpretation or filtered through a handily devised set of "what if" devices, and to present a counter mythology , full of greed, ambition, malice, power seeking in a tragic battle among different parties  who believed they were struggling to achieve the Greater Good. Vidal's prose ,while not overtly ornate--it was refreshing that there was a serious novelist during the period who didn't feel the need to try and out-box either Hemingway or Nabokov in the art of the sentence--was vivid all the same, with with quick character sketches, rapidly but carefully exposition, subtly advanced conflicts and unexpected turns of fortune. He belongs , perhaps , to another tradition altogether, a European tilt toward the Novelist of Ideas. His kin are Voltaire (Candide), Sartre (Nausea), Aldous Huxely (Brave New World), Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus). Too late for the Old School, the nineteenth century writers he doubtlessly would have felt comfortable being included with, too early for the mix and max aesthetic and strategies of the post-modrernists of Pynchon, DeLillo and David Foster Wallace would come after him. My guess is that there is a generation of younger critics who will make the case for the best of Vidal's art.

He had his failed experiments, his mean and grating satires, his half baked efforts that seemed no more than outlines messily assembled in the vaguest resemblance; those will be forgotten, of course, and the best work will remain. He is simply too good , too fascinating, too much a part of his era to not be read, taught, debated for decades to come. Much the same is true of his favorite feuding partner, Norman mailer,for whom there is yet a new groundswell of interest in the actual writing he did. The same will happen for Vidal who, though sadly and seriously flawed and perhaps not the man you'd want to have over for dinner , deserves respect for the genuine seriousness he did bring to his work both as novelist and essayist. I will read Parini's bio and will again ask myself the question if one needs to be a self involved monster of a sort in order to be a writer on the level of greatness Vidal often times achieved in his life.