blogocentrism

Make It Anew

2012-01-07T17:05:00.005-05:00

Get back to where you once belonged. A-bloggin’ we shall go. It’s a New Year, and Blogocentrism is being revived to offset, somewhat, the long withdrawing roar of my opinionated pronouncements, the efforts to get 'on record' (or on web) a lifetime of critical aperçus before, like the song says, 'the man says it’s time to go.' Or maybe it’s just to comment upon the days as they pass, to make an online scrapbook of whatever comes to mind.

I will make the effort, I hope. It shouldn’t be too much to ask: finding something worth posting about a few times a week. Some days there might just be links to something else on the Web. To let clips and links speak for themselves is also a kind of commentary, isn’t it?

Today is the 93rd anniversary of the birth of Robert Duncan, an American poet from San Francisco. Here’s a link to his bio on poets.org. It’s also the 40th anniversary of the death of John Berryman, who ended his life by jumping from a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, at 57. So let’s think about poets.

Here’s the text of one of Duncan’s poems:

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
by Robert Duncan

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

There are many lines here that glow with the force of the kind of lyricism Duncan prizes: “whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded”—“a place of first permission,” a meadow, “as if it were a scene made-up by the mind.” Poetry is conceived as a most deliberate game of make-believe, a willful reading of the world according to the light of the imagination—“a given property of the mind.” When that light fails, things get very dark indeed.

And here’s a song by Australian singer/songwriter Nick Cave that, among other things, commemorates Berryman’s despairing plunge, even as it suggests that the author is an absence behind the words that always eludes us—unless we find the presence in the words themselves.

We Call Upon The Author

Finally, a favorite bit of Berryman--Dream Song 1--where the lines “empty grows every bed,” so soon after the elation “all at the top” of the sycamore, feel as inevitable, as soothingly eternal, as the ocean wearing the land away.

Keep the faith, with hope and charity.

Whatcha Readin?, 11

2011-03-08T14:23:00.003-05:00

15. John Ashbery: Selected Poems (American, 1985).

Let’s finish one thing we started: my list of '15 Works That Stayed With You.' If you recall, I limited myself to things I read before turning 30. I’m cheating a little with this volume of Ashbery for, even though it was published four years before I reached that age, I didn’t buy a copy till 1991. I’d read some of the stuff in it earlier, of course. My first encounter with Ashbery was around 1981, when I first read the Self-Portrait volume. I didn’t pick him up again until April Galleons (1987), the summer I turned 30, and it’s because that book made such a big impression on me, at the end of the period of impressionable youth that I’ve been using these posts to recall, that I feel I must include Ashbery in the count.

Perhaps the book I should list here is April Galleons, which is not included in this volume, but, if it were, here’s my list of the poems from AG that should be here: “Adam Snow,” “Finnish Rhapsody,” “Alone in the Lumber Business,” “Vaucanson,” “Unreleased Movie,” “Letters I Did Or Did Not Get,” “Song: ‘Mostly Places…’,” “Sighs and Inhibitions,” “Someone You Have Seen Before,” “Becalmed on Strange Waters,” “Winter Weather Advisory,” “Never to Get it Really Right,” “Wet are the Boards,” “Bilking the Statues,” and “April Galleons.” There, and that’s my contribution to the Ashbery selection process.

It’s taken me so long to get around to writing this post because I don’t really know what I want to say about Ashbery qua Ashbery. So I might as well put the impression he made on me as a reader and writer into context. The poet, after Berryman’s Dream Songs which I’ve already commented on, who took me over for awhile, in the period, 1979-83, when I lived in Philadelphia and read poetry at various poetry gatherings, was Wallace Stevens. I read the Collected Poems while a nightguard for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and remember that, for the first time since my immersion in Willis Barnstone’s fine anthology Modern European Poets, I found an American poet who seemed to have something in common with poets in that collection, which I greatly admired. Simply put: I didn’t like most verse written in English in the 20th century, and still don’t. I preferred translations into English, at that time. But it’s interesting to me that I’d read Ashbery’s Self-Portrait before I wandered into Stevens and I didn’t feel that same kindredness to the Europeans there, though I would say now that one reason Ashbery makes this list is because I do see him in that line. Certainly more so than anyone with as long a career who came after Stevens.

Next month Ashbery’s translations of Rimbaud’s Illuminations will appear, and I’m eager. For there, I suspect, I will find much occasion to reflect on what these two poets—the first and the last poets on my list, respectively—say to one another. Rimbaud, I’ve always felt, made reading Ashbery possible, or, to put it another way, Ashbery’s investment in Rimbaud, to whatever extent that exists or has always existed, is something I’ve intuited in some way I haven’t clearly defined. It may be too obvious to be worth stating, on one level, but on another level—“where the meanings are,” as Saint Emily would say—it could be the factor that explains much about what I want poetry to be.

That I’m hardly alone in recognizing the worth of Ashbery’s poetry is a staggering understatement. The man is about as fêted as a poet can be, and still be deemed “incomprehensible” and the like. He was born the same year as my mother and that makes him, in many respects, the true parental elder in my reading. As a writer, my agon with him, to use Bloom’s term, started with the recognition (reading AG) that here was verse in English I could find delight in. And that sense of delight in verse—which had been eclipsed, mostly, when I looked into contemporary lit journals—re-animated me. Which is to say it inspired me to write derivative verse, the kind of stuff we were fond of calling “Ashbery-lite” when I helped weed the slush-piled submissions to the old Yale Younger Poets Series (vor Glück). I got stuck in the wake of Ashbery for most of the ‘90s it seems to me, and why not? After AG came Flow Chart (1991) and then Hotel Lautréamont (1992), and then And The Stars Were Shining (1994)—the man, in his ‘60s, was at the top of his game—and then all those books I recently (in 2010) got around to reading: Wakefulness (1998), Your Name Here (2000), Chinese Whispers (2002), Where Shall I Wander (2005), A Worldly Country (2007), Planisphere (2009). I still haven’t gotten to Can You Hear, Bird? (1995) or Girls on the Run (1999). I won’t say I’ve ever parted company with his manner as, simply, the best way to write poetry when the purpose of the endeavor is to find out what will happen if one chooses to write in lines.

Is that too humble a task for poetry? Not in our age, I’d insist. It may be that poetry should be exhortation, wisdom literature, should be declaimed at public events and functions, should narrate, should woo the beloved or berate the beloved, should commemorate the dead, should praise works of art or acts of virtue or valor, should be used to sell life-enhancing products and to involve readers in life-changing projects, but, if so, it should also be used to involve the reader in process. What process? The process Stevens described as “the act of the mind finding what will suffice.” And if becoming a novelist means, as Henry James claimed, becoming “one on whom nothing is lost,” then becoming a poet means becoming one for whom nothing is not verse. Ashbery’s nothing is Stevens’ “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” It is poetry as the dance of the mind among the measures provided by words.

Which isn’t to say that Ashbery never has an “object” on view—such as Parmigianino’s famous painting—but rather that what the “view” is will always be tempered by lyric discourse, a lyricism that accepts one main dictum: words are never an end in themselves, they are always a provisional field, a range, and in that range there are any number of moves, the only condition is whether or not the language, the words, the terms, move to the same tune, reply to the same impetus, create a chain of thought. I say this not as a reader of Ashbery, primarily, but as a writer in the wake of him. Last spring I set myself the task of writing “in response” to some of those latter volumes by JA I mentioned above (I think it was Wakefulness and Your Name Here primarily) and what I produced, called “Metro Lace,” is simply me doing (from 9 April to 2 June) what I’ve just described. Then in August I turned 51. Am I done with the lesson of Ashbery?

Perhaps, but if so I expect that Ashbery’s Illuminations will be an epilogue I won’t want to miss.

As to this volume of Selected: here are the poems Harold Bloom assigned when I sat-in on his class my first semester at Yale as a post-doc: “Soonest Mended,” “Parergon,” “S-P in a Convex Mirror,” “Wet Casements,” “Syringa,” “As We Know,” “Tapestry,” “The Absence of a Noble Presence,” “At North Farm.”

And here are the titles I made insistent marks by: “The Grapevine,” “Illustration,” “‘How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher…’,” “The Ecclesiast,” “A Blessing in Disguise,” “Clepsydra,” “Soonest Mended,” “Decoy,” “Sortes Vergilianae,” “The System,” “Grand Galop,” “Mixed Feelings,” “S-P in a Convex Mirror,” “Pyrography,” “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” “Houseboat Days,” “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name,” From “Litany,” “This Configuration,” “Their Day,” “Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are,” and, especially, “A Wave.”

New Year? Hear, Hear

2011-03-07T14:57:00.000-05:00

Did anyone see a new year around here? Not me, apparently. I haven’t posted here since mid-December. Without going into the reasons for that—I picture William H. Macy in Fargo shaking his head and saying, “but there are personal matters, you see, personal matters, they needn’t…”—let’s just say that January (the month with record snowfalls in a single month and for the month of January, in CT, I’m told) was pretty much a blur, and February? Well, I have the feeling that there was some kind of little anteroom to the blitz of January and I’m only now realizing we’re on the other side of it, what with lion-winds and big bluster and the light lingering longer in the sky come evening. It’s March. Growl.

So, just to show that I haven’t been a mole in the ground, here are links to things I’m rather proud of having tossed off: First of all, there’s a review of historian Sean Wilentz's book on Dylan and his context; another on One with Others, C.D. Wright’s latest book, a very involving read; and a review of local poet Charles Douthat’s first volume of poetry, Blue for Oceans, published by a local fledgling imprint, New Haven Review Books, and of course I wish them all the best. Then there are a few theater reviews at the website of NHR: one on Simon Gray's Old Masters, with Sam Waterston as Bernard Berenson; another on a revival of Angus Wilson’s The Piano Lesson at the Yale Rep (where it debuted in its original run with Samuel L. Jackson in the cast), another about an avant-garde troupe from Austin, TX, called Rude Mechs; and, most lately, a review of a collection of reviews and essays by the deftly dis-ing poetry critic William Logan, a book review that, in some ways, might inaugurate a new stage in this biz of blogging and critting, at least to the extent that it points me toward something a bit more reflective. Why write? you ask. And why write criticism? Good questions, both. Logan has his reasons and I might have mine too.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.--R.W. Emerson

THE CDS: Syd Barrett

2010-12-19T22:33:00.001-05:00

I’ve only got one Syd Barrett solo CD: The Madcap Laughs (1970). The other one is called Barrett. Both albums were released in 1970, though Madcap sessions began shortly after Barrett ceased to record with Pink Floyd, in 1968. Both albums were released together, by the time I was aware of them in the wake of the huge success of Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and the sudden interest in all things Floyd, as a double album set. I was about equally familiar with both since I had them on a cassette together and probably still do somewhere, but I always preferred Madcap because it's more dicey.

Syd, as you all no doubt know, was the inspired composer for the early Pink Floyd (“Arnold Layne”;“See Emily Play”; “Bike”; “The Gnome”; “Flaming”; “Jugband Blues”), as well as a legendary performer known for his idiosyncratic approach to all he did, particularly his guitar-playing. His contribution to Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), the band’s debut, assures him a place in the front ranks of the annals of psychedelic pop. But psychedelia was a short-lived phase, even if, to my mind, a delightful one, and when it came time for the Floyd to record their second album, only slightly less psychedelic, Syd was more or less undependable. Instability having to do with (take your pick): those genetic problems we blame everything on these days; or the hallucinogens he was so fond of and the psychosis the same have a tendency to bring on in impressionable types; or the nature of genius (or pressures of fame) as being a burdensome gift that can cause massive hemorrhages of other aspects of the psyche (a familiar, heroizing tale whereby madness is the sign of true genius, etc.).

How out there did Syd get anyway? I have no way of knowing, but something along the lines of Withnail and I seems suggested by the stories told; judging by this record, he was in some region where the usual conventions of professionalism were no longer a functioning concern. But does that make the album amateurish? Not quite. It’s a bit like therapy, it’s a bit like a vanity project, but it’s also the kind of thing that cements the notion of Syd as utterly unique in all his plaintive oddity. There are songs on here that I wouldn’t want any other way: “Terrapin,” “Octopus,” “Dark Globe,” “Here I Go,” “Late Night,” and the lovely melancholic setting to music of James Joyce’s poem “Golden Hair.” But there are other places where better stuff wouldn’t hurt. According to what I’ve read, the sessions were a chore for those working with Syd due to his way of going about it, and when his former band mates Gilmour and Waters stepped in to help they did so in a bit of a rush, being busy guys with a band and all. Anyway, Syd is Syd and no one else is or was. He died in 2006.

Please, please, please lift a hand
I'm only a person

with Eskimo chain
I tattooed my brain all the way...
Won't you miss me?
Wouldn't you miss me at all?

--Syd Barrett, “Dark Globe”

WHATCHA READIN?, 10

2010-12-18T22:44:00.000-05:00

14. Gabriel García Márquez: Cien años de soledad (Spanish, 1967); One Hundred Years of Solitude (English, 1970), Columbian.

It’s taken me a long time to get around to writing this entry, primarily because, though I recognize GGM’s novel as one of the few undeniably great novels published in my lifetime, I can’t say I really grasp this novel, nor can I claim the kind of personal meaning that was easy to describe for others on this list.

I first read the novel sometime in the late ‘80s, after GGM had received the Nobel Prize (1982) and after I’d read Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981; English, 1983), and after I’d begun to study Art History and Comparative Literature at the University of Delaware, living again in the state and town I grew up in. And I think all those factors play a part in dividing me a bit from the experience of reading this novel: I read it from a sense of duty as much as curiosity, GGM being the first Nobel winner of the period of my adult life that I already had some interest in. So there was a definite intention to read someone who had become internationally famous and well-respected. It was also the case that, as a student of literature, I wanted to read works that enlarged my knowledge of the tradition—at that point, the only Spanish-language writers I’d read were a few poets, notably Pablo Neruda. GGM represented a step outside of the parochialism of reading only English-language contemporaries, but also represented a recognition on my part that here was a living master of the novel. Otherwise I might begin to think that Proust was the be-all and end-all.

But more than my haziness with regard to the time when I first read Solitude my haziness with regard to the novel itself stymies me. I believe I’ve read the novel four times, and one of those was aloud to my daughter, and yet I can’t say I have a clear knowledge of what transpires in this book. While I’m reading it, I can recall that I’ve been there before, but that’s no help. I don’t feel I could enumerate its plot, its major scenes, its dominant themes. What’s more, I don’t want to. What the oft-used phrase “magical realism” means to me with regard to this novel is that the action of the novel is real enough while one is reading it, the way dreams are, but that it also magically disappears upon “waking.”

One enters the story with an unflagging faith in its narrator, whose voice seems to know so well, and indeed to love so fondly, the characters whose tales he must tell, but trusting that voice and the events it unfolds also means not simply the suspension of disbelief, it means a suspension of the will to interpret, to record, to make sense. More than any other novel I can think of, one reads Solitude in a trance, letting it, like a dream, unspool across the screen of one’s mind, while accepting its slightly fantastic but incredibly vivid world, a world that comes to fruition with the unmistakeable odor of the New World of Latin America in a fascinating interplay with the Old World of Europe, but which of course overturns that distinction by presenting the great age, indeed the ancient mysteries and strengths, of a world much older than the colonizing, modernizing imperatives of Spain. Which is to say also, for me personally, that the indigenous elements of Columbia as well as the Spanish importations are equally foreign, equally alienating, as I have no connection with the respective cultures, not even through the mediation of Spanish-language classes or courses in Spanish literature.

GGM’s novel, in which I can catch fitful traces of Faulknerian yarn-spinning and audacious underpinnings of family sagas and ethnic, almost tribal, associations of blood and soil, together with whiffs of the surrealist and symbolist modernism I find in the Spanish-language poets I know of, resonates in my mind as a kind of hothouse transplant, an exotic flower in my predominantly northern European mindset, and for that very reason it has to be on this list. The notion of fiction as a waking dream exists nowhere better illustrated. GGM’s accomplishment—one that makes me think as well of Beckett, Kafka, Moby Dick—is to provide a personal mythos (meaning both the telling and system of the world told) that seems to pre-exist the fiction it exists in. In other words, Solitude is so imaginatively convincing that I can really only think about it when I’m in it. I can’t discuss it; I can only revisit it and watch it happen to my mind again. The novel strikes me as a truly unique performance, unrepeatable and unforgettable, but also uncanny in its elusiveness. It is a lyric novel, perhaps the best possible example of what that might mean.

FALL Y'ALL

2010-11-04T15:06:00.003-04:00

Halloween has been and gone and dead leaves are plentiful on the streets while those still on the trees are flaring at their best.

I’ve been up to much less than I should, but I may as well do the roll call of some things of mine that have shown up online, elsewhere than blogocentrism.

First of all, here’s an essay on David Shields’ book Reality Hunger, an effort to think past the rather passé nature of today’s “literary fiction,” but the problem for me was how backward-looking it was. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been ready since I was a teen for a “return to modernism,” and that’s what Shields is sort of calling for without ever putting it in those terms, which is what bugs me. He wants to make it all about reality TV, hip hop sampling and memoir-fever, but when the dust clears his main gripe is that fiction as it's practiced is too boring and not venturesome enough. It’s just that he seems to see that asking lit fic to be more high art and poetic is an even bigger dead end, these dayz, and no doubt he’s right there. Anyway, enjoy.

And here’s a bit of a follow-up, a review of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City which I enjoyed more than his two previous novels I’ve read, even read this one twice, but that’s probably because this one seems somewhat aimed at my demographic.

Then there are a few theater reviews I’m pleased with because they speak about some interesting theatrical experiences in New Haven: one is on a production of Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice in the Yale School of Drama, the other is on a revisiting of Edward Albee’s by now venerable A Delicate Balance at the Yale Rep. And I’m still hitting the Yale Cabaret each weekend; here are write ups on some of the stand-outs: Far Away; Vaska Vaska, Glöm; The Wedding Reception (Chekhov).

The most interesting book I’ve read of late is Alain Badiou’s The Century, which I hope to get around to writing about soon. And maybe I’ll get around to saying something about The Social Network before I forget I saw it. Right now I’m into Zizek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, which is also pretty sharp, for the most part. And I’m just starting to get into Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death, for a review I’m supposed to do by Nov. 14th.

Meanwhile, we have fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf.

15 ALBUMS: 2.

2010-10-01T00:35:00.005-04:00

2. Who’s Next—The Who (released July, 1971; first heard August, 1971) On the cover, The Who have just had a piss at a monolith. Who’s next? They saucily inquire. We can make just about anything be that monolith, but I like to think of it as the view that The Who were not The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World, but that The Stones held that coveted spot. Maybe they did, but in 1971 I wasn’t convinced of that. In 1971, when I got this record for my 12th birthday, The Who kicked everyone’s ass – or pissed on everyone, if you like – and that’s that. I hadn’t graduated beyond AM radio at the time, and the song that leapt off the radio and colonized my little pre-adolescent brain was “Won’t Get Fooled Again” – first in its shortened, single version, then in the long version that AM radio would occasionally play (making me have to get the album), with the long (in the land of 3 minute songs) Moog run that sounds like a keyboard solo from Kubrick’s (speaking of monoliths) HAL. And the way that percolating sound is punctuated by Keith Moon bashing away, then Daltrey’s full-throated scream, and the lyrics, sounding tossed off but undeniably right in their wise-guy shrug: “I’ll move myself and my family aside / if we happen to be left half-alive / I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky / for I know that the hypnotized never lie.” Townshend and co. weren’t just pissing on things, they were giving things (like the counter-culture, to say nothing of the slavish material culture that had become the driving wheel of pop-rock, or, ok ok, had always been the driving wheel of pop-rock, only now, more so, and of course the infamous military-industrial complex) a rather enthusiastic finger. “And the parting on the left is now the parting on the right / and the beards have all grown longer overnight.” Not only a comment on fads and fashions, the “left,” “right” switch noted the passing from LBJ to Nixon (1968), and the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970) that would bequeath Thatcher to the Brits. And the length of those radical beards must suggest all the thoughtful pondering that would no doubt give us much theory but little gain.

Then there were the other tracks that sometimes got airplay and which later became unshakeable staples of “Classic Rock” radio: “Baba O’Riley,” “Bargain,” occasionally “Behind Blue Eyes,” the latter a misanthropic ode that I just loved to maunder along with (despite the fact that I have brown eyes). “No one knows what it’s like to feel these feelings / like I do, and I beg you / if my fist clenches crack it open / before I use it and lose my cool / and if I smile, tell me some bad news / before I laugh and act like a fool.” It’s an anthem for wanting to be left alone, and offers the paradoxical glory of exulting in someone else’s version of what it’s like to be persecuted by one’s own uniqueness. And that was something, I realize now, that drew me to a lot of the music that I loved in my teens and early twenties: the voicing of an “include me out” status, the sense that the singer had seen enough to know that motives were always questionable, that love would always fall short of ideal, that grand causes made for grand losses, that fellowship was usually in the name of something that would not endure, that sex, at its best, always required a bit of the blues, that the methods (and sometimes substances) you used to be “free” became traps in themselves, and being cool with all that was about the best you could hope for.

Pete Townshend, who gave us the inspiring story of the deaf, dumb and blind pinball phenomenon who gains a following only to be destroyed and denounced by his disciple/fans, clearly had a chip or two on his shoulder, but on this album he put his irked spirit to the test and churned out some of his best tunes, and the mighty Glyn Johns (all hail the “Glyn John method for recording drums”!) got it all on tape with that amazing crispness and layeredness that still takes my breath away at times – like the descending drumfalls at the close of “Bargain,” or the piano that suddenly comes plunking in at the end of “Song is Over.” And “Baba” is one of those truly great opening blasts. In fact I think a given of most of the albums on this “15” list will boast major opening songs and definitive closing songs (here it’s “Won’t Get Fooled”). And don't forget silent John Entwhistle's harrowing hard rocker "My Wife." This album is what the early ‘70s should be remembered for and as, sez me.

The song is over
I'm left with only tears
I must remember
Even if it takes a million years.
--Peter Townshend, "The Song is Over"

15 ALBUMS: 1.

2010-09-06T21:06:00.005-04:00

1. Highway 61 Revisited--Bob Dylan (released August 1965, first heard spring 1970). At that point, 1970, all the Dylan I knew was on the first Greatest Hits album. The only song the two albums have in common is "Like a Rolling Stone," which had briefly become an object of fascination as I tried to get all the words just by listening to it over and over again. When my older brother brought this album into the house, he called me in, mainly to play "Desolation Row," a song he'd heard on late night FM radio and had been talking about since. First he played "Tombstone Blues," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." I wasn't even 11 yet, and I was getting tired. Dylan's music, by the early '70s, had been superseded, in aural presence and hooks and power chords, for anyone who had been listening, as we mostly did, to hard rock or pop-rock. This wasn't pop or rock, really. It was some weird hybrid derived from folk and it sounded (as indeed it was) designed for mono playback rather than stereo. Which is to say, it seemed pretty dated already. And yet.

Now it's forty years later and they're about to release the mono version on CD; I've bought this album on vinyl and on CD and on SACD, and I never tire of it. That datedness has come to be an immense part of its charm, partly because of the aura derived from the mid-60s as a time when mono music was still made. And that era boasts an aura, these days, in part because of the albums Dylan released then. Indeed, but for some notable exceptions, the AM radio music of the era isn't what matters, except as nostalgia. This album threw a wrench into what pop and rock'n'roll could be in the name of a hipster subculture I knew very little about when I was 10, but there it was, filling the room. And something changed. Because Dylan, on the cover, was so cleary not a rock star. And he wasn't a folksinger any more either. Whatever he was, he seemed to know it would be unprecedented for a lot of people.

Between '72 and '75, when Blood on the Tracks was released, I got to know most of the Dylan back catalogue and this album only increased its fascination. It so clearly was a definitive statement -- the rock songs on its predecesssor, Bringing It All Back Home, were mostly throwaways, and its dense and drugged-out successor, Blonde on Blonde, though it showed progress in making an entire album boast a dominant sound, lacked the sheer verbal brilliance of this album, haunting, comic, surreal, sneering. "Desolation Row" never fails to put me in a trance and somewhere in there -- among the indelible images, the clever phrases, the articulate guitar fills -- is that feeling I learned to call "poetry" though maybe that's a word too literary in connotation. Maybe it's better just to call it "the dream." Every song on this album takes me away, and from every one of them I could quote a line or two that does it for me. Sums up some state of mind or an attitude or a way of articulating one's status in a memorable, take no prisoners phrase. And for sheer delivery, this is still the Dylan album, the singing, as the liner notes say, "exercises in tonal breath control" that bend and rasp and enunciate as though, in the weird scenes Bob finds himself in, only diction can get you through.

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the doorknob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
--Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"

15 ALBUMS

2010-09-06T12:53:00.006-04:00

Originating in answer to one of those Facebook memes that go the rounds, this list of "15 albums that left a major impression" picks up on something that has put a snag in my cataloguing of the good ol' CD collection: my preference for chronological rather than alphabetical listings, and an even greater tendency, perhaps, to autobiographical sequencing. In other words, it would be more interesting to me to go through the collection as I have it arranged, from the earliest music -- Dylan and The Beatles (classical and jazz are in separate ghettos, respectively) -- to the most recent releases, which right now are Tom Petty's MOJO and The New Pornographers' Together, or, as this list does, in order of my first hearing of and immersion in a given album. Granted, not all LPs or CDs lend themselves to that sort of thing, many are acquired more or less "by the way" -- you don't remember when you got them or how often you heard them, you got them to fill out the collection or to give a listen to other work by someone who released something major, so you're just filling in the gaps, hoping lightning will strike twice. If not, no harm done, but there the album sits, not, as they say, "fully absorbed."

These 15 are not only fully absorbed, they are touchstones, lodestar albums I steer my creaky ship by. They all burned their respective tracks into my brain before I turned thirty, which I think is the only way to really count for "major impression" status. There are lots of things I got to know after that landmark age, but, since this is rock music we're talking about, I'm aware that most of that is by people my age or younger, and when that becomes the case, you can speak of what the best of "your generation" is, and what the best of the younger generation is, but it's not likely to leave the same kind of mark. As to the few albums that my elders have released that might rival something on this list, well, that would be yet another list I suppose, of second or third acts.

1. Highway 61 Revisited--Bob Dylan (released August, 1965; my first hearing, spring 1970)

2. Who's Next--The Who (released July, 1971; first heard August, 1971)

3. Exile on Main Street--The Rolling Stones (released May, 1972; first heard summer 1972)

4. Zuma--Neil Young with Crazy Horse (released Nov., 1975; first heard spring 1977)

5. Vintage Violence--John Cale (released March, 1970; first heard fall 1977)

6. Marquee Moon--Television (released Feb., 1977; first heard Dec., 1977)

7. Astral Weeks--Van Morrison (released Nov., 1968; first heard spring 1978)

8. New Skin for the Old Ceremony--Leonard Cohen (released August, 1974; first heard summer 1979)

9. Get Happy!--Elvis Costello and The Attractions (released Feb., 1980; first heard Feb., 1980)

10. Remain in Light--Talking Heads (released Oct., 1980; first heard Oct., 1980)

11. London Calling--The Clash (released Dec., 1979; first heard winter 1981)

12. Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)--Brian Eno (released Nov., 1974; first heard winter 1983)

13. Fables of the Reconstruction--R.E.M. (released June, 1985; first heard June, 1985)

14. Rain Dogs--Tom Waits (released Sept., 1985; first heard spring 1986)

15. Honky Tonkin'--Mekons (released 1987; first heard fall 1987)

WHERE WAS I?

2010-07-18T16:07:00.000-04:00

Seems I've been missing in action online of late. It happens. I was indeed away from home for three weeks in June which probably explains my lack of posting in that month, even though I had internet during that time. Could it be that blogocentrism is an at-home proposition? Probably.

Being at home at the moment means sitting in heat. And that's been too much the case this month, another excuse for avoiding online life, I guess.

But I see my last appearance was on the 24th of May, and it does surprise me that I managed that even. Fact is, from April 9th till June 2nd I was mainly preoccupied with regular composition of a long poem that began simply as free free-versing but eventually extended to five parts with a variety of forms. With the provisional title 'Metro Lace,' it's 79 typed pages, over 18,500 words, about 3,761 lines. What will become of it I don't know, but in between those dates I was spending most of my time wandering around in what I hoped was some kind of receptive state. It's not a narrative, it's not an autobiographical sketch, but it is a stream-of-consciousness -- in a manner of speaking. Maybe it's more accurate to say it simply is a manner of speaking -- because 'stream-of-consciousness' seems to imply that it's a rendering of what's going through my mind, the way a journal might be, for instance. But it's not that. Parts of it, I believe, do reflect upon my actual experience, but not much. Mostly it lives up to my intention that poetic expression not be personal expression so much as an expression of linguistic possibilities.

Anyway, I've also been doing Screen Time, the weekly column on films showing in and around New Haven, for the Advocate. Occasionally I get to talk about a movie that inspires more than just providing info, as here, with some comments on The Big Lebowski, or here, with some recent comments on the two films that have opened stateside based on Stieg Larsson's best-selling thrillers, or this consideration of My Beautiful Laundrette.

I've also seen the two shows so far this summer presented by the Yale Summer Cabaret, run this year by Jesse Jou, and commented on them at NHR: one was a feisty version of the rock-monologue, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, starring Chad Raines and directed by Jou; the other an elliptical and challenging play, directed by Devin Brain, derived from a story by Isobelle Carmody called The Phoenix.

But more than all those items, I think what has distracted me from blogocentrism has been a will to move in two separate directions, prose-wise. On the one hand, teaching again -- the summer Ulysses course at Yale -- brings me back to an ideal of analytical prose that doesn't simply trade in received ideas or personal opinion, but works through the text with fidelity to what is present there but with what flights seem necessary to render its implications. Implications for whom? Well, that's the question not so easily settled. I'd like to say: implications for writers and readers. That is to say, the focus shouldn't be the ongoing academic conversation on Ulysses and Joyce, per se, but would address what could be called 'the use value' of the experience of reading Ulysses.

The idea of the Ulysses book is to be more rigorous in the sense of fidelity both to an original and to a variety of experiences of that original, broken down into 'reading Ulysses,' 'studying Ulysses,' 'teaching Ulysses,' and, possibly 'writing Ulysses,' where the 'writing' isn't about how Joyce composed it, but rather how one -- namely me, pilgrim -- approaches the task of writing about it with the focus on Joyce's writing. In other words, it's a way of pondering the value of writing via Ulysses.

The other direction is toward something that might be personal, like blogocentrism, but less chatty, filtered more through the kind of writing 'Metro Lace' makes available to me. Call it lyric diction, I suppose. But what it means, in terms of writing, is having a certain liberated edge to it. Liberated from what? Primarily the explanatory mode, the informative mode, I suppose, which is so intrinsic to newspapers and to non-fiction writing in general. Not that I would want the essays I envision to dispense with filling in background or context -- a lot of the fun of writing comes from characterizing such things, plus I can't help thinking it keeps the writing 'honest.' Or maybe just keeps it from being uninformative or, worse, uninformed. But there is more to give via writing than information and opinion, isn't there? Something other than stories too, eh? A story it may be, but a story of ideas; a memoir it may be, but with the accent on the present in which it occurs rather than the past it departs from. A critical act, yes, in the sense of wanting to arrive at some kind of clarity about the topic at hand, trying to see and to speak clearly about it, but also a lyrical act that creates a position, a viewpoint, a manner of speaking.

WHATCHA READIN'?, 9

2010-05-24T14:41:00.001-04:00

13. Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu (French, 1913-27; English, Rememberance of Things Past, 1922-31; revised, 1981; authoritative French edition, 1987-89; English: In Search of Lost Time, 2002), French.

For a long time, I read Proust while on the job as nightguard at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I commenced it sometime in the spring of 1983, and concluded in the fall of that year after moving back to DE. Thus reading Proust bridges a key moment for me, ending one phase and groping toward the next. It's the 'youth here has end' period of twenty-three to twenty-four, and, at the time, reading Proust brought into keen relief the prospect of retrospect. Not that looking back hadn't been more or less the way I spent most of my time, but Proust and mid-twenties arriving at the same time gave me leave to believe that there was now a significant distance between those earliest days of childhood imagination, and the pre-adolescent days of first writing, and the present. True or not, my first foray through the first volume of the two volume set mainly set off states of vigorous recall.

But this isn't about me, it's about Proust. Which became quite evident as I continued on to the end. This was a fiction that quite overwhelmed one's own attempts at lucidity. This is writing of such richness, such verbal excellence, such knowing observation, amusing anecdote, suggestive analogy, psychological, temporal, existential insight and oddity, aesthetic resonance and philosophical purpose that it pretty much beggars anything you want to set beside it. My first go-through was with the old Moncrieff translation, even though the revised version had just appeared. I thought the latter was simply an update in type and packaging, so opted for the old Random House in clothbound boards, and serviceable it was. The cadences of Victoriana that clung to the diction didn't distress me too much once I got into it, they even lent it a certain charm.

Later, in graduate school, around 1990, I re-read Du côté de chez Swann, Sodome et Gomorrahe, and Le Temps retrouvé in French, with the revised Moncrieff to steer by, and subsequently, c. 1992-93, the second novel and segments of the fifth and sixth while prepping for a dissertation chapter on Proust. Eventually, in the summer of '98, I read the entire 1981 edition, matching quotations to the 1988-89 Pléiade edition for the purposes of an expanded version of that chapter, still languishing on my computer at about 63,000 words.

I've already commented elsewhere on this blog about my experience of reading Proust, as for instance here, and have evoked him many times. What I'd like to add to that is a comment on Proust and writing. The sheer brilliance of the Proustian world is such that it dwarves most anything else you'll read, and almost certainly write. That's the reason it's best to avoid supreme masters like Proust if you really want to write. For while the initial experience of reading him may fill you with the giddy feeling that this is what writing is all about and that you too are positively ready to live for that alone, you come to find that what Proust is all about is a literary achievement that is so astounding it tends to ruin lesser efforts.

That may well be true of any great writer -- Cervantes, Tolstoy, Joyce, tend to be the masters of fiction who sometimes top Proust on lists of the great -- but what is particularly pernicious about Proust is that you don't read him, as you read those others, because of an engagement with fictional characters primarily. You read him with an effort to be as self-knowing as his narrator is, to be as capacious, to be truly 'one on whom nothing is lost,' to use the Jamesian phrase, to be as candid about experience and one's acquaintances. Tolstoy may be as all-knowing about his characters and their society; Joyce, with the interior monologue, purports to make the mind's undisclosed contents available, but neither master a truly epic conception of experience through the first person alone. And even Joyce doesn't keep the interior monologue functioning for the duration of Ulysses.

This means that the reader of Proust is generally beguiled by the narrator-as-writer, tending to believe that what is stated is coming from Proust as the achieved figure of both. After studying the novel closely for the sake of my own argument about it, I don't believe that's so, and so I do understand the novel as a novel, as perhaps the supreme fiction of that form. But that doesn't stop the sleight-of-hand from happening, and it's precisely because it does happen that I award the palm of highest distinction to Proust for the great achievement of narrating while not seeming to be narrating.

Everything that becomes so cumbersome in most fiction -- the effort to tell the story, to make it work and seem real -- seem magically dispensed with, and all we are privy to is the endless fascination of an incredibly self-obsessed writer explaining himself to himself. Along the way, he also explains everything, it seems, we need to know about his family, his friends, his enemies, the society of which they are a part and the changes it undergoes as the arisocracy becomes steadily democratized and abased après la guerre, the art and political issues of the times, and the mores and matings of a vast cast of homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals, deliberatively portrayed to a degree that was unthinkable in the English or American novel of the time (witness the bannings of Joyce and Lawrence). And it's in part the frankness about how sexual desire infuses life that makes Proust such a towering modernist and makes us believe we are getting "the real story" -- because, unlike the parochialism of Joyce and Lawrence, sex in Proust isn't "dirty" or "heroic", it's the constant pulse of the flow of time, it's desire as more amorphous, sustaining and frustrating, oppressive and ecstatic, self-negating and enhancing, conscious and unconscious, bodily and mental and spiritual than it can ever be in Freud.

It may be hard for the 21st century reader to find a knowledge of her state -- in all its showy immediacy and glut of interconnected wonderment -- contained and demarcated in the Recherche. The novel may seem too much a tedious history lesson by an insomniac with total recall, and it may be the case that our time couldn't possibly sustain the degree of scrutiny that Proust brings to bear upon his own, but that's just surface phenomena. The nature of time, we learn as students of Proust, is a constant, and seeing ourselves in the past he provides us, and seeing that past in our present, is a mighty lesson that makes other mighties lessen in comparison.

SIMPLE NECESSITY

2010-05-18T01:02:00.005-04:00

First published in 1965, John Williams' novel Stoner might seem at first glance to be utterly out of touch with the times. A college novel with no student unrest, with no racial issues or politically sensitized students? Indeed, and it is as a realistic novel from the mid-Sixties that narrates a story of the previous generation that Williams' novel acquires quiet force and meaning. In following the story of a teacher, William Stoner, from his birth in 1891 on a Missouri farm, to his enrollment, at his father's urging, to study agriculture at the state university in 1910, to his becoming an English major and an instructor at that same university, to his marriage, fatherhood, promotion to assistant professor, single extramarital affair, and eventual retirement and death, in 1956, Williams shows us how even the simplest, most unassuming life has complications, and how the quiet dignity of doing one's job, performing one's appointed task, can be enough to sustain a life.

Such a message one imagines to have been rather lost at the time of the novel's initial publication. Republished in 2003 by The New York Review of Books, Stoner is not only a restored American classic, it also is a realist antidote to the modernists of Stoner's generation and the postmodernists of Williams'. Stoner is predominantly a grammarian in the hoary mode handed down from Aristotle to medieval scholasticists and thence to the Renaissance scholars that are Professor Stoner's true precursors. In his world, fads -- like modernism -- are suggested only by his wife Edith's brief inclination to bobbed hair and sheath-like, sleeveless dresses. In fortysome years of teaching, Stoner is never confronted by a sense that the world the university serves is changing very much, nor that the subject matter itself has been altered by new knowledge, nor is he pressured to meet the challenges of young men who, after 1945, had been to war before they had been to college.

Stoner is a novel of a life and of a life of the mind that are both almost hermetically sealed, but it is not Williams' intention to be critical of or the least bit satirical toward Stoner's involvement in his vocation, or toward his rather grim dissociation from most other people. In Stoner we find a readily sympathetic product of the Missouri farmlands, a laconic, deeply introspective young man who goes to college and shocks himself by beginning to think for himself, and about matters, thanks to charismatic English professor Archer Sloane, that have nothing to do with crops and livestock. Williams does not overly romanticize the quest for knowledge, nor does he belittle Stoner's humble origins in light of academic success. One of the great assets of Williams' style is that its clarity is so forceful, so direct and right we never feel that we are being misled or asked to make dubious flights of the imagination. Stoner is always what he appears to be, and the fascination of the story is watching him -- a somewhat glum but never insensitive, despairing, or self-important hero -- come to terms with what, exactly, he is.

Williams, who himself taught for a long career at the University of Denver, has too much respect for the mystery of teaching, and of learning, to treat Stoner ironically. Irony is presented as the attitude of the bad guys of the novel: the crippled and brilliant Hollis Lomax and his crippled and would-be brilliant protegé, Charles Walker. That this duo's high ironic mode is inimical to Stoner seems fitting; certainly a teacher of Stoner's earnestness would be somewhat guarded when faced with the verbal self-regard of the highly respected Lomax. But that both Stoner's antagonists should have crippled limbs might indicate in Williams an equation of great mind and stunted body with a twisted soul. Further, the fact that Lomax and Walker are Romanticists pitches them -- as asserters of self and the sublime -- against the less showy because more sound scholarship of Stoner. Williams does not belabor the point, but enough space is given to Walker's highly romantic and floridly rhetorical defense of Shakespeare as unique verbal genius against another student's account of what Renaissance poets owed to Roman models for us to laugh as the narrator lets Walker be hoist with his own petard.

Lomax's villainy takes the form of nothing more than professional antagonism: because Stoner sees through Walker's flimsy facades and tries to fail the student, he incurs the ire of Lomax and so comes to be Lomax's whipping boy when the latter becomes chair of the department. But the suffering Stoner bears in his professional life -- he is given a trying schedule and course assignments that are almost insulting -- has already been matched by suffering in his private life. In the same way that Lomax tries to separate Stoner from his love of teaching classical grammar and rhetoric, Stoner's own wife separates him from, first, their daughter and, later, his efforts to work on a second book.

Stoner's suffering is presented by Williams not as some kind of ethical test, but rather simply as the inevitable outcome of certain fortuitous circumstances and, perhaps, of choices. Stoner could have capitulated to Lomax, but chose not to. Lomax is by his nature vindictive, so Stoner must suffer for it. Stoner, as he realizes poignantly late in life, could have loved his wife more -- if he had, perhaps she would not have felt such jealousy over his close relation with Grace, their daughter. But could he have loved her more? Is such a thing a matter of choice? The other side of that coin is that perhaps Edith could have loved Stoner more. But Stoner accepts it as a given that she loved him as much as she was capable. Everything else -- her absences to her family in St. Louis, her meddling with their daughter, her indifference to his career and rejection of the possibility, after Lomax's ascendancy, of his finding a position elsewhere -- simply becomes the given of what being married to Edith means.

The unknowableness of women also seems a given of the novel. We never really have access to Edith's mind nor to the thoughts of Grace because Stoner never does either. He understands them both intuitively, but never makes much effort to really know what they think or feel. Thin as these characters may seem at times, Williams convinces us that Stoner's background and nature makes venturing into the interiority of others nearly impossible.

Even in his one great love, in his forties, with a grad student named Katherine Driscoll, Stoner is circumspect about his own feelings and hers. The success of these characterizations lies in the skill with with Williams delineates the effect of circumstance on the character of life. The oddly attenuated courtship of Stoner and Edith is very deftly presented, and the love affair between Stoner and Katherine, in its power, everyday beauty, and failed secrecy, is one of the most commanding segments in the novel. While the women are kept mostly dark to us, Stoner's experience, in its limitations and guarded exaltations, is knowingly and precisely represented. Like Stoner, we know his women through what they do and its effect on him.

Ultimately, Stoner is a novel concerned with the fate of character and circumstance. By living so closely with Stoner's nature throughout the novel, we inhabit a world presented with such clarity that we must grasp the value of its deliberate focus. We enter into a life where decisions are made and consequences occur, but only death resolves the struggle with the given. We have to watch Stoner play the cards he has been dealt to the very end.

We experience Stoner's life from childhood to grave in less than three hundred pages. If Stoner's life were more extraordinary that would be too little to do him justice; if his life were less interesting, if the prose rendering that life were less exemplary, the length would be too much. For the task Williams sets himself is presenting closely, with admiring but not fawning attention, a life that could be easily and quickly summed up, to show us both its sorrows and its joys, to render as deliberatively as possible life in the American midwest in the twentieth century. The novel suggests that a life, any life, is always consistent with itself, even as it is touched by the encouragement and decline of a mentor, loss of parents, three wars, early death of a friend, professional contention, an estrangement from wife and child, and a love that must be sacrificed for the sake of an onerous status quo. Through it all Stoner comes to know himself, and we come to know him, as a man assigned certain qualities he must live by. Though religion plays no significant part in the novel, Stoner's attitude toward life could be said to be quintessentially Protestant in that sense found in Martin Luther's famous declaration of inner necessity: "Here I stand I can do no other."

* * * * *

This review appears as a participant in the Spotlight Series, a book discussion focusing on small press books, sponsored by The New York Review of Books; this is a link to a site where you can access info on other books published by NYRB Classics.

SPRING CLEANING

2010-04-16T11:58:00.004-04:00

Seems I have to clear the dust away here, it's been so long since I've had occasion to post at blogocentrism. Have I really been too busy or simply too distracted? I think the latter, and the distraction has come from several quarters: first, it's always in the post-spring break phase of the semester that events on campus greatly increase, so there's a lot to take in and seemingly no time to comment on it. On that score, here's a link to some of my thoughts on recent visits to campus by Terry Castle, David Shields, and James Longenbach: NHR.

Another distraction has come in the form of continuing to watch films, ostensibly for material for a series of poems I call "cinemagics," but also because I've started a Screen Time column at the New Haven Advocate to talk about non-first run or non-mainstream viewing in the area. Here's one on some '80s films, and another for the Environmental Film Festival at Yale (that's worth checking out to get the names of the films shown, many now coming to DVD).

I actually saw two films currently playing in theaters: Polanski's The Ghost Writer, and Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. The first very satisfying at a technical level (i.e., as something to look at) but not really as a story, though the scenes with Tom Wilkinson had such cold authority they really stayed with me; in the end, sleuthing via google and GPS just seems laughable; and Greenberg gives us Ben Stiller surprisingly watchable as a 40 year old guy we've no reason to like (he's so dullsville) as he tries to come to grips with the time of life he's now facing (middle-age) -- could've been improved by giving him more of a past to come down from; the show is stolen by Greta Gerwig who plays his much younger love interest and conveys well the feckless affect of the well-meaning twentysomething girl with decent instincts and not much depth.

On DVD I've been availing myself of things like Wings of Desire, An Education, Cold Souls, The Informant!, Up in the Air, John Hughes films, several movies featuring Marilyn Monroe (God, is The Seven-Year Itch unwatchable!), takes on the story of Christ from Scorsese, by way of Kazantzakis, and from Zeffirelli -- a made-for-TV venture from '77, and, on the theme of televised nostalgia, my favorite production of Chekhov's Three Sisters which I saw back in high school and haven't seen since -- with Janet Suzman, Eileen Atkins and Anthony Hopkins. Also saw an old b/w televised The Cherry Orchard with a girlish, twentysomething Judy Dench, a young Ian Holm as Trofimov (it would be fun to tally up all that guy's great supporting work), and his eminence, the majestic John Gielgud as the uncle.

Finally, there's my effort to try to get back to print material -- reading not only books I'm supposed to review (and sometimes actually do, as in this link to a review at QC of an oddball down-and-out Brit novel, complete with werewolf stories, by Martin Millar called Ruby and the Stone Age Diet), but also a backlog of poetry books that seem to be piling up around the place. This last task inspired by the latest from The Master (aka Ashbery), Planisphere, and The Common Man from Maurice Manning. Mayhaps I'll have something to say about them at some future date.

And if all that's not enough, there has been theater of note: comments on The Yale Rep's greatly entertaining A Servant of Two Masters, and on The Yale Cabaret's renderings of Evil Dead: The Musical, 4.48 Psychosis, and one helluva Salome. Then there was a review of MESs the dance/theater piece by the Japanese group Baby-Q which was fascinating.

What have I been listening to, you ask? Well, I finally got around to hearing Transference, the new one from Spoon and I think it's a step forward, at least in the dynamics of creating aural atmosphere via guitar sounds. We already knew they were composers of infectious songs.

And speaking of guitars: I've been getting lost in Guitar Hero Land with the "new" Hendrix release Valley of Neptune, an album that, in its unfinished glory, makes Hendrix feel part of our DIY days. It's got more astounding guitar, and that's what we pay him (or his ghost) for. And I've also become more than a casual Santana listener via the first album, the third, and Caravanserai (the fourth). Abraxas (the second) I've had for some time, but it's nice to set it in sequence and let the CD changer take it away. The third is the rip-roaring best, in my view, but Abraxas is quintessential.

There, that wasn't so hard, now if only cleaning up this place could be done so fast.

SHAKEN AND STIRRED

2010-03-20T22:33:00.006-04:00

Shakespeare’s Othello has always been a bit of a problem play for me, respected more than loved, and, of the four great tragedies with eponymous heroes (Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, the other three), it was always the least satisfying, primarily because I could never really feel the tragic aspect of Othello’s situation. Killing whom one loves because of jealousy is bad enough, but groundless jealousy at that. It makes Othello a dupe in a way much less interesting than Macbeth, bad as he is, is.

What wins my fascination is the character Iago, for here we have Shakespeare’s flair for villainy at its most villainous. The treachery of Iago, its 'motiveless malignity,' has been the cause of much spilt ink, but, apart from whatever ways we might rationalize it, it simply is inspiring at the level of machination, meanness, and the very theatrical nature of lying, deceit, manipulation. A case study in how unsuspecting people can be ‘played’ by someone apt to do it.

Today I saw a production of the play by students in the Yale School of Drama, directed by Michael McQuilkin, that, although student work within the program and not really aimed for the general public, struck me as a definitive interpretation of the play. I say this because I actually learned a few things while watching it. The productions I’ve seen have been hammy (Welles’) or sleep inducing (Olivier’s), or both (Branagh’s), but, even while watching those filmed versions in frustration, I could feel that there was something truly remarkable about this play -- that my conviction of its greatness wasn’t due to some syncophantic aping of what Shakespeare scholars say, but was based on my own experience of reading the play. But, in performance, more than all Shakespeare's other tragedies (except Romeo and Juliet), it just seemed too improbable, too loaded with dupes and stooges, but for the super-slick and dastardly Iago.

It was Stanley Edgar Hyman’s book-length study of Iago, which I read in high school, that convinced me not only that this play was extraordinary but also that literary criticism might be worth reading, but it fatally swayed me in favor of the villain over the hero of this play. Why would Welles or Olivier play Othello, I fumed, because he’s the title of the play? All the psychological complexity is in Iago!

So one thing the YSD production did was put paid to that conviction. Austin Durant’s Othello was invigorating, so full of dignity, so great-souled, that his downfall was truly tragic, stirring in a way that had to do with our sympathy for him, but that came from his passionate grasp of his own misery. 'O the pity, Iago, the pity!' was a moment of staggering realization of all he has lost, once he believes he can no longer trust his wife.

And that realization, which might seem naive or inconsequential, to our modern ears, is sustained by the fact that, in this version, there were grounds for his suspicions, even without Iago. Desdemona (Sarah Sokolovic) wasn’t simply a paragon of virtue, but was rather a woman who liked being admired (as many women, even those who are virtuous, might, without actually being vain or deceitful) by Cassio, the handsome lieutenant. Of course, it’s in the play that she might favor Cassio more than is seemly, but it’s all a question of how it’s carried off. In this version, it was all innocent enough, but not wholly innocent. We could feel how desired Desdemona might well be among the other men in the cast and that was enough to make her fidelity to her husband questionable.

Another striking aspect of this production was the suffering of Iago. Usually he’s just a cad who wants to see how far he can push the gullibleness of human nature, but with an ulterior motive of bringing down his enemies. His hatred of Othello has been seen as bigotry, and as jealousy; his hatred of Cassio as frustrated homosexual longings, and so forth, but nothing completely explains him. As played by Will Connelly, Iago, thin, small, wiry, was a man burning with a sense of his own psychological power -- his ability to anticipate how others will act in scenarios he creates. He became, rather explicity to my mind as I watched, a figure for the playwright himself, manipulating his characters, giving them roles in scenes he creates, making them suffer to make up, perhaps, for his own suffering -- or lack thereof. What he suffers from is being stuck with who he is (a mere scribbler), able to see the great as, in Nietzsche’s phrase, 'the play actors of their own ideals.' As Iago says, in a meditative moment of clarity that ripples throughout the entire play in terms of who is actually true to who they are: 'Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago.'

I’m sure that’s not an original idea, that others have seen Shakespeare in Iago, and perhaps I’ve even encountered that argument. But never have I felt it so convincingly rendered as in this version of the play, and not as a tendentious ‘interpretation’ being foisted on it for our benefit. It simply came out in the brilliance of how well the drama Iago creates runs its appointed course. I think this is meant to be the case and should be obvious to the viewer, and to be present as it happens -- to see 'the mousetrap' close with such effective timing -- is truly staggering.

What’s more, the tragedy stung with the feel of the playwright’s utter perversion of what Romeo and Juliet portrays: there true love is frustrated by fateful errors, but the love remains true, even unto death. Here, the love is thwarted by a major error -- lack of trust of the beloved, willingness to believe the worst so as to undermine one’s own happiness -- that leads to murder and suicide. The crippling power of jealousy -- which is the overwhelming insight of this play, and which needs to be played extremely well to be convincing, convincing as tragic affliction and not simply ego assertion -- is Shakespeare’s great theme and so finely tuned, so well-wrought, as to be endlessly entertaining, even to modern audiences. And all the best characters are sacrificed on its altar.

Durant’s delivery of Othello’s 'that in Aleppo once' speech was truly heart-breaking, and not, as it can appear, the last bid for sympathy by a wife-murderer. We have to believe in the love and we have to believe in the urge to kill for it, and to die as a consequence. Durant fulfilled those requirements handsomely.

This was textbook stuff -- not in the sense of boring, already digested information -- but in the sense of a rendering of the play to be studied by students of the play, to see the power of the text come to life, and death.

RECENT STUFF

2010-03-03T20:19:00.008-05:00

Another month is over, how did that happen? There was some snow, I seem to recall, but not nearly as much as the folks back home got. What snow we got in the Haven was largely cosmetic, just a nice white mantle to make things look different for a little while.

It seems to me I watched a number of videos, including some BBC productions of Shakespeare's history plays and of Chekhov. And started on a little retrospective on Scorsese movies, including his first ever, 1967 and fresh from NYU: Who's That Knocking on My Door, which featured Harvey Keitel as an Italian youth with some issues about female virginity; also watched Mean Streets, probably only my second time, and found it much more powerful and fun -- what with that poolhall fight to the tune of "Mr. Postman" -- then I did whenever I first saw it, on some tired old video copy. New York, New York is still too unwieldly in the final third, but the colors look great, and again one gets to see DeNiro enact a violently mood-swinging eccentric, which would all come to its culmination in Raging Bull, which I'll have to see again soon. Ditto King of Comedy. I did see After Hours again and I think it really holds up, especially when we consider how utterly vanished the vision of SoHo it gives us is. "Ah, you could really have anxiety in those days." And when Paul returns to work the next morning, covered in plaster, well, it's eerie in a whole new way.

Seeing New York, New York, a movie about Coco Chanel, and Inglourious Basterds in fairly close proximity got me into writing some fast-paced stream of film consciousness poems I call "Cinemagics." There are six of them so far, not sure if they will progress or not.

I must've read something last month, but it seem all I'm sure I read is Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City (and I've started a piece on that) and Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies (which I also expect to review, for Quarterly Conversation). Speaking of QC, here's a link to my review of Mark Strand's New Selected Poems. And speaking of poets, Robert Pinsky gave a talk at the Divinity School; I didn't go, but I did talk a bit about his most recent book, Gulf Music, here.

I also posted about and reviewed some theater in New Haven: here's me on Mandy Patinkin in Compulsion at Yale Rep, at The Forward, and here's a few other points about the play, at NHR. In honor of Valentine's Day, here's a bit on Yale Cabaret's Missed Connections, a really fun musical culled from craigslist personals. On the day itself, me and the missus took in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, Yale Opera, at the Shubert.

Speaking of dysfunctional relations, here's a bit on a grad student adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and here's a take on a one-person show by "freak drag queen" Taylor Mac, an entertaining entry in the No Boundaries series at Yale Rep, from back at the end of January. A more recent show, Radio Station, just last weekend at Yale Cab, is here; inspired by Shogo Ohta's slow motion theater pieces, it was quite a show.

Finally, just today I posted on NHR, having a bit of fun with a piece by Ted Genoways, published in Mother Jones, inveighing against the state of fiction, the failing of literary journals, and writing from writing programs, etc.

WHATCHA READIN’?, 8

2010-02-19T12:27:00.006-05:00

12. John Berryman: The Dream Songs (1969; 77 Dream Songs, 1964; His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 1968), American

At position number 12 in 'The 15 Books That Stayed With Me' comes a work of poetry. This position could go to Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems almost as well. The period of reading I’m recalling, spring 1982, the last full year I’d live in Philadelphia (i.e., the bohemian phase), found me on a roll, from '81 and that reading of Norton’s Anthology that I mentioned in an earlier post, of American poets who appealed to me, primarily for their music. I arrived at Berryman via Robert Lowell who I spent a lot of time reading in '80/'81. Stevens was a bit later in my reading, spring of '83, and as such was the big modernist in verse for me, taking over from Eliot and the Williams of Paterson. Pound’s Cantos would have to wait till graduate school.

But I pick Berryman because, unlike Stevens, he produced his signature work during my lifetime, and because his influence on me was immediate. I composed a 'long poem' of 48 numbered 13-line stanzas -- an agitated mix of asides, lyric flights, and the freely associative quotations that were a staple of my personal style in those days -- that took its impetus from those packed and idiosyncratic 'songs' of Berryman’s, their compressed monologues, rife with allusions and personal navel-gazing, all the hurts and hurrahs delivered in gifted syntax, setting off a wave of verse babble. I wrote the first 24 in one night’s shift at my post in the empty Academy of Fine Art and two nights later did the second group of 24 -- lesser, I felt, because I was deliberately trying to pursue something that had simply been a spontaneous inspiration initally.

I called it 'Trials and Errors,' and lifted my epigraphs from Berryman (on Housman): 'To listen to him, you’d think that growing old / at twenty-two was horrible, and the ordinary tasks / of people didn’t exist' (# 205). I was twenty-two, newly a father, and we were being evicted from our crappy U of Penn area apartment, so it was a perfect time -- what with all the drinking with the other Academy folk, painters mostly -- to wallow in the woe-is-me but ain’t-I-charming badinage of Berryman. The other epigraph was more significant, and is one I still like to quote because it pretty much gets it right: 'Working & children & pals are the point of the thing, / for the grand sea awaits us, which will then us toss / & endlessly us undo' (#303).

In those days I was only beginning to see the truth of that part about children, though it was beguiling to find huffy Henry making room for them, though he ended by leaving them to live on, much as he himself was left by his self-deceased daddy. If that bothered me as too bleak -- suicide, I mean -- it didn’t seem to me too overdone to see how ‘sins of the fathers’ get visited unto the next generation, which ended up being one of the themes I was dancing around in my 'Trials.' Being, I’d say, not at all ready to be daddy and none too easy about whatever my relation to my own was supposed to be at that time -- first of my sibs to reproduce, and all that biz.

'Working' as my old man understood the term and as Mr. Berryman seemed to mean it were very much different, that was clear enough. And me, having run up the barricades with Rimbaud’s grand flag 'I will never do any work' flapping nimbly above me, I was just beginning to see that 'working,' in Berryman’s sense, might be a lifelong toil -- endless trials and errors -- to no clear conclusion, without even the buttressing of retirement pensions, and what have you. Or haven’t, as the case may be. But 'the ordinary tasks of people didn’t exist' for me, then.

'Pals' was still meaningful in the context of trying to grab some local glory as bar poets, small press producers, art gallery entertainment, etc., but that was starting to seem little ado about less. And yet ... who else was I writing for and why else was I reading Berryman? Because 'life, friends, is boring' (#14), and your friends, I guess, are the people who don’t find you boring, or vice versa. Though Berryman claimed to find Henry boring, I never quite did. Repetitive, maudlin (at times), cryptic, pretentious, incomprehensible, funny, mordant, trenchant, graceful, sexy, sinister, menacing, crazed, inspired, inspiring, and all the rest, but rarely boring. And why? Because of the music of it all.

In any case, the grand sea is still tossing Berryman, it’s tossing my dad too (whose life of work was whatever it was and got him wherever it got him), and will toss this dad as well, sooner or later. Last night I watched a BBC production of Richard II and liked this line: 'I wasted time and now does time waste me.' The relevance is clear enough, jumping in time from twenty-two and eager to find something to put one’s hand too, and yet, for all that, not really working, merely letting the words lead where they will, to now, when that’s still pretty much my 'ordinary task.'

I think what kept up my fascination with The Dream Songs was the fact that it was a long poem that was comprised of many individual poems. Certainly, for the reader’s sake, there could be far fewer of them then there are, but I read them all, and was struck -- and still am -- by the prospect of a continuous use of a flexible form to create an ongoing commentary on life, both as a fictional and actual aspect of the poet’s mind and his changes in time: 'It seems to be solely a matter of continuing Henry / voicing & obsessed' (#133).

And Berryman also seemed a figure not so gargantuan with an impossible gift -- as in the great generation born in the ‘70s and ‘80s of the previous century (Rilke, Proust, Stevens, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Kafka et al.) -- but rather more erratically accessible: scholar, school-teacher, drunken ladies man on the lecture/reading circuit, showing up on TV (now YouTube) and being a boob as only men of letters can be on the Boob Tube. All the persnickety nit-picking of the life of letters was in the poems too, as it so seldom is in that previous grand generation; here were the psychic costs of trying to be King of the Cats. 'I’m Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly!' (#22).

I still go back to the Songs I like best. Even read some of them as mp3s for my iPod, loving what the poems make my mouth and ear do, and how the voice of Henry (no, I don’t really care to hear Berryman read them) is ever at home in some inner chamber of my brain. 'Henry on LSD was Henry indeed' (#329). Indeed.

FEBRUARY 2ND

2010-02-02T21:56:00.003-05:00

Today is Groundhog Day. In Harold Ramis’ film Groundhog Day (1993), there’s a scene I’ve always had great affection for: it shows Phil Conners, the caustic weatherman (Bill Murray), sitting at a table in a coffee shop early in the day, reading. One of the books on the table is Ulysses. Phil looks up from his reading, looks around him, and a feeling of bliss passes over his face.

Phil has to keep reliving the same day, February 2nd, as a kind of Purgatory, until he significantly changes its outcome (he finally gets Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, to fall in love with him). In the course of the film, Phil goes through all kinds of self-serving uses of the day -- to get money, to break the law without future consequence, to finagle affection from Rita -- and, driven to despair by a real love he has begun to feel that he can’t convince her of, killed himself numerous times. He always returns miraculously unscathed to the same day.

The scene of reading takes place when he at last begins to enjoy the ‘eternity’ that the day has become, eventually performing many acts of kindness so that others avoid injury or inconvenience on that day.

But what I love about that reading scene is that the atmosphere in which he reads -- the sunlight, the classical music playing, the sense of freedom for the luxury of reading -- brought back to me similar moments in college and in grad school when the only task was to read, and sometimes one would seem to wake briefly from a dream of words and see oneself in the act of reading, buoyed by a quotidian sense of time as simply present, but not pressing. And it was good.

It seems to me no accident that Ulysses is there on the table, a book that requires, indeed fosters, just such a removal from the rhythm of one’s own time in favor of the rhythm of its long, unfolding day. And it’s a day -- the endless February 2nd -- that is also the birthday of James Joyce, and also commemorates Candlemas, the presentation of Christ in the temple, also known as the Purification of the Virgin, and -- or more properly February 1st -- the feast of Imbolc, the beginning of winter’s end, and St. Brigid’s day.

2-2-2010 for JJ

No rest for the demon, no retreat.
He keeps before me a tranced space

Where fables of compunction elicit laughs,
And all that sacred poetry, born

Of tearful entreaty and fear of illicit
Conjunction, inspires a manic dance,

Spidery, fiery, flung over an abyss
We’re forever reading, forever waiting

For that glimmer of shared sense we need.
Knowledge -- take a bite, and flaunt glad

Ignorance of all injunction to freedom,
Cautioned by purifying candles’ witness.

Praise the joyous apostate, St. Brigid,
Close Epiphany for a season less frigid.

DISCS OF THE DECADE

2010-01-28T00:49:00.013-05:00

And so another decade is over. Having entered this world in the last year of the Fifties, I always pay attention to transitions from the tenth year of a decade to the year that adds a new number before the final digit. Do I really believe in ‘decades’ as an assemblage of years that are in some way united? Not really. Time seems more coherent in groupings of four to five years, and what comes either ‘before’ or ‘after’ those years is equally meaningful, if you want it to be.

That said, it’s easy enough to view ‘the aughts’ as dominated by one’s distaste for W. -- from the election of 2000, to the start of the war in 2003, to the re-election in 2004 and the torture photos, to the botch of Katrina in 2005, to the attempt to pass the torch in 2008, with the Bimbo Mom from Hell foisted upon the public. And then, of course, Obama’s victory, and the tanking economy in 2009, and the great hopes showered upon Obama as he took office, and the supposed backlash as the new decade begins -- we'd like to believe the ‘low, dishonest decade’ (to appropriate Auden’s useful phrase for the Thirties) ended with Obama’s Inauguration in 2009, but there’s too much hangover to say that, and 2010 simply continues ‘the situation.’

The years of the past decade are not notable to me as being distinct entities, much less so than decades from earlier in my own history. In fact, during the decade itself, I could be heard to say I’ll start paying attention again when we get to the ‘teens. And there’s more than a little truth in that. I’m ready to start paying attention now, I swear.

So here goes an attempt to stretch my brain by actually trying to ascribe something memorable to the output of the individual ‘00 years, in my listening. It’s quite easy for me to ignore whatever is high on the charts, and simply pick up new stuff from oldsters, or new stuff from whoever among the young(er than me) catches my attention. The decade ends with me listening to more classical music than ever before, so ... who knows, in another decade I might not be rocking at all.

Ok, enough preamble: let the listing begin!

2000:
Steve Earle’s Transcendental Blues arrived as a follow-up to the excellent El Corazón of 1997, but with more variety to the production, more muscle. It was, in hindsight, Earle’s peak album and blends a contemporary rock sound with country (which was a genre I was indulging more than ever in the closing years of the ‘90s, what with Johnny Cash’s renaissance, and with me finally listening to Townes Van Zandt, The Flying Burrito Bros., Gram Parsons in the early years of this decade). Speaking of Johnny, his Solitary Man from this year may be his all-around strongest album, or, in any case, it showed that the Rick Rubin-produced sessions were still going strong.

But the album that came to dominate all others from that year, eventually, was Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica, which I didn’t really get to know till 2001. It had the power of a, for me, new discovery (being the first entire album I heard by this oddly abrasive band), and features extended songs, short visceral punches, and a host of memorable lines and deliveries. 'Tiny Cities Made of Ashes' was a song for the time, much as a song like Talking Heads’ 'Life During Wartime' was in its day.

My song of the year: 'I’m the Man Who Murdered Love' by XTC: a catchy, mordant, irresistibly tongue-in-cheek account of how to overcome romantic longings.

2001:
Bob Dylan’s Love & Theft was released on 9/11/2001, a day everyone old enough to have memory on that day will always remember. Even though I didn’t buy it on that day, I did wander by a record store to contemplate its existence in the long daze that the day became. And that’s the album that will always be the album for the year, not only because getting to know it happened in the wake of the World Trade Center attack, but because, with two other Dylan albums of new material released this decade, it holds up the best. I’m ready to say it’s one of the top ten albums of his career and might even accept it in the top five. It brought back home a Dylan who could rock and softshoe and croon and caterwaul, and everything else he’d always done, including throwing out memorable lines and others that played with cliché and borrowings -- including a knock-knock joke -- in a refreshingly loose, at times almost zany, way. Not as prettily produced as Time Out of Mind (1997), nor ever as menacing or menaced, the album presents a Dylan for the new decade, a bit of old weird Americana with a vengeance. It actually reminded me of Self-Portrait at times in its ‘take it or leave it’ insouciance.

A big album of this year for me, in hindsight (didn’t get to know it till 2003) was Jay Farrar’s Sebastopol; even more than Earle’s album, this is country-tinged rock able to disassemble both genres in the name of something else, feeling almost at times experimental, and at other times quite ‘classic’ the way an album by The Band feels. Nick Cave’s album No More Shall We Part is a strong, lyrical, melancholy, and at times hilarious, edgy and uneasy follow-up to The Boatman’s Call (1997), which I regarded as a career peak, though others saw it as Nick calming down. No More, in its audacity, is more like classic Nick, but with greater musical maturity than he’d shown up to this point.

My song of the year: 'Mississippi' by Bob Dylan: a survivor’s wistfulness pervades the song, neither too dark nor too light -- rueful but unrepentant.

2002:
There was some good stuff this year: two albums by Tom Waits, though neither was as good as his previous album; a bit of a return to form for Elvis Costello, the best David Bowie album in a long time; the last George Harrison album, which is one of his best; a strong, but lesser, follow-up to their 2000 album by The Mekons, and, though I didn’t hear it till 2006, the best album I’ve heard by The Decemberists, Castaways and Cutouts; but the real contenders, for me, at the time were: 3) the debut album by a brash punk band, The Libertines, Up the Bracket, by turns melodic and almost thrashy; 2) Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around (his final album of his lifetime), featuring his version of 'Hurt,' powerfully uncompromising and naked, and some other standouts, like the title track and a somber reading of Sting’s 'I Hung My Head'; but the album I hear as the soundtrack for the year is 1) Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It was the first album I heard by them, which means I started, I’d say, with their career peak, at least so far. It’s a pop album with a bad conscience, so while it can give you that happy-go-lucky air of good vibes that pop is supposed to deliver, it also works its hooks through layered deconstructions at times that make them have to fight to the surface, full of foreboding, and Jeff Tweedy’s voice can put you on edge the way the Neil Young of After the Gold Rush could.

My song of the year: 'The Good Old Days' by The Libertines: it’s a little dissatisfying, only because the huge adrenalin spike between 'things we said we’d do tomorrow' and 'the arcadian dream has fallen through' only occurs once, but the trailing off of the song makes that meaningful. These are the good old days, but they’re only as good as you believe them to be.

2003:
Things start to fray this year . . . or maybe it’s just one of those years -- every decade has them -- where not that much comes out to give the year a definite trajectory. Richard Thompson’s The Old Kit Bag sustains his position as a frontrunner of those remaining artists who began careers in the ‘60s and consolidated themselves (rather than burning out) in the ‘70s, and managed to survive the ‘80s without too much loss of taste, and on through a reassertion in the ‘90s as mature rockers; it, like Mock Tudor in 1999, is one of his most adept albums; Neil Young, also in that group, but more restless and uneven, delivered Greendale, a musical drama that is as inimitable as anything in his career, but the breakout album for me was by Chan Marshall, a young woman born in the ‘70s and hitting her stride with a stripped-down, hypnotic, haunting album, Cat Power’s You Are Free, which keeps up what seems to be my ear’s inner tendency in these days: strong hooks that are undermined rather than pushed in the usual pop-song manner; Marshall’s voice can be hard to take in its baleful unprettiness, but it registers a truth that no pop diva paraded on the radio has any inkling of.

My song of the year: 'Meet Me Down the Alley' by Paul Westerberg: speaking of truth, this song is so quaveringly plaintive, you’d probably have to shut it off if you aren’t in the mood to meet its gutsy vulnerability, but . . . it’s the song, by a guy more or less my age, that said what needed to be said, to whoever’s listening.

2004:
Another difficult year. It’s almost tempting to say it’s all over: longtime favorites R.E.M. release the worst album of their career, not bad so much as boring; albums by The Cure and Elvis Costello, both of whom had done some good work earlier in the decade, are mostly annoying, though featuring a few good tracks; Leonard Cohen puts out his slightest album ever, and Tom Waits puts out an album only intermittently interesting; but there are some new acts to catch: Franz Ferdinand’s eponymous debut is as hot and cool as rock is supposed to be, updating ‘80s club sounds; The Veils’ debut album, The Runaway Found, surfaced in the U.K. late in ‘03 and finally makes it stateside, giving us Finn Andrews, one of the most gripping, visceral vocalists of his generation; but this is Nick Cave’s year all the way. His double album disc: Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus crushes all that blocks its path; the arrangements, including great back-up singers and horns, kick ass and Nick is at his weirdly verbal best, riffing on basic premises that stem from a poetic approach to life threatening to go horribly wrong or, despite everything, able to affirm the value of personal vision.

My song of the year: 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World' by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: with its litany of artists and writers on the edge, evoked comically but feelingly; with its cri de coeur for some kind of inspiration; with its abasement that is utterly exhilerating; and with its relentless rhythm that seems to bowl over every possible hesitation or resistance, this is a crowning song in the Nick Cave canon of rave-ups. 'Send that stuff on down to me.'

To be continued.

RECENT STUFF

2010-01-23T11:39:00.004-05:00

Not much has appeared on Blogocentrism of late, but here are some links to things I've written, posted elsewhere: First of all, there's a review of Katharine Weber's entertaining new novel, a take on candy manufacture and family business dynamics in a little town called New Haven, CT: True Confections; then a review of Tim Page's memoir on growing up with Asperger's Syndrome, in the '60s and '70s; then there's some looking back at the future as it appeared in two Terry Gilliam films recently screened at Yale: Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995); then there's some thoughts on a challenging one-man show by Kevin Daniels, which kicked-off the new semester at the Yale Cabaret; then, going back pre-holidays, there's my shot at Wally Lamb's attempt to cash-in on the season with a lame holiday story set in a Catholic middle school in CT; and, finally, there's my essay over at Quarterly Conversation on Pynchon's three CA novels.

And I'd like to take this moment to personally thank Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings for kicking the Dallas Cowboys' collective ass last Sunday. Go Purple People!

THE LATE GREAT GORKY

2010-01-12T10:19:00.004-05:00

One of the interesting experiences at a big retrospective of an artist’s work is walking from room to room, from beginning to end, tracing a line of development from the early fledging works, to the period of full maturity, to whatever comes after that. In most cases, there’s a point reached at which one feels quite satisfied that the artist has attained something truly distinctive, and one is more or less willing to reside in those peak galleries, looking at the undisputed masterpieces, for as long as one likes. Whether or not there is a precipitate falling off, or perhaps simply repetitions that don’t seem to go forward, there is a feeling that something glorious has occurred and that it won’t last forever.

In the case of remarkable artists, that sense that one has hit a peak can sometimes continue for room after room, as one keeps moving beyond what seemed to be the significant form the artist had been working toward to find new vistas constantly appearing.

That’s the sensation I had in walking through the retrospective of the work of the Armenian-born artist Arshile Gorky at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I went into the exhibit knowing at most a handful of Gorky’s canvases: the portrait of the artist and his mother; The Liver as Cockscomb, Agony, Dark Green Painting. I knew the basic story -- which the early paintings in the show depicted quite clearly -- of his antecedents in Cézanne, the Picasso of the 20s and 30s, and of his similarity to elements in the work of Joan Miró, André Masson, Robert Matta, and his influence on de Kooning, Pollock and others of that generation.

There’s also the story of his painful personal life -- from his mother’s death before her children were able to flee Turkish persecution in Armenia, to his cancer and declining health in the later Forties, to the fire that consumed some of his works in his studio, to the car accident that left him ailing and depressed, to his suicide at age 48 -- that the wallcards tended to play up as much as possible in an effort, I suppose, to give human meaning to the forms and figures that might otherwise elude the casual viewer, but which tended to make the art seem the melodramatic soundtrack to the ordeals of the artist’s life.

Perhaps that’s the best way to make meaning of Gorky’s canvases, but I don’t really think so. I don’t think it’s an act of inhumane formalism to look at the work as work and not as cries of passionate suffering. For some reason, beginning perhaps with Van Gogh, the fact of an artist’s suicide gets read into the work as though an artist paints to express an inner state that continues to elude viewers until, finally, the difficulty of the situation becomes unbearable and death becomes preferable to life and art. It’s a kind of cheap romanticism that places art always in the context of biography.

But what the retrospective itself shows is how art exists independent of biography, ultimately. In room after room, Gorky’s work creates a context in which the story on display is not a fight with depression or with the obstacles of life, but rather the refining and exercise of a unique talent for shapes and space. Gorky’s breakthrough is a signature style in which a background -- whether of paint or, in his drawings, charcoal -- creates a space upon which his precisely delineated but seemingly freehand shapes, or objects, are sketched.

In some cases, as with Garden in Sochi, there are three different versions, showing us how the painting functions when ‘background’ is rendered in paint so thick and undifferentiated that it overwhelms the objects and all space collapses into one ground; another, with a bright yellow background, makes the objects float in space, bold and cartoonish; the third, my preference, gives a washed white background that lets the pure line of the objects come to life. This manner gets further explored in canvas after canvas, but never simply as repetition. Gorky is always working on the relation of painting to drawing in interesting new ways.

In fact some early paintings are inferior to drawings to which they are akin. For a period in the ‘30s, Gorky seems too influenced by the monumental style of Picasso, showing the same tendency to overwhelm shapes with thickly built-up surfaces of paint in heavy colors. Gorky escapes this tendency by exploring landscapes in situ -- in Connecticut near the Housatonic River, and in Virginia. The gradual sense of painting and drawing in a struggle for dominance is what gives Cockscomb its menancing air: it’s as if both aspects of the work are taking on a life of their own and are held together in a riotous harmony only by the sheer vigor of the artist’s command of an idiosyncratic sense of shape and color.

Later, in that same impressive room, How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life shows the strong and fluent lines of Gorky’s drawing becoming wet on wet applications that drip down the canvas, giving a sense of a melting fusion of shape and color that seems to border on gesture painting. It’s also clearly a personal painting, reflecting on the loss of his mother and the meaning she continued to have in his life as an occasion for his art.

The power of distinct shapes -- from drawings that are laid upon the canvas after being worked out in proportional arrangements -- return in the series called The Plow and the Song, evoking rural life in Armenia. The pleasure of having all three paintings hung together so one could look at them all more or less at once was a bit like listening to different arrangements of the same basic melody.

In the last room, on what I considered the last wall, were hung together two paintings that Gorky had worked on over a period of time, listed on the wallcards as 1944-47 and 1944-48, so that these were works that take us through his peak period to within the year of his death. Both were stunning to look at after all that had come before. Here drawing had been submerged utterly in paint but the paint was not the thickly masking, unyielding surface/ground that could be found even in late, much praised works such as Agony or Dark Green Painting. Instead, the surface/ground was more translucent, seeming to let light (as canvas) through,and letting the objects float and appear as ghostly presences echoing Gorky's repertoire of biomorphic shapes.

The paintings in no way struck me as last gasps or as acts of despair. Rather I had the feeling that the man Vostanik Adoyan gave up on life for personal reasons, but that the artist Arshile Gorky was moving forward at that point and that greater canvases might have remained for him to produce. He seemed to have more to say. A pity he could no longer continue.

MILESTONES

2009-12-31T17:54:00.003-05:00

At the end of the year, one can find many a ‘roll call of death’ on the internet. Passings which made quite a mark this year include, perhaps most famously, Michael Jackson (June 25), but also Ted Kennedy (Aug. 25), and his aunt Eunice (Aug. 11), notable passings for all of us for whom the Kennedy family were fixtures of our lives and times; then there were writers so prolific as to seem eternal, John Updike (Jan. 27), and J.G. Ballard (April 19); actresses, like Farrah Fawcett (June 25), whose death inspired nostalgic paeans of the ‘70s as culture and fashion, and Natasha Richardson (March 18), whose death inspired thoughts about how important it is to treat recreational injuries seriously; in academia, milestones were certainly marked by the passing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (April 12), a major voice in the establishing of gender studies (oddly, she died on the same day as Marilyn Chambers, star of the first porn film I ever saw), and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the intellectual most responsible for structuralism and all that followed from it; an actor, Patrick McGoohan (Jan. 13), whose role as The Scarecrow for Disney’s TV show left a mark on my childhood and whose role as The Prisoner left a mark on my teens and twenties, when I finally got around to watching them all on PBS; a few more figures lost, who had some personal valence for me, were Andrew Wyeth (Jan. 16), the most famous artist from the region I hail from, and W.D. Snodgrass (Jan. 13), who was the grand old man of the writing program at Univ. of DE when I was there in the late '80s, and who I took a class with and shared a dinner with once at the home of an English prof and friend, the late Hans-Peter Breuer.

But of all the deaths of the year, the one that feels most like a loss to me is that of Vic Chesnutt, a singer and songwriter from Georgia who, paralyzed from the waist down since the age of 18, apparently took his own life at age 45 with an overdose of muscle relaxants, dying, after being in a coma a few days, on Christmas Day. Chesnutt’s breakout cd was 1996's About to Choke, which I first got around to hearing in 1999, and then got to know the 1998 album, The Salesman and Bernadette, which he made with the band Lambchop. More recent albums I’ve picked up as they were released were Left to His Own Devices (2001) and Ghetto Bells (2005), which featured not only Bill Frisell but also Van Dyke Parks. I saw Chesnutt play live twice, once in combination with Kristin Hersh in Baltimore, and once opening for Jay Farrar in Towson, MD. Of late, he seemed to be on a roll, with new albums featuring new musicians to collaborate with.

The thing about Chesnutt’s music, to me, is that I associate it with the decade now ending; those brittle melodies, that unadorned and unmistakable voice, bending words and notes in dialogue with his characteristic strum, and those literate, quizzical lyrics, many of which posit a life lived marginally, one might even say magisterially so, a kind of anatomy of the perilous nature of creativity on the edge -- where there’s nothing to keep the machine running except a claim on what it means to be human, musical, driven to find words and tunes. I can think of many, many lyrics from Chesnutt that gripped me on first hearing with the unfettered honesty of someone committed to a unique musical vision, able to convert the misery of his condition into beautiful acts of legerdemain, even of levitation. 'Supernatural,' 'Maiden,' 'Parade,' 'Myrtle,' 'Ladle,' 'Swelters,' 'Degenerate,' 'Very Friendly Lighthouses,' 'Hermitage,' 'We Should Be So Brave,' 'To Be With You,' 'Vesuvius,' and no doubt many others I’ve still to discover. Rest in Peace, Vic, and thanks, man.

Christian charity is a doily over my death boner
–Vic Chesnutt, 'Vesuvius' (2005)

RECENT BOOKS

2009-12-20T22:29:00.002-05:00

Much as I'm really getting into recounting my early reading of '15 books that stayed with me,' I'm also still reading books published in 2009. Here are some recent comments over at The New Haven Review on Philip Roth's The Humbling, and on Paul Auster's Invisible.

WHATCHA READIN?, 7

2009-12-17T12:00:00.004-05:00

11. Samuel Beckett: The Trilogy: Molloy (1950, French; 1955, Grove Press), Malone Dies (1951, French; 1956, Grove Press), The Unnamable (1955, French; 1958, Grove Press) (Irish)

Now we jump forward to the period, 1979-80, when I was 20, living in Philadelphia, and enjoying a spell of unemployment, lasting a little over a year, while not being enrolled in any course of study either. I was studying myself, I guess. The movements of my own mind. I was keeping a journal steadily, so I was always writing. And I was writing poems I was reading publically at local open readings in the city.

My reading was whatever I felt would be most conducive to my growth as a writer. And I feel, in terms of 'books that left a mark,' I should choose something from this time because I really had my antennae out, back then. And what I was after were those figures who did not write 'conventional fiction' in any way, shape, or form. It seems to me I could put forward a few possibilities that I encountered for the first time in this period: Henry Miller (read the two Tropics and also 'The Rosy Crucifixion' trilogy), Vladimir Nabokov (read Lolita and Pale Fire), William Burroughs (read Naked Lunch), and Beckett. It should be noted that all of these books, with the exception of Pale Fire, were first published in America by Grove Press.

So I could say that this was my 'Grove period,' and what that means is that I was interested in narrative more than in what I would at the time have called 'the novel.' The Novel was what Dickens and Dostoyevsky wrote, what Tolstoy and George Eliot wrote, and which continued in our day in the likes of James Michener, Norman Mailer, and so on (Stephen King was starting to get well-known at this time). But there was another strain of writing -- which would get slapped with various terms, 'postmodernist, 'black humorist,' 'anti-novel,' 'fabulist,' and so on -- that didn’t try transporting the reader to a fictionalized version of the real world, a world of things, places, people, and situations, so much as it sought to create a kind of simulacrum of a state of mind.

I don’t mean to put Miller, Nabokov, Burroughs and Beckett all in the same boat, by any means. But what made them 'Grove authors' was their willingness to push the envelope in terms of 'taste,' in a willingness to be as graphic about sex, bodily functions, and the internal workings of the human mind as Joyce was in Ulysses. And being still 'in the midst' of reading Gravity’s Rainbow, I went in search of fiction less novelistic than TP’s. After all, Pynchon’s novel, for all its wild imaginings and playful style, was still recreating, at least in the early going, a time and place: London and environs during the Blitz. It was still a species of historical fiction.

But these guys were not about rendering historical versimilitude in any compelling way. And of them all, Beckett the least so. Miller was more directly autobiographical, and so the story his narrator told was still some version of Henry Miller’s own story, involving Brooklyn, and Manhattan, and Paris, and the kinds of pre-Beats deadbeats and raconteurs and scribblers and prostitutes and show people, etc., he met in those precincts. Nabokov was more deliberately 'meta-fictional,' creating a reasonable facsimile of lived life, but via a strange, cracked looking-glass in which 'the literary' takes precedence over any other kind of life or meaning. And in Burroughs the looking-glass is cracked by hard drugs, which allows life to be at times more raw than in any other writing, but also closer to borderline dementia.

In Beckett, a method was being pursued that dismantled the Novel and arrived somewhere else. Not in 'autobiography,' not in 'metafiction,' and not in hallucination. Beckett inhabits the land of the pure cogito, but a distortion of Descartes’ version, or (depending on your view) a sublime recasting of it. For what Beckett’s narrators face is a simple fact of all writing, no matter what form it takes: 'I think therefore I am' is meaningless to others if there is no record of that 'think': so there must be writing. But then we (or our thought) have to say 'I write therefore I am,' and, with that, something else happens, for what kind of writing is what 'I am'? None is really me, and I am not really any particular kind of writing. And yet, we have to get beyond that to something else: 'it writes therefore I am written.'

Beckett is willing to face, in his wonderfully sinuous prose, that 'something,' some quality of writing itself, is what is causing the words to appear, and, to the extent that what gets written is something in which I am mirrored, or trapped, or, maybe the best word, by which I am addressed, then it is 'me' as, literally, a body of writing.

Since I was mostly writing in a journal at this time, with no effort to create fictions or stories, with no interest in creating art, except, maybe, when I used ragged right margins to suggest that what I was saying wasn’t 'me' so much as spoken by a poetic persona, maybe with a logic dictated by whatever I thought a poem was, I was struck forcefully, inevitably, and eternally by this first reading of Beckett’s three volumes in that little Grove Press paperback.

I’ve since re-read the first, Molloy, a few times, once even in the French original. But I still haven’t gone back to The Unnamable. I now own a nice Everyman’s Library hardback of the three and, one of these days, I’m going to go back there. I do note that I got through these three before I got through Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow or Finnegans Wake, or Proust, and that, perhaps, my willingness to get through them, my need? to do so, was developed by what Beckett did to my head.

THE CDS: The Band

2009-12-08T12:08:00.004-05:00

The Band -- Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson -- were a major musical entity of the ‘60s and early ‘70s that it took me awhile to get around to really listening to. I knew them as the guys who did the original version of 'The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down' which sometimes got airplay, but more often Joan Baez’s cover of it was heard. The first song of theirs I remember on Top 40 was 'Life is a Carnival,' and for awhile, when I was about 12, I contemplated getting the album (Cahoots, 1971, their fourth) because they covered a Dylan song, 'When I Paint My Masterpiece.' In fact, the main claim to fame of The Band was as the guys who backed Dylan on his legendary 'Dylan goes electric' tour. But them days was long gone. Until...

1974, and Dylan was on the road again, with The Band. This still didn’t make me a fan of theirs; I begrudged them their space on Before the Flood, the live album from the tour. Their music struck me at the time as a throwback to rockabilly, a version of Americana I had no real interest -- Brit Invasion brat that I was -- in embracing. My Dylan was the hipster Dylan of the ‘65-‘66 period, not the old folky. And whatever that legendary early tour (in ‘66) with Dylan sounded like (still hadn’t heard the bootlegs at this point), the revamped Dylan/The Band alliance gave us a Dylan ready to do some hog-calling, caterwauling all over the place. It took some getting used to.

Then came that phase, as high school began to come to an end, and as the forces of the ‘70s -- funk and disco, namely -- began to suck my will to live, and glam and prog were mostly kaput, when the only thing to do was return to the ‘60s. So I did, even reading a friend’s old copies of Rolling Stone from those fabled days. And there was Ralph Gleason touting the wonders of those first two albums by The Band, Music from Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969), which I dutifully acquired and gradually began to enjoy. Already, in 1975, the long bootlegged collaborations of Dylan and The Band, set in the house known as Big Pink, had been partially released, cleaned-up and almost commercial quality, as The Basement Tapes. The capper to this incremental interest was Martin Scorsese’s rousing film of The Band’s farewell concert, The Last Waltz, on Thanksgiving, 1977, released to theaters in 1978.

Seeing The Band play live on the big screen confirmed a few things: they weren’t glamour boys, to be sure, but they were extremely able musicians whose interplay was simply great fun as music. This important element of their music had been somewhat lost, I felt, in their studio recordings. The sound of those first two albums already sounded dated and inadequate by the late ‘70s (after all those pristine prog recordings, and in comparison to the likes of Steely Dan where mulit-tracking of perfect studio performances was the ne plus ultra), but it was also the fact that The Band were just better when playing live. This is what gave so much charm to The Basement Tapes, the loose, ‘sit-in and see what happens’ feel to it all. The Band are better the more ramschackle it is.

Of course, in The Last Waltz, they’re all on their best behavior and there are many definitive deliveries on view: 'Stage Fright,' 'The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down,' 'Up on Cripple Creek,' 'It Makes No Difference.' But I still don’t have that on CD. What I do have instead is the double CD release of what had been a double album in ‘72: Rock of Ages. The CD has extra tracks, including four songs with Dylan who showed up to cap the encore of the second night’s show, New Year's Eve, as 1971 became 1972, at Madison Square Garden.

Rock of Ages may be the best album by The Band; they were at their peak during that two night stand, and you can find there all the manifest qualities that made the sound of The Band unmistakable: Levon’s throaty delivery, always so full of vitality, and his crisp, precise drumming; Danko’s tremulous warble, so vulnerable and comical, and his floppy bass lines; Robbie’s needle-like lead guitar punctuations; Garth’s roomy, cathedral-like organ tones; Manuel’s piercing falsetto on 'I Shall Be Released' and his barroom-swagger baritone on 'The Shape I’m In' with his honkytonkin’ electric piano.

Having achieved an Americana -- interesting, considering that all but Helm are from Canada -- that is unique, their music seems more and more to exist in a timeless realm of its own. Sure, it’s the great era of the ‘60s/’70s when rock’n’roll still existed and when it was about musicians making music together more than anything else, but the themes and sounds of their best songs inhabit a world that was already old by then, what the music critic Greil Marcus calls 'Old Weird America,' that time when there was a real culture of the land, when town life wasn’t so homogenized, where idiosyncracies of place abounded. A song like 'The Weight,' maybe their best-known song, captures it all: the play-it-close-to-the-chest utterances of folk wisdom, with about equal measures of wit and dread.

Hats off to The Band!

WHATCHA READIN?, 6

2009-12-05T14:13:00.006-05:00

10. The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke (German; 1923; trans. A. Poulin, Jr., 1977)

It was May of 1978 and I’d never heard of Rilke but for references to him in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow where he is the favorite reading of a German military man, Lt. Weissmann, aka Captain Blicero -- bisexual, sadistic, highly romantic, Wagnerian even. I was in New York for the day and browsing a book store. Seeing the name, I picked it up and started skimming. It was one of those ‘something clicked’ moments, an ‘interpellation.’ Suddenly, I just had to read this because this was for me.

What I saw, it seems to me now, was a glimpse of the full flower of romanticism, but not in the form with which I was previously familiar. I’d carried around in high school The Mentor Book of Major British Poets, including everyone you’d ever need from Wm. Blake to Dylan Thomas, and not long after my Rilke encounter, I would pick up Willis Barnstone’s Modern European Poetry, comprised of translations from major poets writing in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Greek. A bit later, it would be The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann, stretching from Whitman to James Tate. Yes, friends, I read it cover to cover in 1980-81.

But Rilke, even against the backdrop of all those various poets, is a unique read. And the point at which I found him was fateful. There I was, eighteen and never been kissed, and here was a poetry of desire as metaphysical longing. Of ecstasy as transcendence. This was the ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’ era, and I’d had plenty of the latter, my share of the former, but none of the initial term. Rock made sex banal -- the music’s predominant modes were either horniness or bitching and moaning about the fact that it didn’t work out (generally called the blues). Sure, Dylan was different, and I spent a lot of time with his work, even picking up his Writings and Drawings in 1973, but there was still lacking the imperative to romance. One could think: oh, if only I could meet a girl like the ones in Dylan songs, then we’d see . . .

What did Rilke have to do with any of that? It was the timing, pure and simple. It was time to find a girlfriend (being out of school meant being ‘mature’ or something), but Rilke gave that quest an existential coloring: the pursuit of a romantic Other, in other words, could be a personally defining moment, a moment of Being!

I’d been filling notebooks with verse since I was twelve. There had eventually come a hiatus around seventeen. ‘Youth here has end’ and all that. So certainly I already knew about romantic longing, but never was it focused on the here-and-now of my own life. I was not a teenager writing about being a teenager as a day-to-day reality, or writing fantasy exploits or sci-fi escapades. I was putting into words an internal logic -- a ‘romance with the self’ was no doubt how I understood it. And if that sounds a bit masturbatory, well, sure. But that outlet is true of almost anyone; what’s not so often true is the lyrical outpouring of solitary adolescence. Of course I was enamoured of Hesse and German romanticism, and of course Rilke would arrive as the crown upon that throne.

I fell in love with this book, one of those ‘and that has made all the difference’ choices. Being in love with it colored rather drastically what falling in love with a person would be like when it happened. It happened that summer, 1978; I had two females in mind as I read Rilke at the beach that year. I ended up falling in love with both of them, at first kind of simultaneously, then in succession. But that’s another story.

Why is a sequence of elegies the poem of my late-teen romance? Doesn’t that tell you something right there? I could’ve believed that Rilke was under thirty when he wrote these, when I first read them; when I realized they date from his late thirties to late forties, completed only a few years before his death, I could see them as a great summation from one who could shuffle off this mortal coil only after giving us immortal songs of praise and grief, of what it means to be in love with this world and with what Keats calls ‘beauty that must die.’

More than a decade later, in graduate school, talking over Rilke with the German scholar Stanley Corngold, who thanked me for doing the whole Rilkean ‘when a happy thing falls’ number in class (he didn’t feel up to it anymore, he said), Poulin’s translation came up and Stanley belittled it as ‘too Californian new-agey.’ I saw at once that he was right, but that in itself was part of the fatefulness. I was, in ‘78, about as Californian as I would ever be. The previous September I’d heard the Dead play live for the first time -- at Englishtown Raceway in NJ -- and a few months before acquiring Poulin’s Rilke was present at a memorable Jerry Garcia Band show at the Tower in Philly where the vibes were -- to quote Shelley Duvall in Annie Hall (1977) -- transplendent. So, yeah, a happy thing falls, the dead are grateful, times are high, and romance is a way of life -- just ask the angels.

CRITIC AT LARGE

2009-11-12T11:16:00.003-05:00

I will get back to my 'blogocentrism exclusives' shortly, promise. But, as Bonnie Parker would say, 'if you're still in need / of something to read,' you can check out two recent articles by me in The New Haven Advocate this week: one on the Polish theater troupe Theater of the Eighth Day's recent New Haven production of their play Wormwood (1985), the other on Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer-winning book of poems Native Guard (2007).

JUST LIKE JACK FROST'S YULE

2009-11-06T10:47:00.001-05:00

Yes, it's true, Bob Dylan has released an album of Christmas tunes. You can read my take on it here. As if you deserved it, you old humbug.

WHATCHA READIN?, 5

2009-10-31T20:17:00.003-04:00

9. Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (American, 1973)

An English teacher in my high school, who later became a friend and was known for being something of ‘a freak,’ hearing I’d read a bunch of Vonnegut and had recently made it halfway through Ulysses, told me about a crazy book, published a few years before and deemed ‘unreadable’ by the Pulitzer committee, that featured a character who goes down a toilet bowl. He offered it as perhaps the most challenging work of recent fiction.

Not much later, I accepted the challenge. The trip down the toilet didn’t put me off, but I do remember one morning in homeroom reading the infamous Brigadier Pudding shit-eating masochism scene and feeling a bit peculiar in my first few classes that day. I kinda let my reading of the book drift a bit after that, which was spring of 1977. The next time I remember reading the book at length was at the beach in June of 1978. That return was in part inspired by picking up a copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in May of ‘78 (see 'Whatcha Readin? 6'). But even then I didn’t get through GR.

It wasn’t until September 1980 that I finally got through the final third of the book: the end of 'In the Zone' and 'The Counterforce,' and it was then, living in Philadelphia, that I got to know other readers of the book. And every time I crossed paths with someone who had “been there,” who could recall some improbable, baffling, hilarious, inspired, mind-expanding scene in Gravity’s Rainbow, there was a starry-eyed high, a contagious elation. Yes, it’s true, it’s really there because someone else has read it too!

Given my feelings about literature as a field of study (as expressed via Rimbaud in 'Whatcha Readin? 4'), I must’ve needed to find a living literary hero I could believe in. And Pynchon, in his weirdly insular refusal to be a public person, to be, basically, unseen and unheard of since sending a comedian to accept the National Book award for him in 1974, was the ideal figure. In addition to Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, a book I was in love with in those closing months of high school was Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). The deregulation of the senses, capiche? Pynchon’s novel, like nothing else I’d ever seen, felt like the wild imaginings of someone completely outside or beyond the rational norms, the parameters of conventional thought -- whether of history or of narrative or of literature or of myth. The book was paranoid and psychotic, but absurdly so, pushed to the point of clairvoyant vision, or to where that vision must break down before the unprincipled rationales by which the world is run and governed.

Pynchon wasn’t a person. I couldn’t care less about what the guy who perpetrated this did with his days and nights or how he had gotten this incredible thing produced and published. Pynchon was prose, or, even more, 'Pynchon' was the name given to what was going on in my mind while reading this prose. Then I read his previous two novels and saw something else: it’s not 'Pynchon,' because that author has written two other books that, no matter their merits, don’t do what GR does. So, it was the narrator of GR, that unique and unrepeatable performance itself, that was the mainline. And the only place to find that was in GR.

Thus began a love affair that lasted for another four years, or until Slow Learner’s Intro (1984) introduced a guy named Thomas Pynchon who was a writer and who had the proprietary rights to GR (even though he said nothing about that book in the SL intro). And this Pynchon was going to go on with his career, write blurbs and reviews and produce more novels. Fine. But that guy isn’t the narrator of GR. To be a fan of GR was like, oh pick your own example, being a fan of Blonde on Blonde and having someone put one of Dylan’s ‘80s albums on... or of 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and someone puts on 'Silly Love Songs.' Or Kind of Blue, Miles with Coltrane, and now you’re hearing Miles with Chick Corea. There’s a wide difference, not just a difference in the perpetrator of these things, but in the times themselves, in what was possible or imaginable.

It’s here, perhaps, that the point of this exercise of '15 Books That Stayed With You' becomes clearest to me. Because Pynchon is the first person on this list who still has an ongoing career, and so he becomes the best example for how definitive it is, that moment in which a book finds you -- in your own life (I’m insisting on pre-30) -- and in its life. GR found me in the first decade after its publication when it simply made every other work of fiction published in that period feel like an also-ran, written by someone who had largely missed the point of what the decade previous to its publication -- from the assassination of JFK to the impeachment of Nixon essentially -- was 'like.'

Pynchon got it, and he translated that feel into a vast cinematic retrospect on the era --World War II -- he was a child in, and which we all, post-WWII brats, grew up teething on. In other words, it was as timely and as necessary, to my conception of things, as any work of fiction could be. It has been hard for me to imagine ever since how any mere novel could beat its time.

The CDs: Badfinger

2009-10-24T15:53:00.006-04:00

Take a look at these guys: the carefully coiffed hair of the post-Beatles pop-rock band. Badfinger were under the wing of the former mop tops from the get-go. Their first hit was a McCartney composition: ‘Come and Get It.’ And they were signed to Apple Records. On the only album of theirs I own, 1972's Straight Up, George Harrison produces 4 of the 12 tracks and adds his trademark All Things Must Pass era slide to the hit single ‘Day After Day.’ Harrison was supposed to do the whole thing but had to split to help save Bangla Desh, so in the end early ‘70s hit-meister Todd Rundgren took the helm. On the re-mastered CD, six of the tracks are also presented in versions produced by The Beatles’ sound engineer Geoff Emerick.

So, yeah, the sound of Badfinger on Staight Up is as close to The Beatles as you can get at the time. At times, particularly with some of the vocals sporting the husky tone of McCartney’s singing in the later Beatles’ releases, and with the harmonies modelled on the Fab Four, you can almost believe you’re hearing demos of unreleased Beatles material.

Why demos? Because Badfinger never manages the full panoply of The Beatles sound; if you compare this record to Abbey Road, Straight Up is a bit thin. There’s none of the heaviness that The Beatles, largely due to Lennon, mustered for every album. The musical ideas here are serviceable, and what they did rather well, in 1972, is sound just reminiscent enough to give an extra poignancy to radio songs like ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Day After Day,’ 45s that were part of my transition to early ‘teens. The songs have a certain melancholy grandeur I always liked, and still do: ‘looking out of my lonely room / day after day.’ It’s in the ringing sound of the voices and bright guitars chiming so well together.

Hearing the hits in situ with the other tracks, when I first got this CD a few years back (in the beginning of my ‘relive the ‘70s period'), was a bit revelatory. The whole record is satisfyingly listenable, even if --- to sustain my listening -- I have to accept the CD as an album of the period, in a way I don’t for those albums of earlier eras that manage to convince of their intrinsic worth decade after decade. A song like ‘Name of the Game’ is an exceptionable track, standing out because of its anthemic tone. But too much of the stuff tends to blend into a vaguely Beatlesque sound that, one feels, the band simply congratulated themselves on attaining.

After all, this was the early period after The Beatles went their separate ways, and many were still pining for some type of musical reunion. Badfinger, of course, didn’t have the skills to be heir apparents, but they did have enough of the sound to make them, briefly, ‘the poor man’s version.’ At some of the stronger moments on this record, one might believe they could emerge from that founding shadow, but if they dropped the Beatleisms, what would they be? The Joey Molland tunes, as opposed to those by Beatlesque Pete Ham, suggest a kind of lighter Bad Company. And who needs that?

In any case, there they remain: remembrancers of that time when everyone wanted to be The Beatles, except The Beatles themselves.

WHATCHA READIN’?, 4

2009-10-21T01:07:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, Oct. 20th, is Arthur Rimbaud’s day of birth, so, in honor of that, it’s time to do the next book in my list of '15 Books That Stayed With You.'

8. Complete Works, by Arthur Rimbaud (French; trans. by Paul Schmidt, 1976)

Previous to Schmidt’s version, the only complete English Rimbaud, I believe, was Wallace Fowlie’s, which I had gotten from the library sometime earlier in high school, after coming across the name a few times, notably in commentary about Dylan songs like 'Desolation Row.' But Fowlie’s volume, which was bilingual, offered English language versions of the poems that were too stilted, too dependant on the originals. A good way to go if you’re trying to parse what the French says and just want to look at the English for guidance, but it was rare for the English version to read as if it could stand alone. Even the prose sounded too dated. Which of course it was, since Rimbaud wrote the originals of these works from 1869-73, or from age fifteen to nineteen. Try as I might to get into Fowlie’s versions, it just didn’t happen.

Then, in the spring of my senior year of high school, age seventeen, I picked up Schmidt’s version, and fell in love with it. Here were rhythms and locutions that sounded contemporary -- or contemporary enough. Which is to say: contemporary verse, i.e., what was being written and published in 1977, didn’t interest me at all. What I wanted was older stuff that could still fire my imagination with some idea of a great poetic past. And that’s precisely what concerned Rimbaud. In A Season in Hell, written in the most poetic prose I’d ever encountered, he was mourning the end of a poetic past that had occurred sometime before his late teens. Ah, there’s the rub, indeed. That was exactly how I felt too, Arthur. My imagination was much better before I knew it was merely imaginary, so to speak. As a child, in other words.

But there was more to my infatuation with Rimbaud. And I call it that because from about seventeen to twenty-one, when I gave a public reading from Schmidt’s translation at The Painted Bride Art Center on South Street in Philadelphia, A Season in Hell dominated my imagination to a degree that no work of literature had done before or since. Or rather: Hamlet would be the only contender, but it wasn’t the play Hamlet, it was the character Hamlet. And Rimbaud went one better than that because he wasn’t a character. He was a French kid born in Charleville in 1854, and what he wrote, the voices and personae he created, made claims for poetry that were wholly unworkable, but which, for that very reason, were filled with the rapturous grandeur of the poet as eternal teen.

That might well sound insufferable. Everyone likes to denigrate teens, and everyone likes to smile smugly when they recall themselves as teens (if they’re willing to at all). But Rimbaud was no ordinary teen, or maybe he was the quintessence of what the notion of teen should impress on us: no longer a child, but still able to recall what it meant to be a child, what it felt like. Not yet aged into anything like acceptance of the blandness and drudgery of life, still able to experience the mind, the passions, the appetites, the senses, language itself as uncanny presences that simply surge up, that have a logic or an intention all their own, not yet scripted to coincide with some 'purpose' to life, some 'given' or situation in which one must abide and thrive.

Not even writing poetry and having a literary career could qualify as such a purpose for Rimbaud. And that’s probably why I loved him most. He knew it was all bullshit. Parnassus was home to stuffed gods. It didn’t matter that they were technically brilliant, that they were fêted and celebrated and had great accolades and numinous careers. Big fucking deal. They hadn’t re-made poetry, they hadn’t insulted Beauty, they hadn’t dreamed the impossible and then tried to describe it. They persisted with well-made poems placed in respected journals. Quel fucking bore.

But, unlike many an arrogant teen who might thumb his nose at his elders and become a rebel, Rimbaud was truly gifted. He didn’t just contain chaos, he had an amazing facility for making that chaos appear -- for sounding its depths, with a pristine lucidity that probably only a French teen could hope to have.

Rimbaud was thoroughly extravagant, a word I’d rather use than decadent, though he was that too. But decadence too readily conjures the senescent, the too-much-ness of feeling, a satiety that turns to disgust. These indeed were some of Rimbaud’s tones, possibly his favorite pose. But what got to me was his sheer energy. It was like Hamlet berating himself in endless speeches, going on while no one’s listening or, as he says, while he is so 'dreadfully attended.' That’s the feeling I got from Rimbaud too: that challenge: do you get it? Hey, clever poet guy, hey, Mr big name critic, hey, know-it-all scholar, hey, seen-it-all libertine, yeah you. Do you get this? Can you begin to see where it takes you? What it demands of you? No, probably you can't.

Rimbaud runs through the whole vain pageant of what it means to have creative genius -- and then drops it into the ocean. Throws it overboard. Signs off as the winds of change push him toward his twenties. Because sooner or later you’ll have to stop making such faces. You’ll have to join the human race. Rimbaud knew it was an absurd, inescapable fate. And again unlike Hamlet, who couldn’t ever stop being the prince, son of a murdered father, Rimbaud could simply stop being a poet, and he did.

But he left us the purest expression of talents beyond the ability of the person to bear them. The great curse of the poète maudit: to be too much, to have too much to be taken seriously, to be great not simply because one wrote great poems, but because one saw the poet’s fate to be forever cursed, outcast for not cleaning up the act, for daring to insist that poetry can’t really exist and still be poetry. It becomes, as Rimbaud’s mentor, lover, friend, and nemesis Verlaine said, 'literature.'

The difference? As Rimbaud made me see: poetry is the fire of extravagant imagination. It’s something you keep away from people because it will drive them mad. Literature is something you can teach in school to help people think and understand themselves and other people and the human condition, and other humanistic, liberal-minded panaceas ad nauseam.

Hard to get with that program once you’ve spent a season in hell.

FALL REPORT

2009-10-15T16:08:00.003-04:00

So what have I been up to? Well, apart from nursing a very bad back that decided to play havoc with my life late in August, which includes lots of physical therapy and even acupuncture, I've been attending local events and writing about them. Here's me on "Listen Here," a series of readings from short stories by well-known writers at New Haven coffeehouses, and here's me on local collegiate drama: the Yale Cabaret's show of Euripedes' "Orestes," and two one-person shows, called Alter/Egos, and, here, on a multimedia show at the Cab and a production of a Tony Kushner play at the Yale Dramat. There's also a poem of mine from grad school days up at The Dirty Pond, a new online journal established to showcase New Haven locals.

With a back this bad, going any further afield than "local" doesn't seem likely any time soon; thankfully, there's some interesting stuff close to home.

I just checked and it's been over a year since I posted anything about my dear CD collection -- which has grown a little since -- and I really should do something about that soon. Badfinger, The Band, Bauhaus, Syd Barrett ... how long before I get to The Beatles?

And then there's that "Whatcha Readin?" series which I really should finish before the year does.

This year there's no Cinema at the Whitney as a regular, weekly occasion, so no posting about film-going from me. Gee, when's the last time I saw a new release film? But I did have an opportunity to write about the upcoming showing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at Yale, in honor of its 40th anniversary, and in honor of the fact that its director, George Roy Hill, Yale '43, donated materials about the film to his alma mater. I'll post the link when that's up.

But I've also been watching a lot of films at home from the 1970-72 period. I have this somewhat ambitious plan of trying to write commentary on the '70s: films, music, novels, poetry. No drama? Nah, for that I'd rather talk about what I actually attend. The advantage of those other forms -- two I consider narrative, the other two lyrical -- is that one can always return to them at will. And that, at present, is what I'm most willing to do. My working title is: Wish You Were Here: the '70s Revisited.

As Dr. Seuss might say:
I'll make a list, it will grow and grow, will I ever write it? I don't know.

A MASTERFUL 'MASTER BUILDER'

2009-09-29T00:11:00.003-04:00

Henrik Ibsen’s dramas are classics of the theater, and his best known plays lay bare the stultifying social mores of the late 19th century: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler. The later Ibsen, while still based in the naturalism of his main period, moves toward drama that is more symbolic, perhaps even allegorical -- dramas where the astute student of theater might see possibilities opening up for a new age of the stage.

The Yale Repertory’s production of The Master Builder is gloriously evocative of the fresh face of contemporary theater. If the name of Ibsen brings to mind over-stuffed drawing-rooms and imperious stage-directions where neurasthentic types pine with Norwegian yearning, banish those thoughts at once. The set design by Timothy Brown is wide open, expressionistic -- the characters stand on a stage that seems to be the side of a house climbing into the heavens upstage -- and allows the actors to make full use of space as they seem to ricochet off one another in an urgent ballet of feeling.

Given the theme of the rapturous climb to great heights -- both literal and figurative -- in the play, the set alerts us at once to the possibility for soaring above the quotidian that master builder Halvard Solness finds in Hilda Wangel, a young visitor from his past. Swept off her feet as a girl of thirteen when the majestic master builder climbed to the top of a high tower he designed and built to plant a victory wreath, she also insists he kissed her ‘many times’ when he found her alone later, and claimed he would come carry her off ‘like a troll’ to a kingdom in ten years’ time. The ten years are up, and Hilda wants her kingdom.

The Halvard Hilda finds is a driven man, but one who is also desperate -- worried about ‘the young’ who will make him step aside (particularly in the form of Ragnar Brovnik, an apprentice architect who Halvard ‘keeps down’ by not giving him any projects of his own), and preying upon youth by beguiling Brovnik’s fiancee, Kaia, so that she will remain in Halvard’s employ, thus giving Ragnar reason to stay. It’s an untenable situation that is beginning to fray and Halvard knows it, not least because Ragnar’s father, once Halvard’s superior, is near death and wants to see his son amount to something on his own before he dies.

Into this dense situation, Hilda arrives with the force of visionary destiny, suddenly inspiring Halvard with her muse-like presence and youthful attachment to his former grand figure, but also sharing in the confidences of past tragedy and loss in the Solness marriage, as well as learning of Halvard’s great burden of guilt. Can the master builder put all this aside and rise again to the glory he finds in her eyes?

As Halvard, David Chandler is as mercurial as the part demands -- at times, forthright and earnest, at times cold, unyielding and almost diabolical. He is tender about his wife, in her absence, but uncomfortable in her presence. He is direct with the doctor who tries to sound him out on his relation to Kaia, but is also superstitiously arrogant about his ability to control others through his own mind. Coiled with the exasperation of the man of talent beset by the demands of others, Mr. Chandler flings his expressive body all about the stage with the passion that Hilda brings to the surface. We see a man struggling, in almost every movement, to determine if his desires can overcome his misgivings.

And as Hilda, Susan Heyward is a thrilling delight. Girlish, willful, and remarkably quick on the uptake, Hilda, as written, could easily seem more sprite than person, a creature of Halvard’s Id suddenly incarnated in the flesh. As incorporated in Ms. Heyward, Hilda is nearly ecstatic with the force of her effect on her revered master builder, and plays with him through an intuitive grasp of what they might mean for each other. And though, as Ibsen not doubt intended, Hilda’s actual psychology remains a mystery, Ms. Heyward gives us every reason to believe in the spell that Halvard falls under in her presence -- a spell predicated on her conviction of his greatness.

In the supporting cast, Felicity Jones’ Aline Solness is regal in a gorgeous black gown, displaying, with her mere presence, the sad memories that cling to the marriage, but also giving the dialogue a comic edge as the long-suffering wife all-too-knowing about her husband’s need for young, female devotees. And Slate Holmgren, as Ragnar, does much with a part that’s easy to overlook, particularly in his scene late in the play with Hilda, where, though she mocks him as a mere upstart, we can see in his self-possession the possibility of another master builder in the making.

Credit for this version’s success rests most securely, no doubt, on director Evan Yionoulis. In the “Talk Back” with the audience after the Saturday matinee performance, several in the cast spoke of her ability to ‘calibrate’ their performances to the right nuance -- and much of that nuance itself depends on the translation by Paul Walsh. The dialogue seems unforced and direct -- even when Solness and Hilda extemporize on Vikings and trolls (figures of baleful power Ibsen felt himself at times to be in league with) -- and sounds modern without straying into contemporary locutions.

And what does the play say to us now, more than a century and a decade after it was written? Ibsen’s powerful presentations -- of a man of power abusing that power, of a man of talent seeking some new inspiration, of a man of years trying to revitalize himself, of a marriage that persists without ever freeing itself of its past, where tragedy, rather than ending the couple, made them what they are, and of a young woman’s seeming power to see the future and be the future -- never become dated. So, what do you see when the still great, but slipping, figure climbs that tower in the end -- hubris? inspiration? despair? need? A struggle against time, against mediocrity, against life itself? Or a deluded effort to assert something whose day is done? Then ask yourself: what does Hilda see?

WHATCHA READIN?, 3

2009-09-11T13:55:00.006-04:00

Continuing commentary on ‘15 Books That Made a Difference.'

7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925, American)

As with Ulysses, Gatsby is another work destined to become a ‘modernist classic.’ Unlike Ulysses, Gatsby had the distinction of being one of the few novels assigned for reading in my high school that I actually embraced as worthwhile. It was assigned in 12th grade, but I’d read it the summer between 9th and 10th when the film by Jack Clayton, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, was released. It then became my task to see how ‘pure’ the film could be in terms of depicting the book. The film is remarkably faithful, which is one reason it’s not much admired as a film. Literature doesn’t make for good cinema. And yet I have a very real fondness for the film (Sam Waterston is the perfect Nick Carraway) and an even greater regard for the novel.

Still not ‘contemporary,’ Fitzgerald’s prose is closer to me than anything so far on this list. Joyce wrote Ulysses in the teens and twenties, but set the novel just after the turn of the century, the time of his own youth. Fitzgerald writes about the twenties in the twenties. My parents were born at the end of the twenties, and so this tale speaks of a time, pre-WWII, that they could recall and evoke for their kids. And the ash-heaps in which Wilson works smacks of the Depression era that would arrive after those flashy jazz era days that Fitzgerald is forever associated with. Then too, this is an American story, and one that, for many, is definitive: the rise to riches in pursuit of an elusive goal, to offset the notion that gaining wealth could be an end in itself, but also bringing to bear the sense that those from ‘below’ who aspire to the world of those ‘above’ will end badly because delusion, unlike privilege, is never its own reward.

What I primarily retain of this work is how the prose glows, how exact it is, and yet able to be lyrical, and comical, and thoughtful, without ever extending itself beyond the parameters of a ‘good read.’ It’s got the classic opening, the classic close, and depicts events that Nick the narrator seems to be ‘turning over in his mind ever since.’ As if there’s no quite satisfying way to sum up such longing, heartache, loss -- on Gatsby’s side, nor such indifference or self-involvement -- on the Buchanans’, nor such grotesque facts as the ability of the world they inhabit to cross paths, fatally, fatefully, with the world of the Wilsons.

It’s America, buddy, or at least the East Coast version. I give Gatsby, as a novel, great credit for acclimating me to the ‘idea of America,’ for literary purposes. For some, that sense of peculiar Americanness might come from something like Huckleberry Finn, from something with more of the mythic sense of space, and the tangled sense of race, that we recognize as irrevocably American, but let’s just say I’m more characteristically an Emily Dickinson shut-in than an expansive yawping Whitman, and for me America, to have any purchase on my imagination, must, as Gatsby’s father, Mr. Gatz, says of his son, Jay, rise to success in the East. Provincial? Certainly, but it’s a province, running from Boston to DC, that incorporates both the origins and in some sense the ‘last stand’ of this country. I don’t pretend to understand it, I just know it’s where I’ve always lived, and from that perspective, Daisy’s Louisville is indeed a mythic space out on the fringes of the known world (still East of the Mississippi) where a young ‘poor boy’ from North Dakota can find a vision to govern his life, and to make it all go down on Long Island rather than in Hollywood or LA is, perhaps, dated, but it’s also a factor that makes the book one of the essentials, to me.

(For previous entries in the 'Whatcha Readin?' series, see sidebar.)

BOOK REVIEW

2009-09-08T18:15:00.003-04:00

My review of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice is now up at Quarterly Conversation. In a forthcoming issue, I may have an article on TP's three California novels, picking up from some comments I made earlier on blogocentrism ('trilogy' and all that stuff).

STRANDED

2009-08-31T00:47:00.006-04:00

When I heard Mark Strand read at Yale the end of spring semester from his New Selected (2009), I resolved to get a copy and read through it. The only previous volume of his I’d read in its entirety was Dark Harbor (1993), but I dipped into his earlier Selected (1980) sometime between Dark Harbor and the end of the ‘90s, and read a selection from Man and Camel (2006) shortly after it came out. The impression I’d had that Strand’s work inhabits a certain constant place is sustained by this reading, and it’s fitting that the New Selected should emerge after Man and Camel. There is a wryness in the latter volume that creates a tone that, I realize now, inhabits much of Strand’s verse from the earliest, but which wasn’t quite so forcefully apparent before, to me, at least. His reading was so affable, jocose even, that the sense of the poems as austere imaginative landscapes into which one peers with metaphysical intent collapsed somewhat, leaving a stronger sense of a playfulness I associate with French poetry derived from the symbolistes.

Certainly, that’s no surprising identification. Strand’s poems have always been inflected by a sense of words as symbolic more than descriptive. He’s about as far from being a nature poet, who yet describes a natural world, as one could be. He’s also rather far removed from confessional verse, even though he does at times clearly write about himself, or as himself. And that, to me, is where the lesson of symbolist poetry comes into play: it allows one to write in a voice that treats the natural world, and oneself as a member of the natural world, as an occasion for certain kinds of lingusitic organization. In other words, such poems are not meant to create a scene to contemplate, or to reveal the dramatic movement of events, but are aimed to make a statement. To create a poem is to offer a kind of précis that renders the state of consciousness, that articulates a grasp of lyric presence, or rather articulates the lyric presence that we might spend our whole lives trying to grasp.

This makes Strand sound rather abstract and the odd thing is that he really doesn’t seem to be, even though he often is. The trick of Strand’s verse is to appear completely’natural’ while talking in the most indirect way possible. The reader is almost fooled by the directness of his language, and by the fact that nothing so very different from how prose works is happening, into thinking that the poems are simple, direct statements. It’s only when one tries to parse what a poem is saying, when one tries to place interpretive weight on this or that word or phrase, that one realizes that an odd sleight-of-hand takes place: it’s almost impossible to find the load-bearing supports, as it were. Strand’s poems tell us everything we need to know at once, but almost invariably leave us wondering what they’ve said.

Sometimes, as with 'Man and Camel,' the sense of parabolic meaning is so deliberate its effect becomes quite funny. For Strand has a very dry sense of humor and he knows how to use it. He’s able to make us feel in on a joke that may very well be played on us nevertheless. And that ‘joke,’ in all its wry charm, is that saying something profound, in poetry, is a kind of ‘kidding.’ It’s as if we say, upon reading the poem, ‘you must be joking,’ uncertain whether we mean: the joke is the point of the poem, or the joke is that we accept the poem as a poem.

That may sound like I’m saying that the poems are funny, or that’s it’s funny to call them poems, but that really isn’t what I mean. The poems are often quite solemn, and they are indeed ‘austere’ in the sense that they don’t seek out fun and music and sensuous detail, very little in the way of sound effects or vivid impressions. 'I walk / into what light / there is.' This, we can say, is so pared down as to be almost minimalist. The ability to be so toneless is not easy, and its goal seems to be to be read as if the page itself speaks. There are a lot of imperative sentences, words that simply surface and command our hearing. And the actions are generally simple too: walking, looking, speaking, writing, sitting, thinking; sometimes there are dreams. Nothing very much happens, but everything is poised to happen because each poem is running a course, moving to an end that will clarify its intention, its statement. As with this poem, from Darker, way back in 1970:

The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

It seems to me that this poem is in someways the start of Strand’s poetic project; it pretty much contains everything his poems will do as he matures. The fact that this is offered as ‘remains’ lets us know something: what remains after the essential paring down is what the poetry consists of: a series of statements. Sometimes the statement -- the actual breath and sentence of the poem -- will be the entire poem, one flowing thought. But more often the movement of the thought will be cut up, either by short sentences, as here, or by very short line breaks. In either case, the pacing is very deliberate, and is necessary for the effect achieved, an effect suggested in this poem by the line 'The hours have done their job.' For this definite pacing is a matter of time, or, as with jokes, timing. We have to arrive at completion, at what remains, by very deliberate steps: names, pockets, shoes, road, clocks, photos, boy.

The nouns are so precise and yet so generic; we could almost accuse Strand of seeking out a poetry of the generic. If that were all he were doing, it might be interesting enough for a volume or two, but there is always more at stake because the generic always becomes the allegorical: 'The words follow each other downwind'; and the metaphysical: 'Time tells me what I am.' But there are other registers Strand exploits that are here too: the familial thread is alive in each stanza, from ‘family album’ to ‘my wife’ to ‘my parents,’ so that affective relations, the human community, is always ready to burst into Strand’s meditation (as ‘the man’ that appears in a number of signal poems). And the gesture toward nature or to metaphor (both of which are sometimes greater than here): ‘the milky rooms of clouds,’ can bring a clear, unforced lyricism to bear at any moment.

So what is the poem’s statement? Much depends on whether you view the final verse as illustrating futility (‘What good does it do?’) or whether it has managed -- the very ideal of sleight-of-hand -- to slyly change the terms while we were looking. ‘How can I sing? / Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.’ We are bordering on ‘I am that I am’; could God sing a song of praise? Or, what would God praise other than himself? The parents off their thrones and in their clouds is a joke image; the wife is sent away from this paradise of self-knowing, self-perpetuating Godhead. All the other names are vacated. Only the one remains. The poem is stuck constantly in the groove of its own making, like a needle stuck on a record. Empty/remain; empty/remain, ad infinitum.

And that is Strand’s characteristic jest, to start singing just when about to be cut-off, to point the way out as he leads us back to the start. In 'The Monument,' a long poem, written in prose as responses to quotations primarily from other poets, Strand says: 'my voice is sufficient to make The Monument out of this moment.' To make a monument of any moment, one need only write a poem, but it will be a poem which conceives of each moment, any moment, as monumental.

Reading through the 267 pages of poetry in this volume, covering forty-two years of publication, one is struck again and again by Strand’s fidelity to that task. His ability to bring it off is based upon that keen sense of emptying and grasping what remains, but it’s also based on what I take to be the jest of originary utterance. God, the Hebrew scriptures tell us, spoke first and created everything. After that, there can be no originary utterance. The poet, in enunciating his poem, speaks in an ancillary manner that purports to begin things again, to empty, or to praise, but there is always the remainder of that pre-existing world. Strand is far too canny to take that as a point of despair or of futility if only because the mind allows words to happen to it, and when they do, there is no telling what possibilities for speech might also remain, or, as I like to say, surface.

Here’s Strand, in 2006, evoking the magic of one of his favorite natural objects, the moon. We can easily read the moon’s symbolic meaning of satellite, of heavenly object visible only by virtue of the great shining of the sun, and yet, for all that, visibly reigning in the sky when the sun is invisible, but Strand is able to invest the moon with all meaning we find in mirrors, in indirect figures for our dependent and never quite transcendent condition, and to make it finally a figure for the truth, maybe even the joy, of that condition, though it remains as a memory of something we have to try to experience (or grasp, or understand) again:

Moon

Open the book of evening to the page
where the moon, always the moon, appears

between two clouds, moving so slowly that hours
will seem to have passed before you reach the next page

where the moon, now brighter, lowers a path
to lead you away from what you have known

into those places where what you had wished for happens,
its lone syllable like a sentence poised

at the edge of sense, waiting for you to say its name
once more as you lift your eyes from the page

and close the book, still feeling what it was like
to dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.

Here the moon is closely identified with the page, the path, ‘those places where what you had wished for happens’ (baldly stated wish-fulfillment!), and name. Appropriately enough, after the above, the ‘name’ is something still to come rather than something ‘emptied,’ as in ‘The Remains,’ and its arrival -- our glimpse of the originary utterance -- comes to us as a memory which we would return to: ‘what it was like’ in ‘that sudden paradise of sound’ that is the name. But the name does not appear here, and only when we reach the word ‘sound’ do we know that it was uttered -- ‘moon,’ ostensibly, but the word that said ‘let there be light and there was light’ certainly lurks in (or shines forth from) that utterance, which we can only see ‘reflected’ by the moon, afloat on the book of evening, which we have just closed but which our memory of ‘that light’ will cause us to open again, and again, and again. World without end. Where we remain . . . stranded.

LYRIC OCCASIONS

2009-08-27T23:25:00.003-04:00

‘We can put up with someone’s narcissism providing it makes interesting reading and it doesn’t run on too long.’–Charles Simic, ‘The Power of Ruins’ (review of Louise Glück’s Averno in NYRB)

Lyric poetry is an acquired taste, and I wonder sometimes why I’ve acquired it, or to what extent I have. Song lyrics are easier to remember and more ubiquitous. Fully realized depictions of the life of any era can be found in novels, in films. The quirks of individual character are more fully realized in those narrative forms as well. To say that lyric poetry is ‘about language,’ in a way that no other form of writing is, does make a case for it, but it’s a claim that is reductive rather than expansive -- unless, that is, you happen to think like a lyric poet and believe that ‘language’ includes everything. And that’s the jist of it all, I’d say: ‘thinking like a lyric poet.’ That’s the knack that must be acquired; so let’s say lyric poetry is an acquired knack, and that, once you’ve got the knack of believing language is everything, then you can develop a taste for it.

But what will your taste in lyric poetry be determined by? Your ear, certainly. Your sense of rhythm, yes. But also your sense of the possibility that language can represent something, make perceptible something, that otherwise could not be apprehended, that is simply not available in any other use of language. And, it seems to me, that that ‘something’ depends upon a lyrical self, an understood, implied enunciator of the poem. Even if we trust that the poem simply consists of words arranged strategically on a page, we accept a phenomenological given that the words did not appear there by chance. Someone arranged them that way, and that ‘someone’ remains present, inferred as what we sometimes call ‘the voice’ of the poem, sometimes ‘the speaker’ of the poem, sometimes, ‘the poet.’ But whatever we call this entity, we understand that we mean that part of us that sounds the words of the poem internally, that responds to a previous shaping of language and a transmission of content, and that our grasp of that -- the shaping and the transmission and the sounding -- constitutes an experience of the poem and, if we can focus, a performance of the lyrical self the poem manifests. And if the poem was created ‘by chance’ by a machine or logorhythm? Then the lyrical self we infer is the ‘ghost in the machine,’ that part of consciousness which simply inhabits language, or, if you like, is forever ‘haunted’ or ‘possessed’ by language, for no use of language is ever ‘innocent’ of complicity with human utterance, or denuded of the power of speech as we first experienced it in some daze-shattering moment when words were addressed to any one of us, and there was no escape, nor any denial of the fact that we heard and understood.

And ‘taste’ comes in as the extent to which we feel ourselves addressed by the kind of utterance we find in the poem, and whether or not we feel ouselves -- our lyrical selves -- to be stimulated or challenged or upbraided or intoxicated or mystified or whatever state you desire (for your desire, as reader, is always at stake). In my own case, ‘thinking like a lyric poet,’ when it happens, bypasses ‘thinking like a literary critic,’ which is to say that those lyric poets who ‘score’ most with me make me forget my own taste, my own intentions for language, my own limited grasp of myself. They remake my relation to language; they add to what I can imagine words doing. And when this doesn’t happen, then all I can see is how someone has wilfully distorted the perfectly suitable relation I had to language and to lyricism and to beauty and to all those other things I assume to be the aesthetic occasion of the lyric poem, or, worse, how someone has tried to approximate something I’ve already experienced, processed, understood, and has not done it well enough for me to recognize it, or has done it so poorly or erratically that I don’t want to recognize it. There are so many ways that language -- as rhetoric -- fails to achieve its intentions, it’s a wonder any poems succeed at all. But that precisely is the tightrope walk, the difficult task of trying to speak in an unprecedented way, and of trying to convey an originary idea, a shaping occasion for a definitive performance.

What Charles Simic suggests in the line I’ve quoted as epigram is something I do indeed recognize, for I’d say that, deep down, I concur with this view. My critical cavil at any particular lyrical poem will have to do, ultimately, with the degree to which I find it narcissistic, which is to say, fixated upon the lyric self to such an extent that it forecloses my participation. To read the poem, I have to believe emphatically in the self that the poet displays, and my skepticism will keep rising accordingly. One could say such a poet, like Whitman, says ‘what I assume you shall assume,’ and I’ll admit that Whitman’s presumption of my interest and pre-emption of my own fledgling narcissism made me keep a distance from him for quite some time. It was only when I recognized that what Whitman was defining was the necessary act of ‘thinking like a lyric poet,’ that I ‘signed on’ as it were, boarded ship and took to the high seas with him. But that’s a big step, a leap as existential as any one can make, because it happens at the level of one’s individualized grasp of language as, whatever else it may be, one’s own tool for making oneself understood. If I have to assume what Whitman assumes, then I have to accept that his language is my language.

That kind of concession is not easily given, and that’s why I agree with Simic here: if I’m going to concede at all -- if I’m going to accept the willful narcissism of self-display in language -- then the self on display in the poems better be interesting, and not wear out its welcome. Or, as Simic says in his review of Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems: ‘there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading.’ I like that phrase ‘worth reading,’ for the minute one thinks, when reading a poem, ‘why am I reading this?,’ it’s all over. The spell is broken. The difficult attention will not come back. The pleasure in the liberties taken turn to irritation or boredom. The great affair is over. All one sees is a showy bravado; at best one is grudgingly entertained at the notion of the poem as an experience -- as for instance in that smile of embarrassed refusal that can be seen on the face of a young weaned child at the notion of suckling the maternal breast. As if!

All of this is preamble to talking about a book of poems I read this summer -- Mark Strand’s New Selected Poems (2009) -- but I’ll get to that next time.

(The quotations from Simic are taken from a collection of his reviews: The Renegade. Writings on poetry and a few other things, George Braziller, NY, 2009)

AT FIFTY

2009-08-12T10:22:00.003-04:00

I’m turning 50 next week, and I have to say it’s one of those milestones of aging that actually feels like one. Of course, one of the interesting things about being born in a year that ends in ‘9,’ is that you always hit a round number as a decade comes to its end. It was particularly notable to be turning 40 in 1999, as the twentieth century ended; if one lives to be 80, one will have lived 40 years in each century, a neat divide that is appealing for some reason.

But, as a milestone age, turning 50 immediately caused me to wonder what works were also hitting that half-century mark. Here are a few notables I don’t mind sharing the milestone with:

The 400 Blows (Les quatre cent coups): François Truffaut’s debut film which helped to establish “Nouvelle Vague” cinema, following on the heels of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless of the previous year. When I finally got around to seeing this film, in my 30s, I was delighted by the character of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), to some extent Truffaut’s alter-ego, in his hapless efforts to get along in a school system and in a family situation where he feels alienated for no particular reason. Or rather the reasons could be many, but none are needed; the film simply gets right the feeling of youth in the post-war world having to make its own way because so much is changing. Particularly memorable, to me, was the scene when Antoine becomes enamored of Balzac and writes a homage that is essentially plagiarism, and is treated as such, but which is also a naive effort to emulate a master. The effort to pawn the bulky typewriter is also a classic bit of bathetic comedy. And that final shot against the sea lives on long after the film is over: Antoine looks equal to whatever life has in store for him, but also seems conscious of himself for the first time.

‘Mack the Knife,’ by Bobby Darrin. This song happened to be #1 on Billboard the week I was born, won the Grammy for Record of the Year, and by coincidence has long been one of my favorite songs of the pre-Beatles era. Darrin’s performance is so definitive, I’ve never been able to take seriously any other recording of the song. The horns kick and his delivery is so full of infectious energy while singing about such dastardly doings, or what my sister likes to call ‘murder and mayhem.’ Just listen to how he sings ‘spends just like a sailor.’ Five’ll getcha ten…

Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis (released the day I was born). This is an album I didn’t get to know till my 40s, but it’s one of those quintessential albums in the sense that it’s how I always thought a jazz album should sound. Bluesy, lyrical, melancholy, but with such brightness in the horns and grandeur in the piano, and with improvisatory playing that, no matter how often you play it (and I’ve put it on repeat play through a long night here and there), never quite becomes familiar. It’s simply a gorgeous record.

Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs. In fact, the version that was published in 1959, by the Olympia Press, is different from the version published by Grove in 1962, the latter being the version I read for the first time in 1980. What this novel does to the novel is unforgettable: it simply overruns notions of plot and characterization with bizarre scenes and hallucinatory prose. It’s as if all those expectations that there should arrive a fiction capable of entertaining readers who had spent time with Rimbaud and Lautréamont and Artaud, as well as Westerns and sci-fi movies, not to mention porn and sensational tales of gays, hookers, junkies and derelicts, were finally fulfilled by a writer who understood that, after Beckett, the purpose of prose was consciousness laid bare, bereft of any intellectual or moral solace. And yet funny as well, with the ghastly, mordant humor of the eternal outsider able, in the end and for no easily discernible reason, to address you, hypocrite lecteur, companionably. Wouldn’t you?

‘The Small Rain,’ Thomas Pynchon’s first published story, in a college mag The Cornell Writer. It’s not a very good story, but it is included in Slow Learner. As the work of a college student, it makes us reflect on how vulnerable all beginnings are. I mention it because TP released his seventh novel this month, fifty years after it all began. Cheers!

WHATCHA READIN?, 2

2009-08-06T01:08:00.010-04:00

Back in June, I started a post about '15 books that left a mark on me,' from earliest reading, and covered the first five. Here's a bit on the next biggie, which I happen to be teaching a class on this summer, which ends today. So, here's to From Stately, plump to yes I will yes.

6. Ulysses (1922)--James Joyce (Irish)

My first attempt was in high school, eleventh grade. Up unto that point, modern prose was whatever I met with in the paperbacks of the day - Ray Bradbury, tales of sci-fi and the fantastic - with a more artistic version provided by translations of Hesse, by Orwell and Huxley, but with little sense of the tradition out of which Joyce’s prose came: no Flaubert, but translated glimpses of Baudelaire and the symbolistes, Fowlie’s Rimbaud. Thankfully, more than a passing notion of Ibsen.

That first time I got as far as the opening of Chapter 14: 'Oxen of the Sun.' I couldn’t have made that statement at the time. I didn’t know the Homeric titles, and the chapters were unnumbered in that old Random House edition. I only knew I'd reached the paragraph beginning, 'Universally that person’s acumen ...' and could in no wise parse it. Skipping ahead a few pages, nothing cleared up. Was I still in the same book? When comprehension flags, so does attention. Put it aside.

Still, that first foray was instructive. The first three chapters – Dedalus’s - were like nothing I’d ever read. Later, I learned to call this ‘modernist,’ but at the time all I was aware of was a command of language more immediate and notable than in poems of our century, a prose in which rhythmic units were not guided by line breaks, but by as faultless and unmatched an ear for the aural dynamics of language as could be imagined. As ‘modern’ as anything, I thought, but dated too. Stephen Dedalus was not my contemporary, but he had my interests at heart. He was bored by everything anyone told him using the old style vocabularies, using ‘everyday speech.’ He had to find his space in an alienated relation to his mother tongue -- he needed Church Latin, Scholasticism, Elizabethan English, the wit of Swift and Wilde.

Raised Catholic, educated in a parochial school for eight years, I was familiar with some of those churchy rhythms, with the innotation of King James gospels read aloud, and had already gained a love of Shakespeare through memorization of speeches in Macbeth and Hamlet. Which is to say that the spell of Dedalus was immediate enough, was -- even with that dire and debilitating sense of Dublin’s paralysis that weighed on him -- oddly comparable to the shrunken prospects for language in a middling suburb in the mid-Atlantic States in the middle of the 1970s.

And somewhere in my mind's eye, reading Ulysses, was a vision of what my unknown Irish ancestor must have left behind in coming to America, and even a sense, glimpsed in more ethnic parishes than the one I belonged to, of what part Catholicism played or could play in national identity. Joyce showed me a city, a nation, where priests set the tone.

In that first reading, there were so many glimpses of a different way of doing things, of presenting experience in such a direct and inimical way: the vigor of Malachi Mulligan’s mind in his relentless jests, so performative, so cinematic -- he enters the book as if aware a camera is on him; the touchingly private moment of Bloom’s visit to the jakes, so simple, so elemental even; Father Conmee, so reassuringly banal, an image answered by watching priests on the schoolyard; even the periods of blank confusion -- who is who in the newspaper chapter, in the cemetery chapter, in the many bar scenes -- could be offset by such striking moments: the men spying on the barmaids who spy on the street outside, the dissatisfactions of the funeral service and the ghoulish nature of burial, the hilarious leaps into verbal absurdity in 'Cyclops,' the rapid-fire witticisms and asides in 'Aeolus.'

But nothing stunned me as much as the 'dancing coins' on pious Deasy’s shoulders, and nothing captured my mind and heart like the love of language, the sheer verve of the art of discourse, as in Dedalus alone on the strand. For a would-be poet, every walk along the beach is a walk into eternity, and Joyce’s rendering of the nature of such reverie as a constant making and unmaking of thought, a search for constructions to place on reality, is an odyssey in itself, a depiction in miniature of the liberties his new stream-of-consciousness could take in its flow over objects, through time and space, arrested only by the odd intuition that words might be as palpable as shells and as scattered.

To Be Continued

JUST ANOTHER BAND FROM L.A.?

2009-07-29T00:27:00.006-04:00

As I went out one morning a few weeks ago, there was a package at my door. It contained Inherent Vice, the new Thomas Pynchon novel due in stores next Tuesday. The book came my way because I sought the opportunity to review it soon after hearing, not that long ago, that a new Pynchon novel was scheduled for release this summer. As followers of Pynchon no doubt know, his previous novel appeared in November 2006, less than three years ago. Sure, there was only three years between his first novel V. (1963) and his shortest novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), but it’s been some time since any Pynchon opus was followed so quickly by a new work. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) was seven years after Lot 49, and then there was no new work until a funny, friendly intro to his old short stories, ten years after his National Book Award in 1974. Finally, in 1990, Vineland, a new novel appeared, seventeen years after GR. Then, a mere seven years later, the massive Mason & Dixon in 1997. Almost another decade would pass before Against the Day, formidable at over 1,000 pages, arrived. So, by any estimation, the new novel, at 369 pages, is a quick turn-around for the Reclusive One.

It should be noted too, going in, that TP’s short novels are set in California, predominantly. Lot 49, Vineland, and now Inherent Vice. We can think 'California trilogy' if we’re so inclined. And I must add that I’m both inclined and not inclined. I’m inclined because, yes, all three, besides taking CA as their location, also all take a certain 'California State of Mind' as their main theme. When the smoke clears -- and need I tell you what kind of smoke it is? -- what the three novels share is TP’s penchant for both basking in and gently needling the predominant culture of California in the era from the mid-sixties to the early seventies. Indeed, Lot 49 was set only a few years before the year of its publication, lending it an immediacy of setting not common in Pynchon’s works. Vineland, set in 1984, looked back both at the era of Reagan’s re-election and of Nixon’s first term and suggested that, bummer-wise, they had a lot in common, though the Reagan years were worse due to all the ‘karmic adjustments’ that had to be made because of how the Sixties went down. Now, we’re back in Nixonland again, summer of 1970, a year after the Manson murders, about to go to trial, a recurring reference point à la Joan Didion’s take on the Californian ramifications of that event in her essay 'The White Album.'

Why I’m not inclined? No particular reason, I suppose, other than a certain Imp of the Perverse which makes me want to read each of the three CA novels more in terms of what they mean in their particular moments rather than what they mean yoked together as a connect-the-dots of California culture as presented by everyone’s favorite Paranoid Author. In other words, each of the three CA novels feels to me motivated by a completely different ‘trip.’ In Lot 49, the novel is ahead of the curve, satirizing aspects of the day -- who can forget DJ Mucho Maas explaining the effects of LSD -- that hadn’t quite become common currency in 1966, to say nothing of its glance at the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as something simply in the air, though major protests at non-Californian universities were yet to come.

In Vineland, the task was to remind all those who might like to bury their memories of those days, as they rode whatever conservative and generally more lucrative bandwagon through the soulless hype of the Reagan years. But it should be said that the narrative voice of Vineland was more complex than many of its initial reviewers gave it credit for. It wasn’t simply a ‘nostalgia’ trip in which TP, suffering from Tubal Addiction and jonesing for the heady days of tie-dye and patchouli, tried to reignite synapses long grown dormant. The attitude was wiser, sympathetic, but ultimately skeptical, though not snide. A bit like Frank Zappa’s attitude to hippiedom in its heyday, but more affectionate toward those ‘hungry freaks, daddy.’

Then too, both Lot 49 and Vineland treat different aspects of CA: for Lot 49 it’s the area around SF with forays to the fictional San Narciso, closer to L.A. For Vineland, it’s northern CA, Humboldt County, in 1984, with the College of the Surf shenanigans of the Sixties set between San Diego and San Clemente. And this time, in Inherent Vice, it’s L.A. all the way. The prose, enacted through the viewpoint of a Private Eye named Doc Sportello, reads like Raymond Chandler meets Hunter Thompson, and each finds the other simpatico: ‘hard-boiled’ becomes ‘head-fried.’ But one senses the book had to get into print fast, while the ‘groovy vibes’ of Obama-mania are still in the popular consciousness, and that whole Ding-Dong-The-Witch-Is-Dead thing might support cranking back into a simpler time and place where Chinatown’s Jay Gittes and Easy Rider’s Billy are, like, one.

I haven't finished reading it yet, but it’s easily TP’s lightest novel, his most simply entertaining. It might even become one of his most popular if its target audience can stop watching Nick at Nite broadcasts of the TV shows of the era and/or replays of The Big Lebowski long enough to get on board. And I wish we all could be California PIs ...

I HATE MY GENERATION

2009-07-15T02:07:00.003-04:00

I hate my generation, I offer no apologies
I hate my generation, yeah–Cracker

My recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show 'The Pictures Generation, 1974-84' made this song, from 1996, leap to mind. Interestingly, in her review of the show for the Village Voice, Martha Schwendener bookended her take on the show with two generational markers: a comment from a seventy-something viewer (‘I have no appreciation for this’) and an anecdote by Robert Longo (one of the artists in the show) in which a 15-year-old asked if he got the idea for his Men in the Cities drawings from an iPod ad. Schwendener uses these bookends to talk about how art is generational, marked by what’s in the air at a given time; art can be distanced from us by the convictions we’ve spent a lifetime acquiring (the seventy-year-old), or as immediate as our own ignorance (the 15-year-old).

I appropriate Schwendener’s opening as my opening because I’m supposedly ‘of’ the ‘generation’ being represented in this show. Which is to say that the artists represented, born from the mid-40s to the mid-50s for the most part, are from fifteen to five years older than I am. In 1977, when the Pictures show was up at Artists Space, that seminal event from which this exhibit, curated by Douglas Eklund, takes its name, I graduated from high school. So these artists are my elders in the way that older siblings and such can be: which is to say: annoying in their know-it-all cool, their endgame of art as no longer having ‘aesthetic’ quality, no longer being something specifically made as an ‘art object,’ but rather something concocted from images and existing only as commentary on the ubiquity of image, both as something we look at everywhere, as spectators and voyeurs, and as something that shows us ourselves, as reflection and simulacrum.

This, as almost every commentator on the show has underscored, is the first generation to come of age with TVs in the home. And that, we’re made to think, has made all the difference. Though why television should spell the death of the aesthetic object is another one of those mysterious givens of art history, as for instance when it became clear, to use Wallace Stevens line, that ‘it must be abstract.’ We can rehearse the reasons why — point to Abstraction, point to Conceptualism and Minimalism, point to Pop Art — and then sum up why the only self-respecting response to the ubiquity of Madison Avenue, as the moneyed little brat it is, is: to appropriate it, thus making images of its images. Only this time with irony.

Fine. I can accept that. It was 1977, after all. Disco … Punk … New Wave, you get the idea. And, what’s worse, these people were all recently in art school. Let them have fun, let it rip … never mind the bollocks. But howevermuch one might have been sympathetic to the stance at the time, something rankles when these brittle disquistions on the staging of objecthood and send-ups of the mechanisms of attention, generally known as The Tube, get appropriated by The Museum and then hoisted onto walls where formerly masters of their medium had hung.

Is there a sense in which these artists — Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, David Salle, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, to name but a few — are masters? Yes, if we mean ‘masters of an idiom,’ ‘masters of manipulation,’ for how else explain the manner by which these largely ephemeral works have become ‘permanent’ as art objects? Where once these artists might have protested The Tube’s appropriation of virtually every image, The Artworld’s appropriation of every possible style, The Museum’s appropriation of every ‘aesthetic object’ so-called (da Vinci to Duchamp, etc.), offering their appropriations as flick-offs of the Pop Art/Minimalist aesthetic that, to quote Saint Andy, was all surface or mere object, they have now, via this show, appropriated The Museum, appropriately enough. Because this day had to come. But as with the idea of exhibits in The Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, I can’t help feeling that everything about the art that gave it charm and brio has become a casualty of its enshrinement.

And what’s maybe even worse than that is the fact that the note-cards in the show play back to us the tired tale of epic struggle, not against the Artworld, or even against the bourgeoisie, but against The Image, and yet one is left wondering in whose name such struggle takes place. If it’s artist decrying advertising, such an idea is not new at the time and certainly not accurate to the world of the artist after Pop Art; if it’s the more thinky pleasure of deconstructing the Image, it’s not clear who can really receive this message. For there’s no evidence, in all this surfacedom, that anyone here can think outside the Image or that they would want to. When Sherrie Levine takes pictures of Walker Evans pictures she trades on the fact that those photographs are already known images. And her images of those photos become objects, but objects whose only purpose is the ancillary role of objectifying imagehood. When we watch clips of the TV show Wonder Woman we might hear an internal voice asking us: why was this televised, what does it say about the medium, and about the advertisers who aired to support it, and about those who tuned in — or at least we might in an exhibit cataloguing eras of broadcast television — but the question I ask myself here is what makes this objectification of an Image salient, provocative … enduring?

The big gun of the show, we’re told by everyone, including Barry Schwabsky, whose critical take on the show for The Nation I’m mostly in agreement with, is Cindy Sherman, and it’s true that, in rooms of forgettable stuff, her images of herself as ‘forgotten film stills’ are already ‘unforgettable.’ But is that because they really do look like images of movies we may have seen once upon a time, or is it because we have seen these images before — in the aggrandizing use of Sherman as the poster child of self-exploitative manipulation of gender signals in which every ‘look’ is aimed to see/show a cliché? Striking as these photographs might have been in their day, they now seem already to be like Walker Evans’ photos chez Levine, now objectified by the curatorial effort to tell a story in which the Image of the object (here ‘woman,’ the great absent signifié) reigns. And Sherman’s sad one-shot psychodramas are the best way to ‘reflect’ that.

The reason the seventy-year-old has no appreciation for this, we may say, is because a good part of her life was lived before The Tube changed forever the meanings of looking and watching and being seen … enviable woman, she existed before The Image was everything. But the reason I have no appreciation for this is that I don’t see why The Museum has to capitulate to The Tube, nor why my looking at things and beings (odd that I should think such may be found in the world I live in, independent of images of them) has to be inflected by ersatz renderings of more commercial mediums (TV, magazine ads, pop music) for the sake of art history, and po-mo art history at that. For if the grand narrative was already kaput when this stuff first surfaced — and these artists were cool with that in their glib image-happy heyday — then the deflating irony comes in when we realize that, without those art-critic gestures to the narratives of Pop Art and Objectivism, these particular images mean — to borrow another line from a song — less than zero.

Turn up the TV, no one listening will suspect
Even your mother won't detect it, so your father won't know
They think that I've got no respect but
Everything means less than zero
--Elvis Costello, "Less Than Zero" (1977)

NEW HAVENIN’

2009-07-10T22:08:00.003-04:00

As of May, I’ve been posting biweekly -- every other Wednesday -- at the online site for The New Haven Review, which is a lit mag published locally. The editors Mark Oppenheimer, Bennett Lovett-Graff, and Brian Slattery are working now to produce the 5th print issue. And they also post on the online site.

My first few posts were shortened versions of things I first posted on blogocentrism (I try to keep the NHR posts to 800 words max). But my most recent post, on July 1st, was specifically for NHR, I guess. In any case, I didn’t see the point in posting it separately on blogocentrism, but here’s the link for it: Whither Home? It consists of my thoughts about living in New Haven, after spending three weeks away among people and in environs that in some ways feel more like my home and in some ways don’t.

Meanwhile, there are some other topics I have in mind ‘exclusively’ for blogocentrism, and others that might be on both sites. I recently saw the show called "The Pictures Generation" at the Met, and of course I have to keep the world informed on my progress through War and Peace. But I’m a bit distanced from extended prose at present: it seems the only thing I can write are fourteen line poems ending in a couplet.

I wrote a couple back in February, then a couple in March, then April saw three. At the end of that month I read all those, but for one, at a reading featuring six, including me, of the ten people now blogging on NHR, plus other local poets. And now I’m up to twenty-three 14-liners, when I thought, initially, I’d end up with maybe twenty-four for the year. In fact, I just produced another eight of them, but I consider them not part of that sequence because they’re spoken by a particular fictional character of my acquaintance. Be that as it may, it still makes for a total of thirty-one, and the year’s not quite half over yet.

But prose will out. I’m sure there’s more I want to say about books I read, and maybe even about music (though I have to confess I’m starting to realize that everyone writes about music on blogs, and some people much better than I can ... as in: actually understanding how music is made, not just its effect on them), and also about movies. Movies, remember them? I did see a couple things in the theater, I’m pretty sure. But to tell you the truth, I’m not so eager to talk about whatever is being thrown up on the screen these days. Or it could be that the sheer volume of blogs, review mags (I seem actually to be subscribing to print media again these days), and so on has, at least for the time being, made me less bloggy.

But I really think it has to do with those 14-liners. That concision is so satisfying, like a meal where the serving is just enough. But, to alter the old saying from Frito Lay's potato chip commercials: 'bet you can't write just one.'

WAR AND PEACE, PIECEMEAL (2)

2009-07-07T22:30:00.003-04:00

I got through the next 300 pages, or up to the end of Vol II, of War and Peace while at the shore in June. My reading has languished a bit since, so this is an effort to get back to where I left it.

In this phase of the book, it’s possible to begin fixing on a favorite character, or at least to see who is likely to emerge as the major focus. Andrei Bolkonsky’s experiences in the war are compelling, particularly the scene where he contemplates the freedom of the open sky. It’s right before he loses consciousness after being nearly killed; he goes missing for a while afterwards, so it’s clearly a moment when something happens to him, something which a later language would allow us to recognize as existential. For a moment Andrei sees himself as utterly detached from whatever Andrei Bolkonsky is. For a moment he’s part of a picture that simply includes him, but is not about him. The sky becomes the center of the universe, or at least its most telling expression.

Much as Andrei comes forward as a figure of greater interest -- shortly after he accepts the notion that ‘our life is over . . . he had to live his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything,’ he becomes engaged, but with no betrothal announced, to Natasha Rostov. Indeed, Natasha emerges as the major female character; in her mid teens, she’s becoming the woman who must find a marriage partner, a task that will drive much of the plot of Volume II from Part Three onward. The Andrei-Natasha romance is odd in its detachment; Andrei’s father insists he wait a year and so he does; this culminates in Natasha finding herself swept off her feet by the novel’s foremost no-goodnik, Anatole Kuragin (we last saw him flirting outrageously with Marya Bolkonsky’s French female companion while ostensibly courting Marya). This little dalliance of Natasha gives us the kind of melodramatic flight of emotional hijinxs that is the stuff of much lesser novels, and which Tolstoy handles with his characteristic ability to make everything seem just so. He doesn’t play it up for big effects; he doesn’t go all purple. He doesn’t get sly and snarky as our writers today do, as if emotional depths are a thing of the past and everyone knows they’re just trying to be in a movie. For Tolstoy there are no movies, just opera and drama. And even if Natasha feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway.

Part of my lack of complete involvement with this novel has to do not with the usual concern with the ongoing quest for a suitable partner in a young lady’s life, but with the lack of anything of a more involving nature to set against that. It becomes clear that we’re supposed to take an interest in Pierre: he inherited all that wealth, made a bad match to a supreme beauty who is unfaithful to him, gets caught up for a time with the Masons, only to see that most are simply play-acting when it comes to the more metaphysical significance of the sect, that for most it's simply an exclusive club they want to be admitted to. Pierre is a ditherer; he behaves well in trying to foil the dastardly (but very hot, presumably) Anatole (Pierre’s brother-in-law, which is to say, the brother of Pierre’s steely, selfish, preening wife), but that seems to be the next plot point. Will Pierre too fall under the spell of the ever eligible Natasha? Tune in next week to see.

To give the Count his due: Volume II ends with Pierre, having comforted the distraught Natasha, seeing the comet of the year 1812 above in (again) the sky: 'It seemed to Pierre that this star answered fully to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, now blossoming into new life.' The passage snaps into place with magisterial surety. It rounds out the long Volume with a feeling of the powers that be, but also with a sense that the characters are deluding themselves at every stage when they act as if they can see what’s coming and what it will mean.

I'm not sure I know what's coming either, but one thing for sure, it's not gonna be all good times for Napoleon.

CELEBRITY DEATH

2009-06-26T14:44:00.005-04:00

The death of someone you grew up with is always surprising, and maybe at least a little cautionary. You know the Grim Reaper is eyeing your generation, and that may be cause for anxiety. But when the person who died is a mega celebrity, there’s a certain satisfaction in reflecting that you managed to stay around to see the story end. And I think it’s mainly the ubiquitous figures of our own generation that give us that special relation to their deaths, regardless of whether we were fans or followers or what have you. We were all fellow travelers, in a certain sense, watching the story unfold because it was unfolding in the Big Time in tandem with our own lives and, at times, it was almost impossible to ignore.

For me, Michael Jackson’s death provides an occasion for this kind of reflection, more so than any other performer of his generation, because he was born exactly a year before me and because his fame was so huge, and it helps that his career had such a noticeable three act structure. His childhood era was my childhood era, and he was a star whose voice and jivey movements on variety shows dominated radio and TV c. 1970 -- eleven for me, y’know, the age when most people begin to have some definite ideas about sex and taste in clothes and taste in music and the opposite sex, and all that. Along comes this kid who can out-Smokey Smokey and it registered as ‘late Motown,’ for the simple reason that all the Motown greats I knew of as a kid were quite a bit older. So if someone my own age was suddenly front and center, well, then a new age must be dawning. For me, it didn’t matter much as my tastes were being formulated by folk-rock and British pop and such, but the thing about Michael Jackson, from the start, was that you couldn’t ignore him. But there was also no guarantee that he wasn’t just a flash in the pan.

But the idea that Motown’s great era was over was supported, in my view, by Michael’s plaintive hit “Ben,” which underscored, in its overplayed ubiquity, the reason why, c. 1972, I wasn’t listening to radio much anymore and certainly not AM. Those were largely insipid times, radio-wise, and so the close of the first act is Michael becoming somewhat ‘obscure’ for anyone, like me, who was more concerned with singer-songwriters and rock guitar gods, those staples of FM that now are called ‘classic rock.’ Sure, in the late '70s, when The Bee Gees went disco and had the temerity to enact Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Michael hoofed about as The Scarecrow in The Wiz, but it didn’t exactly catapult him to film stardom, and anyway it looked like he was hanging on to Diana Ross for lack of any other career moves.

But in the '80s, with the birth of MTV, came a vehicle tailor-made for Michael’s showmanship: no more the silly lip-synching in television studios: the songs of his most vital period could be choreographed and enacted as mini-musicals. And Jackson was in his prime. I guess I was too, but I didn’t notice it. Mid-twenties in the early '80s was not a particularly inspiring time, and so it was all that much easier to look on as a spectator -- as everyone seemed to be doing -- of a pop phenomenon. Every age and race of listener seemed to feel the vitality and talent and artistry of Micheal Jackson’s performances at that time. I never bought a copy of Thriller, and the fact that I know the songs is solely from the fact that they were unavoidable, the way those great Motown songs had been in their day. My daughter, who was born the same year as MTV, once walked around the house with a little plush penguin she had dubbed 'Michael Jackson' and for that brief time, at about age four, she was clearly in step with her age group, attesting to the completely infectious energy and timeliness of a musical artist -- as had occurred when I was five and The Beatles came to America.

So that second act ends with Jackson as 'King of Pop,' a supreme talent who can seemingly do no wrong. And even if it’s impossible to do Thriller more than once, the fact of it remains and the feelings of devotion he inspired then never completely subsided, even though he became more and more idiosyncratic. No one minded too much so long as the work he was producing was of the highest quality, but by the late '90s hardly anyone was making that claim any longer.

And so the third act is the one in which he marries Presley’s daughter, and builds Neverland, and starts to look, first, like a slightly more masculine Diana Ross, and eventually like a slightly human mannequin. In this phase, we arrive at that level of mediaized grasp of all things that seems truly debilitating for any kind of creative venture (except providing the technology by which we snoop and snipe): Kurt Cobain, the Great White Hope of the alternative rock world, kills himself; Bill Clinton gets hounded for his sexual misdoings and nearly loses his presidency. It’s a pretty shallow time, and 'Jacko' becomes one of the more garish and cartoonish exhibits in the freakshow of pop culture (though still a million-seller). It’s a period in which I spend a lot of time shaking my head at what so-called postmodernism hath wrought, and there is much to shake one’s head over in Jacko’s career as he hits middle-age, but it’s also a time when ‘excess’ becomes a word with no meaning because there’s no way to measure how far anyone might go in self-indulgence, nor is it easy to fathom the kind of life that excessive wealth makes possible in the late 20th century.

The third act could end with Michael on trial, when the shenanigans at Neverland -- the kind of place perfect for the moment when adolescent urges begin to make themselves felt where formerly all had been innocence and sweetness, and which would be fine except that Jackson’s urges were, allegedly, that of a fortysomething for preteens -- finally blew his cover, at least for yet another mediaized moment. And maybe, if so, it shows how humbling is the law of the land when a family of nobodies can bring to a lowly courtroom in Santa Monica the much vaunted 'King of Pop.' But if that were it, then the ‘next act’ would begin with the 50 shows in London and maybe some version of late laurels as a mature performer igniting a new generation with his showmanship (etc) ... or not.

Instead, the Reaper steps in and draws down the curtain. And the end of Michael Jackson seems to me much like the end of Elvis Presley. Elvis died on the day before my 18th birthday, and I’m sure there are teens standing about now, as I did then, simply shrugging at the death of such an ‘iconic’ ‘influential’ ‘history-making’ ‘dynamic’ ‘innovative’ ‘irreplaceable’ figure. Because by the time Elvis died he was simply a middle-aged guy in a white jumpsuit, doing the Vegas act, and about as interesting to a teen as a vacation with the parents. Jackson, at this point, is better known as a freaky-looking guy of dubious tastes ailing financially and possibly physically. And what the death of such a figure marks is a milestone for those who can remember the immediate effect of ‘the early Elvis’ or ‘the Thriller Michael’ -- it’s suddenly clear how long ago all that was and how little it matters now except in the minds of those who were marked by it.

6-25-2009

2009-06-26T10:52:00.001-04:00

It’s time to wander into a room
Where no one knows you,

The passage from familiar to strange
Enacted again as an ending.

Who finds the shadowed glove,
The old hoofer’s shoes, can keep them

As emblems of those delicate steps
We made with you, each pair of eyes

A priceless fix -- a rubber life-raft,
Its pneumatic curves hugged forever

As a child’s broken toy bounces
Back to life on video replay --

To never land in an empty place
Where no one knows your face.

WHATCHA READIN?

2009-06-02T16:14:00.013-04:00

On Facebook I got tagged with a task: list the 15 books you find to be the most memorable. Not necessarily ‘the best’ or ‘the greatest,’ but the books that stayed with you. The ones, as I understood it, that marked you, made you a certain kind of reader. For fb, I simply listed the books, but here I’d like to spell out a little bit what the experience of reading these books meant, and to that end I’m presenting them in the order of my first readings, more or less, so that what emerges is a bit of a bildung, or educational development through a sequence of discoveries. And, as discoveries, I’m unapologetic about the fact that these are all literary texts. Books about science or history, to me, are books about things as they are or were; one reads them to learn something. Books of argument are likewise for the development of thought and knowledge. But literary texts are experiences, and it’s as experiences that I value them.

1. Alice in Wonderland (1865) / Through the Looking Glass (1871) -- Lewis Carroll (British)
This is the book I most readily associate with childhood, with the kind of humor, whimsy, wit, and sense of the fantastic that I’d claim as part of my own make-believe and which, as rendered by Lewis Carroll, stayed with me through adulthood -- as witnessed in my unflagging love for Monty Python’s madcap antics, in my joy at Finnegans Wake’s verbal pyrotechnics, and in my sense that the best books should include narrative, poems, jokes, talking animals and objects, and amazing pen and ink drawings. Whether reciting ‘The Walrus and The Carpenter’ or ‘You Are Old, Father William’ or ‘Jabberwocky’ to bewildered children, or reading this book aloud, as I have done for younger brothers, daughter, other people’s children, I remain a devotee of Lewis Carroll’s peculiar imagination. I think it’s because this book so resourcefully played hide-and-seek with the conventions of genteel children’s fiction, while remaining genteel children’s fiction, and yet something so much more (‘go ask Alice’) that the book stayed with me, indelibly, from about age 12 or so. I read them in an edition with both books, and here’s a case where I think the sequel is at least as good as the original.

2. David Copperfield (1850) -- Charles Dickens (British)
Dickens, for me, is forever the novelist of early adolescence and no one will ever take that mantle away. The starting place of my love for the English language is Victorian prose, but not just Victorian prose -- Dickens’ Victorian prose. No one does it like Dickens, no one writes prose so enjoyably read aloud, so full of personality and voice. And the story is such as can be read to ten-year-olds with no worry about too much being over their heads. Dickens’ narrators preside over a moral universe and, as with Austen who I didn’t read till much later, the fun is watching how it will all come out and be put more or less right. Copperfield remains in place as the most memorable Dickens for me because of that sense of vocation that permeates it; we are reading of the life of the narrator who will come to be a writer (much like Dickens himself) and that fascinating alchemy, life into art, captured my imagination and never quite let go, for that, to my mind, is still the greatest story, witness my later and longstanding fascination with Joyce and Proust. But that’s not to say that the characters -- each with their familiar tag -- are not also justly indelible, from Barkis is willin’ to the most ’umble Uriah Heep, to the princely, dastardly Steerforth, to Betsy Trotwood, Mr. Dick, the incomparable Mr.and Mrs. Micawaber, and all the rest, this is the book most teeming for me with a major supporting cast of ‘character actor’ turns. Which, again, makes it all the more fun for read-aloud performances.

3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) -- Friedrich Nietzsche (German)
I first read this book in 1973, in the era when pseudo-wisdom texts were quite the rage -- The Prophet by Kahil Gibran, Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Teaching of Don Juan by Carlos Castenada (I read Seagull, not the others) -- but this one was by a major thinker of the 19th century who had already produced at least two formidable works -- The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science -- when he chose to go off the rails even more and produce this unlikely book in the ‘voice’ of Persian/Iranian prophet Zarathustra (or Zoroaster). The book, even for readers and scholars of Nietzsche, is a bit of a hard-sell (I base this on a seminar I took at Princeton in 1989, led by the Nietzsche scholar Alexander Nehamas), but for others its sui generis quality is intriguing, even if it is ultimately judged as not rigorous enough as philosophy, not dramatic enough as narrative, and not artistic enough as literature. But a book this odd -- philosophy with jokes and poems and allegories, dramatic scenes, and plenty of pithy aphorisms -- for me was a must. If you weren’t, like me, subjected, from first grade, to the teachings of Christ as interpreted by nuns and priests of the RC Church, then maybe this book would be a much less necessary antithesis in your teens, but I read it annually each year of high school (is it any wonder I didn’t go on dates or participate in many student activities?) and stand by it as the book that made Nietzsche matter to me. In it can be found the most joyous acceptance of life -- a life in which we won’t really know what the truth is and won’t necessarily be able to make anything happen the way we want it to -- that I’ve ever met with.

4. The Brothers Karamazov (1881) -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian)
When we come to Dostoyevsky, it’s very hard to say which is the novel of The Big Four (Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Possessed (or, Demons) (1872), The Brothers K) that was the most memorable to me. Each was, in its own way. C&P because it was the first I read and because I was instantly hooked by the übermenschlich disatisfactions of Raskolnikov, who entered my pantheon as yet another great misanthrope to set beside Hamlet; re:The Idiot, it would be hard for a teen, still nominally a Christian trying to work out what the true imperatives of the faith were, not to be struck by the Christlike travails of Prince Myshkin; and The Possessed was the one I conceived most readily in cinematic terms, casting the novel as a film in the manner of recently successful period films -- I’d say it’s the novel that gave me my strongest sense of scenic structure; but I chose The Brothers K because it shared much of The Possessed’s cinematic power, but gave us protagonists who weren’t played mainly as targets of satire or as cautionary fables. And for all Dostoevsky’s attempts to render the true value of religious faith, I was irritated at Raskolnikov’s conversion, and was, in the end, not willing to accept Myshkin as Christlike, nor even as a Quixote, but at the end of Brothers K I recall -- I was fifteen -- crying real tears with Aloysha, the saintly brother. More than that, I recall that I read Ivan as a more mature version of Raskolnikov, with bits of Rogozhin and Ippolit (my favorite characters in The Idiot) thrown in for good measure, to say nothing of actually meeting the devil, and recognizing, via The Grand Inquisitor, that if Jesus returned his first task would be to separate himself from his believers, but that his believers would reject him just as readily as did the mob of his own day. Then there’s Svidrigailov, and old man Karamazov, characters just waiting to be rendered by some great character actor at the top of his game.

I’m looking forward to reading the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers K, as I have of the other three; I don’t think my admiration will suffer as a result. I should also say that the great attraction of Dostoyevsky, as my supreme 19th century novelist, was that his stories, prose, and characters had none of the genteel mannerisms of Victorian or Edwardian English prose, that he, unlike Shakespeare-hating Tolstoy, rendered characters that had some of the same wild passions, obsessive griefs, voracious monologues, and hearts of darkness that one found in The Bard, and that, unlike the French, the spirituality of his characters was always in crisis, about to be born or to be killed once and for all. Then there’s the humor of Dostoevsky which seems to be a wicked irony aimed at human foibles, an irony necessary if we would avoid drowning in sentimentality when faced with his waifs and whores and drunken rogues and suicides.

5. Faust I (1806) and II (1832) -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German)
It should be said that Nieztsche, Dostoyevsky, and Goethe would not be on this list so early in my reading, were it not for Hermann Hesse. It was reading his novels, beginning in 9th grade, that turned me to Nietzsche, one of his heroes, and it was probably some Kaufman intro to Nietzsche that gave me the name Dostoyevsky to track down. But Goethe was a bit more of a stretch, mentioned in Hesse (remember the portrait in Steppenwolf?), but as a distant figure, as Shakespeare might be for a Romantic poet; what led me to him was the fact that he wrote Faust, a story that fascinated me as it combined elements from other favorite reading not listed here: the Gothic (I was an avid Poe reader around eleven years old), the occult (read lots of those kinds of tales), the meeting with the devil (as in The Brothers K), and the notion of the heroic tragic figure (which Shakespeare’s plays planted in my mind from the summer between 8th and 9th grade).

But Marlowe’s version didn’t deliver, for me, something that I wanted, without knowing exactly what that ‘something’ was. Maybe I simply didn’t want an Elizabethan Faust, wanted to feel something more medieval at work in the tale. But in saying ‘medieval’ I believe now what I mean is ‘allegorical,’ or ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that Goethe’s version provides. His Faust is epic drama, which was preferable to me to epic poems -- Homer, Dante, Milton -- and to dramas so banal as to be playable on stage. Faust takes place in the poetic imagination, and its tragic sense has to do with human limitations on their grandest scale of conception. Ok, grandest scale for scientists, scholars, artists. In other words, not the epic of battle and adventure, but the epic of the searching, striving soul. Faust became the romantic hero par excellence because his battle was a battle of wits with Mephistopheles, but was also a battle against mediocrity, against staying trapped in what should only be a momentary identity for the man of ceaseless thought, and was further a battle against God as the one who had wagered on him, making him a kind of Job figure, or even a Christ -- doomed to do what his creator had already determined. That’s what I mean by metaphysical. Lear can rage against nature and fortune, as can Macbeth, and Milton’s Lucifer can rail against God, but only Goethe’s Faust can question his own identity as the one who must question. And the defeat of Mephisto in the name of Gretchen-transfigured had a kind of quotidian mysticism satisfying to a reader who was already starting to wonder what it was, exactly, that so-called modernism did to romanticism.

In other words, Goethe’s Faust is sui generis not only in the sense of not being containable as a particular genre -- making it one of the most unique reading experiences in all of European literarture -- but also ahead of its time in being as ‘modern’ as you can stand. I like to say that Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Rimbaud ended the 19th century for me (as retrospective reader), but in a sense Goethe had already looked beyond all three. I’m not saying I saw that in my first acquaintance with the text, but the sense of finding a work bizarre enough to qualify as something wholly other (not ‘literature’ in any traditional, disciplinary sense) was there in both the early and the enduring fascination.

To Be Continued...

WAR AND PEACE, PIECEMEAL (1)

2009-05-26T16:46:00.006-04:00

About three hundred pages in, end of Volume One of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, it’s time to take stock. Reading War and Peace seems to conjure more readily comparisons to the Hollywood epic, or TV Mini-Series, than to the epic poems of antiquity. What Tolstoy does well is what every storyteller, particularly in motion pictures, has tried to do well after him: give us action and give us interaction, with enough context to keep it interesting, but never to bury depiction with exposition. In other words, in that pithy phrase, ‘show, don’t tell.’ Tolstoy’s great novel, so far, is very readable because it is comprised of scenes, most of which are short and very focused. It gives us a mammoth tale in bite-sized chunks, as it gives us a cast of characters who are just distinctive enough to keep confusion at bay, but which are also more or less of a type, which is to say, aristocrats rather unremarkable in themselves.

So, as with many genteel drawing-room dramas, part of the fascination is seeing 'how the other half lives.' Tolstoy looks back at the generation of his grandparents, and he has the great good fortune to be an insider to both the aristocracy and the military, the shaping forces of that world. The gauntlet that Tolstoy flings down, for the novel, is the illusion of rendering all levels of society equally well: Napoleon and Alexander, the Russian czar; the aristocrats in their various capacities -- Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Count Nikolai Rostov are the two we follow into battle in Volume One, both present at the debacle of Austerlitz as Volume One ends -- as well as the generals, the hussars, the enlisted men, the horses even; then there are the ladies seeking suitable union (as for instance Princess Elena Kuragin) or avoiding unsuitable union (as for instance Princess Marya Bolkonsky); there’s the illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, Pierre, who inherits everything, despite the efforts of his more legimate kin to put themselves forward. It’s a cast that only vaguely includes the commoners, but somehow Tolstoy’s grasp of his characters’ milieu, his magisterial 'what I assume, you shall assume' register, makes aristocrats common enough even for American readers born in the twentieth century.

In the first Volume most of the intrigues center on the Kuragin family, trying to maneuver more favor from the dying Count Bezukhov, and trying to maneuver a comfortable marriage for young Anatole. The figure who emerges as the most indelible is the old Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky who runs his household in an unvarying manner, and is pleased that his devout daughter Marya refuses Anatole Kuragin. At the end of Part One, the going-off-to-war leave-taking of the patriarch by Prince Bolkonsky’s son, Andrei, is the first scene that overwhelmed me with Tolstoy’s precise grasp of tone. In cinema or television, the scene would be fraught with some kind of emotive soundtrack rendering a garden variety 'emotionality,' that flattening of affect that says, in effect, that what these characters feel is what 'we all feel.' What makes Tolstoy the lord of realist fiction is that he knows that what 'everyone' feels is what convention dictates they feel, but that what each individual feels is what their own natures dictate. And what he’s after is the individual natures of humanity depicted in the confines of rather rigorous conventions: interactions in high society salons, rituals of courtship and marriage, rituals of death, enactments of inheritance and social placement, tensions within hierarchies, both familial and martial, the rituals of war and the strategies of battle, and, so to speak, the best-laid plans of mice and men.

Tolstoy’s narrative opens in medias res upon a society facing the threat of the foreign invader. It’s 1805 and Napoleon, or, as the Russian aristocracy like to call him, ‘Buonaparte,’ is already on the war-path. War and Peace is a tale that had to be told: a crucial period of European history from the perspective of that great power to the East. Tolstoy’s definitive conceit is that we are being allowed to visit ‘behind the scenes’ at the cultural moment when the first major pan-European threat of modern times emerged and was quelled. The context, then, is the last hurrah of the old aristocracy of Old Europe, while the element of historical fact that veers toward absurdity is that the Russian aristocracy speak to each other in French. It’s as if a major country had already been colonized by a foreign power and culture. It’s so remarkable that no one remarks on it. The French are the enemy, and yet adopting their language and their manner is the measure of one’s civility and standing in Russian society. Is there any way such a culture could endure in modern times?

SEIZED BY CÉZANNE

2009-05-21T12:01:00.004-04:00

If you grew up in the Philly area like I did, you had the good fortune of living in proximity to some great Cézannes -- in the collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the Barnes Foundation, in NYC at the Met and MoMA, in DC at the National Gallery -- so the notion of going to a show like Cézanne and Beyond (at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) might give you a certain ‘been there, done that’ feeling. Not so. I saw the show yesterday and fell in love again with the man who invented modern painting.

The show sets thirty to forty Cézannes against works by later artists who can claim the Master as a major influence. There are some great pairings, à la those Art History exams where two slides are set side-by-side and your task is to identify both and write an essay comparing them. My favorite, on that score, was Mondrian’s Ginger Jar still-life next to a Cézanne which also prominently featured a large jar. And the Jasper Johns painting on a table drawer took on extra aura situated next to a Cézanne still-life with a similar drawer, and a Giacometti painting of a table with drawers, topped by a solitary orange. (The Giacometti, by the way, was stunning and is in the possession of the Met, though I can’t recall ever seeing it on exhibit before.)

On first entering the exhibit, I was primarily interested in the painters other than Cézanne (didn’t I already know all I needed to know about the latter?), and learned that, in the 1920s, Arshile Gorky was able to knock-off still-lifes of fruit and views of buildings that were dead-ringers for Cézanne’s style of the 1870s-80s, no mean feat (and so I’m looking forward to the Philly museum’s Gorky retrospective, coming this October). But not engaging immediately with the Cézanne paintings may have had more to do with the fact that I entered the exhibit at about 11:30, when a drove of people did, most of whom sported headphones and devices allowing them to listen to commentary, which meant they pretty much stood en masse in front of whichever painting they first came to that was included on their walky-talky thingy. Eventually, intrepid art admirer that I am, I was able to doubleback and get a gander at paintings formerly obscured by thick crowds of staring listeners. (The funniest moment, to me, came when I’d spent ten minutes or so fully engaged by a Cézanne landscape only to turn from my corner perch to find a dozen or more people all looking at my painting.)

My favorite area of the exhibit was a little corridor identified on the brochure as “Toward Abstraction,” featuring a Cézanne landscape I’d never seen before in person (though it’s owned by the Baltimore Art Museum). No paintings in this area had ‘talk’ symbols and so were largely ignored. The Baltimore St. Victoire was a standout with its abstract layering of planes of space in the foreground; not yet become a mosaic of broken planes as in the later St. Victoire paintings, the areas of this landscape read like distinct painterly treatments, risking here and there stylized incoherence that was offset by naturalistic color overall and patches of naturalisitc rendering, particularly in the sky and in the distant mountain. The overlap of those distinct areas produced a fascinating landscape that, like the wonderful still-life (from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris) with piles of fruit and energetic, mountainous swatches of cloth, was a wonder of emerging and receding forms and of effects of color. In the d’Orsay still-life the contrast between the colorful drape (a background that contained the entire display, but for a small glimpse of table) and the white tablecloth bunched and draped beneath stray fruit and a display plate lifted against an abyss of colored shapes (including what seemed to be a house in the distance) was a disquisition on the relations of forms to color in painting. Also not to be missed is “Large Pine and Red Earth” from The Hermitage in St. Petersberg, a painting the like of which I’d never seen, where the bravura treatment of foliage (always remarkable in Cézanne) renders tight, mosaic-like patterns irradiating from and framing a central tree that literally bridges earth and sky.

In the furthest room were a number of landscapes, from the 1870s to the 1890s to the 1900s, most from the area of St. Victoire. The Jasper Johns paintings placed in this room helped to underscore a point that I seem never quite willing to relinquish: to some degree, mastery of the art of painting is about the skill of applying paint, is about the touch in handling the brush. The Johns paintings looked like hamfisted mockeries -- as indeed they are, mockeries of Abstract Expressionism -- and so rather out of place in a room with canvases where the Master takes apart painting, while still painting masterfully.

After leaving the exhibit, I went over to the museum’s permanent collection to revisit again that great story in the history of painting (specifically French painting) that takes us from Corot’s lightly feathered trees and chalky landforms in the 1860s, to the groundbreakingly flippant brushstrokes of Manet in the 1870s, to Monet’s miraculous decade, the 1880s, where the rendering of light in painting is re-invented, all of which served to underscore that the paintings I’d just seen in the Cézanne exhibit showed that, in the 1890s, the only game in town was Cézanne.

By the 1900s, Cézanne begins to look too much, for my money, like Matisse, so shamelessly did the later master crib from him, but I had emerged from the exhibit thinking, ‘conjure up what fin-de-siècle fulminations you will, the only reason the 1890s matter, for art, is because that’s when Cézanne achieved his full method.’ Et tout le reste n'est que l’histoire de l’art.

BOOK TALK

2009-05-13T11:25:00.007-04:00

Facebook abounds in quizzes. I haven’t yet taken tests to determine which philosopher or movie hero or pop diva I am, nor what city, ethnic food, or personality type. And no one has tagged me to reveal 25 things about myself. But I’m an inveterate list-maker and when I saw this quiz on the page of a facebook friend, I felt an overwhelming desire to appropriate it and give my responses. So, though no one asked me for this, here it is.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Don DeLillo, I have all his novels: 14.
2) What book do you own the most copies of?
James Joyce’s Ulysses: four
3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Not particularly, what’s that about?
4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I’ve gotten over that, but I used to have a major crush on Jessica Swanlake.
5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
James Joyce’s Ulysses, probably up to about ten times, but parts of it many more times.
6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
Gerald Gottlieb’s retelling of the story of Ulysses: The Adventures of Ulysses
7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
The Truth about Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie
8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee
9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
I’m not tagging anyone, but, I believe that no one should shuffle off this mortal coil without reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, they can even take my class in it if they want help. Apart from that, I’d say everyone should read at least one Dostoevsky novel, Don Quixote, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. But the recent book I’m recommending to everyone is the answer to #8.
10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
I really don’t know or much care. James Joyce never got one, thus invalidating any claim the Prize has to legitimacy, in my view. So I have no real hopes for Thomas Pynchon, my favorite living writer. Coetzee already got it, as did Marquez. I think I’m more inclined to say who should not get it. But if Roth gets it, I'll be pleased.
11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Well, when I was young I wanted to see a movie made of Dostoevsky’s Devils (The Possessed), I even casted it in my mind; I still think it should be possible to do an accurate film of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but I’ve given up hope after Branagh's travesty. I tend to like books that are unfilmable, but T. C. Boyle’s Drop City might be fun as a movie.
12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Any of Pynchon’s novels, Ulysses (badly made into a film twice), One Hundred Years of Solitude, just about anything I really like, really.
13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I don’t know about ‘weirdest’ and I don’t remember dreams that well, so I’ll simply cite the most memorable: once in grad school while reading lots of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Ezra himself appeared in a dream (I think I sorta stumbled upon him sitting somewhere, maybe on campus) and was reciting Cantos, but these were not poems that I’d actually read. When I woke up I could dimly recall some of the lines he recited because, by the end, the lines were simply happening in my own mind. That was pretty weird, come to think of it.
14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
Cover to cover? I mean, I amused myself for awhile in a book café once reading Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Barry Williams’ account of being Greg Brady in The Brady Bunch, and, also in that café, skimmed No One Here Gets Out Alive, Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkin’s account of Jim Morrison, which is appallingly bad. In fiction, the award goes to William M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, a pretty wretched post-apocalyptic sci-fi tale I actually had to teach as a grad student at Princeton. Ask my daughter about my many pithy and scathing put-downs of the book.
15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Finnegans Wake, which I’ve read three times in its entirety, and parts of it many, many more times.
16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
I haven’t seen many enacted on stage; does the film Titus (of Titus Andronicus) by Julie Taymor count? I also watched a BBC production of Measure for Measure which, while not ‘obscure,’ doesn’t seem to get staged much.
17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
The Russians, at first. Dostoevsky was major for me, from my teens. And Chekhov’s plays. I still need to read War and Peace, though. Proust and Flaubert are two biggies of my twenties, and I want to re-read the Stendhal novels I read so quickly in grad school. And maybe even make it through a couple Balzacs. So, probably the French, since Proust was a three time (in its entirety) read for me. I used to have a saying: there are two kinds of people in this world: those who have read Proust, and those who haven’t.
18) Roth or Updike?
Roth, easily. I’m a major Updike detractor. His stuff really annoys the hell out of me.
19) Hemingway or Faulkner?
Faulkner, the only American novelist that can give Dostoevsky a run for his money.
20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, in that order.
21) Austen or Eliot?
Austen, though Middlemarch might be the greatest single 19th century British novel.
22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I already said it: I haven’t read War and Peace; but I have the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation now and I have resolved to read it this year (my 50th). In English: Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, then probably Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
23) What is your favorite novel?
James Joyce's Ulysses; runners-up are One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez); Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), Lolita (Nabokov), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky); Don Quixote (Cervantes), and, if you count the entire thing as a novel, Proust’s Recherche.
24) Play?
Hamlet, of course, with Macbeth a close second. But I’m also very partial to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard; Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia; Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
25) Poem?
All-time favorite poem?? How about some greatest hits? Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn; Keats’ To a Nightingale; Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode; Whitman’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking; Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat; Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; Stevens’ Sunday Morning; Crane’s Broken Tower; Thomas’ Fern Hill; Ashbery’s Soonest Mended
26) Essay?
Not too many essays have burned themselves into my brain, so I’m simply going to say Emerson, and go with the one I’ve assigned to students: Self-Reliance. For more recent essayists, I’ll go with Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Virginia Woolf is a great essayist but I can’t name a particular favorite. The greatest essayist of alltime, of course, is the inventor of the form: Montaigne.
27) Short story?
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka; or The Dead by James Joyce; I have to admit I’m not much of a short story reader, but collections I’d strongly recommend: Joyce’s Dubliners; Kafka’s Collected Stories; Nabokov’s Dozen (my favorite is Spring in Fialta); and Salinger’s Nine Stories (my favorite is The Laughing Man); recent favorite: the brilliant Pastoralia by George Saunders.
28) Work of non-fiction?
My favorite scholarly work is probably Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode; my favorite biography is James Joyce by Richard Ellmann; favorite work of reportage: Michael Herr’s Dispatches; memoir: Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking; for cultural history, a recent read I really enjoyed: Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America by Jonathan Gould; for world history, any of the series by Eric Hobsbawm.
29) Who is your favorite writer?
James Joyce, obviously.
30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I would’ve said John Updike, but he recently died. So... probably Stephen King, in the sense that he has great commercial success and is starting to be taken more ‘seriously’; otherwise, the insufferably prolific Joyce Carol Oates
31) What is your desert island book?
Probably Ulysses; I would set out to memorize the entire thing, then eat the book. But I might actually prefer The Complete Shakespeare.
32) And ... what are you reading right now?
I’m about to begin War and Peace, seriously. I’m in the midst of Gogol’s St. Petersberg stories, D. A. Powell’s Chronic (poems), Allen Grossman’s The Ether Dome (poems), and have gotten not too far yet in Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare: Will in the World, but am better than halfway through Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe.

DYLANIN’

2009-05-02T15:10:00.004-04:00

Together Through Life, Bob Dylan’s third album of the 21st century, was released on Tuesday. I’ve been listening to it pretty regularly because, though it didn’t seem like the kind of thing I most wanted to hear when I first heard it Tues-Wed, it has come to dominate the mood in these uneasy early spring days.

'Beyond here lies nothin’ -- nothin’ done and nothin’ said.' The first song is one reason I keep playing the album: it has a no-nonsense, quick grab that doesn’t let up. It has the feel of a song that sums up a lot, but without the kind of lyrical brilliance of a song like 'Times Have Changed.' Instead, it offers a groove, and horns, and Dylan’s voice, in its shrugging, worn-out grimness, seems just the right mood: no quarter asked, none given.

'I’m always on my guard, admitting life is hard' The second track has a bit of a ‘Mood Indigo’ feel -- mellow, aged, wizened even. This is Dylan in some old crooner incarnation, the old crooner on hard times (just listen to that cracked voice), but still able to put it across sweet when called for. Time to follow those spotlight stepping stones off-stage, folks. He even hums as he goes...

'I just want to say that Hell is my wife’s home town.' Delivered almost with a carny bark, with a nice little walking blues riff puttering around the lyrics, this is a stand-out. Very amusing, in a style that Dylan rarely attempts -- but think of something like 'Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat' for its deadpan throwaway jabs. And the little chuckles that surface in the fade are priceless. Willie Dixon, bless him, gets credit on the tune, and I suspect Bob’s delivery is a bit of a tip of the hat as well -- he's never sounded more like an old bluesman.

'If You Ever Go to Houston' was the first song to bore me, and though I’ve become a bit more positive about its midtempo step-out, I can’t reconcile myself to that incessant accordian. And this is the place to note that on this album David Hidalgo’s accordian is way too out-front a good part of the time; when it’s in the background, it’s acceptable, but when it carries the tune, as here, its drone makes me want to drop off. (I have nothing against the instrument itself, since Tom Waits and Richard Thompson and the Mekons have all used it quite effectively.)

Closing ‘the side’ is 'Forgetful Heart' (‘lost your power of recall / every little detail you don’t remember at all') which has some of the ominous sound of songs like 'Going, Going, Gone' or 'Not Dark Yet,' helped along by Mike Campbell’s brooding guitar -- nothing flash, nothing stabbing, just a long meditative scowl. 'Can’t take much more / why can’t we love like we did before' -- the lyrics are as if penned to one’s own recalcitrant seat of emotions, and ends with the album’s best couplet: 'The door has closed forevermore / if indeed there ever was a door.'

Start the next side with one of those peppy little blues struts that seem to me must be much more fun to play than they are to listen to: 'Jolene' doesn’t get up to much, but it does resurrect the ghost of Jerry Garcia a bit. Bear in mind that Garcia’s longtime lyricist Robert Hunter collaborated with Dylan on all but one track; this is the song where that’s very much evident, as it’s easy to imagine Jerry cruising his way through this one, getting everybody to do their best 'and you’re the queen' steps.

'This Dream of You' is the song sans Hunter. This is one where the accordian is really necessary to the feel Dylan goes for: it has to sound like a night wandering through its courses at the local cantina, or is that bistro, with a wide-eyed singer watching those ‘shadows that seem to know it all.’ There are a few moments where a big production hook seems ready to jump out, but Dylan keeps it close to his chest, nothing that would embarrass a coterie of locals watching another sad sack eat his heart out.

'Shake Shake Mama, raise your voice and pray / if you’re goin' on home, best go the shortest way.' Yeah, this is one of those songs from the old blues becomes rock’n’roll era that Dylan has always been partial to ('Outlaw Blues'; 'Obviously Five Believers'); tune makes me think of 'my little baby loves shortnin’ shortnin.'

'I Feel a Change Comin’ On' is swanky and breezy -- think 'I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,' from the old days -- and hard not to like (except for that damned tweeting accordian), especially when Bob lets us in on the following: 'I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver, and I’m reading James Joyce / Some people they tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice.' Yeah.

In closing, Bob picks on one of the most mindless sayings of the post-‘80s generation: 'It’s All Good.' It’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really good, and Bob lets us take that in as he piles up the dysfunction, then maybe ribs us with the thought that watching it all go down is, indeed, pretty fucking good, but the song never really goes for the jugular, the way something like 'Jokerman' did back in the ‘80s. Too many pulled punches.

Talk about me, babe, if you must
Throw out the dirt, pile on the dust
I’d do the same thing, if I could,
You know what they say, they say it’s all good.

The album is more or less all good too, though none of it’s great -- nothing comes close to the major splendor of 'Red River Shore,' a track abandoned and then allowed to surface on 2007's Tell Tale Signs. As the third in the Jack Frost trilogy (Love and Theft, 2001; Modern Times, 2006; Together Through Life, 2009), it’s the least of the three, but is the one that seems to hearken back most to the Dylan albums of yore (vinyl days, in other words). Think of an album like New Morning (1970) or Planet Waves (1974) or Under the Red Sky (1990), albums that have a characteristic vibe, but aren’t often revisited as major moments in the career (though Planet Waves was Dylan’s first number one album, largely due to the comeback tour with The Band that promoted it). Together Through Life is quick, cool, fun, and, as the man said at the close of 'Highlands,' 'that’s good enough for now.'

WHAN THAT APRILLE...

2009-04-30T17:03:00.007-04:00

'April, come she will,' the old nursery rhyme says, and who can forget the wistful rendition by Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack to The Graduate (1967)? The month, so famously called 'the cruellest,' has been wet, at times windy, at times humid, occasionally halcyon, and finally downright summery before switching back to an early spring feel. All things to all people I guess you could say.

Not only the weather has been slippery, but the ways I’ve been spending my time have been something of a mixed bag, as I’ve felt myself blown here and there, hither and yon, by whatever vague winds of change seem to be in the offing. It’s 'National Poetry Month,' y’know, so, in-keeping with that sudden spike in national awareness of the value of the poetic word (yeah), I attended, late in March, a poetry reading by D. A. Powell, and a bilingual reading by Jacques Roubaud, then, in April, a reading by Mark Strand, from his New Selected Poems (2007; Knopf); Strand shared the stage with Chang-Rae Lee, who read from his forthcoming novel. I also had a poem posted on the online magazine nthposition, thanks to Todd Swift, and read a few new poems at a gathering of writers local to New Haven, sponsored by The New Haven Review and by Yale’s McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life, where the participants reading poetry outnumbered those reading prose by 8 to 3. And earlier in the month I met some fellow OpenSalon bloggers at a comradely party to celebrate the first anniversary of the hottest forum for bloggers.

On the day of the OpenSalon celebration, I visited the Met to see the Pierre Bonnard show again before it closed -- for the express purpose of writing a poem in situ. I managed to write two, even though there was quite a milling crowd. Foolish me (it’s April, after all) was unaware that kids would be off from school that day and had picked a Thursday thinking it might be more relaxed, solitary, less given to the crowds of a weekend. No such luck.

Powell’s reading, at St. Anthony’s Hall at Yale, was subdued, offering the stringent lyricism of his poems in a quiet, undemonstrative manner. The week before, we had kicked around a selection of his poems in a poetry reading group; from that brief exposure, it seemed to me that the poems in Chronic (2009; Graywolf) were the best of his career thus far. After the reading, while getting a copy of the book signed, I mentioned that to Powell and asked if the book was well-received; a little bemused he said it had gotten some unfavorable reviews -- later, I came across the review on Poetry Magazine’s website where Jason Guriel takes Powell to task as a kind of epitome of the tiresome tricks of contemporary verse. The enumerated failings that Guriel finds in Powell’s verse might well apply to an entire cohort of poets of our times, but I can’t see the reason in laying that at Powell’s door. I assume it must have to do with praise, deemed unmerited, Powell has received in other quarters. I suppose there is some purpose in the ‘set the record straight’ sort of review that wants to make clear that the views of other reviewers simply don’t hold water. About Powell’s reading (I haven’t gotten through the entirety of the book yet, so will hold off any more extensive comment), I’ll just say that I don’t think he presented the best of the book. My feeling was that the poems we read for the group were better chosen than those he elected to read. Where there was agreement was in the excellent paired poems 'Corydon & Alexis' and 'Corydon & Alexis, Redux' -- Powell ended his reading with them, and I wished we’d given them due discussion in our meeting, but so it goes.

'oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs'

One might believe the Eliot 'Waste Land' crib is uncalled for (Consider Phlebis), that time personnified as a banker foreclosing on us is a bit obvious, even if effective, and that the choice of a verb phrase like 'deranges itself' is deliberate poeticizing. In fact, what I like about Powell is his willingness to poeticize in this register: allusions, apt similes, somewhat off-putting word choice. I found myself having to listen pretty intently, while reading his poems to myself, to catch, again and again, a very deliberate music that, in his reading, was easy to miss: 'forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs' -- the course of the 'o' sound is the entire line, set-off nicely against short and long 'i.' At his best, Powell’s mastery of such music is woven easily into his poems so that it constantly teases the ear while reading.

Mark Strand’s reading was delightful; he presented himself as a very affable, unpretentious poet, and his poems are at times mysterious, at times amusing, and at times both. In response to a student’s questions about trying to integrate the creative and the everyday lives, he said something to the effect that he has no problem keeping them separate; that the outer life keeps him busy, while the inner life keeps him amused. I hope to pick up the Selected soon.

Jacques Roubaud was also extremely affable, discussing his compositional methods, seminar-style, earlier in the day, than reading in the rather unkind to poetry ambiance of a Barnes and Noble (aka Yale Bookstore). Roubaud read from an amusing text entitled The Form of a City Changes, Alas, Faster Than the Human Heart (2006; Dalkey Archive) which was very exacting in its treatment of the streets of Paris, and also read 'Genesis in Reverse,' a poem not to be missed.

Chang-Rae Lee read of American soldiers during the Korean war mistreating a prisoner (blowing out his eardrum with a bugle, for instance), which, apropos of the recent spate of torture talk, seemed topical if a bit uncomfortably grim for a springlike afternoon amidst Yale writing students; Denis, a graduate student acquaintance, offered his take: well, he’s going gray and he seems like a simple family man and teacher -- what can he do to come off like a badass? Perhaps. Of course the style of the writing and the reading were in that unencumbered, almost inflexionless prose that seems to be Lee’s only mode.

My favorite bits at the New Haven writers reading: Jim Berger’s hilarious poem trying to imagine the lives of the authors of Best American verse, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang’s nonfiction piece about being mistaken for Sandra Oh, and Brian Slattery’s 150 word stories on the theme, Las Vegas.

About my poem, 'Gold and Gloom,' I'll say only: it was written in 1996 during a particularly glum autumn, but reads to me now as quite apropos for last November when the economy's precipitate plunge became the stuff of daily reports: 'I toil not, neither do I spin' might describe a lot more people in the great attrition of jobs in the current economic scene.

TORTUROUS THOUGHT

2009-04-26T22:31:00.010-04:00

I happened to be reading Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee's excellent and bracing and clarifying novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007) just as news stories began to arrive about the 'torture memos.' What struck me so forcefully about Coetzee’s novel, in which a writer produces a series of 'opinions' about the modern world, while also becoming infatuated with a young woman in his building whom he hires to do secretarial work, and subseqently having an effect on the woman and her relation to her boyfriend, was the evenness of the essaysistic opinions. Matters such as terrorism and democracy and the slaughter of animals are the stuff of Op-Ed writing and blogs, and Coetzee enters this territory, within the freedom provided by an authorial voice, without the kinds of cant and breast- or brow-beating so common in the press.

So consider how applicable, two years after their publication, such comments, under "On Machiavelli," are:

"The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.

"Machiavelli does not deny that the claims morality makes on us are absolute. At the same time he asserts that in the interest of the state the ruler is 'often obliged [necessitato] to act without loyalty, without mercy, without humanity, and without religion.'"

The pointedness of this quotation from Machiavelli is obvious. Torture is the very sort of practice that rulers may undertake 'in the interest of the state,' and be sanctioned in doing so by Machiavelli’s logic for what ruling entails and requires. Coetzee gives us food for thought by citing Machiavelli because the clarity of the latter’s approach to power has never been equaled and because it is a statement that comes to us from so far in the past that it can’t smack of any kind of partisanship. What Machiavelli assumes is that any ruler, once in power, becomes the state, and thus will make use of whatever means necessary to maintain that power.

But Coetzee doesn’t want to leave it there; he’s after the kind of support such 'abuse of power' may often find in the general populace.

"The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: how can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do.

"If you wish to counter the man in the street," Coetzee’s author continues, "it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions . . . . Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fradulent."

Fair enough, but it seems to me that the argument here, in becoming ‘metaphysical, supra-empirical,’ moves away from the tangible world of power. The necessity is not an over-arching concept that can be shown to be fraudulent, I would argue; it is in the very nature of power itself: to be exerted. Upon whom? Whichever subjects are deemed to be its proper targets. Because power says 'this is so, therefore I am obliged to do such and such,' there is no recourse to a demonstration that 'this is not so,' for power has already decreed it to be so. This was nakedly the manner of rule of the Bush administration, and what is mind-boggling to me, personally, is that anyone could seriously think there would be some other result from the fact of giving power to Bush and his crew. But even if the enormity was unthinkable when he ran first ran for office, it should’ve been abundantly clear when he seized power in the 2000 election. The intentions of the administration to wield the power it had taken I would say were manifest -- which would’ve included an invasion of Iraq and whatever means were deemed necessary to wage that war. The attack on 9/11 was the outrage that allowed the ends of the Bush administration to be pursued with more or less the sanction and backing of anyone who might have been able to object in a more than negligible way.

Coetzee’s author, in discussing democracy, also makes some salient points: however a ruler is chosen or determined, it "is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict." In that sense, and in that sense only, the legitimacy of Bush’s initial election could not be contested. But those who, like a blogger on OpenSalon, Dennis Loo, who brings serious charges against Obama’s administration, expect some momentous redress of the situation that pertained under Bush might consider a few other grim points Coetzee’s author offers:

"Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian." In other words, whoever becomes the ruler of the U.S., by whatever means, becomes legitimate so long as civil conflict is prevented, and, what’s more, will prevent all such conflicts by whatever means deemed necessary. In this sense, if you like, power corrupts, but, from another point of view, power simply protects its claim to power, and demonstrates power through its exercise.

"If you take issue with democracy in times when everyone claims to be heart and soul a democrat, you run the risk of losing touch with reality. To regain touch, you must at every moment remind yourself of what it is like to come face to face with the state -- the democratic state or any other -- in the person of the state official. Then ask yourself: Who serves whom? Who is the servant, who the master?"

Ask the naked guy tasered at the Coachella Festival.

RECENT STUFF

2009-04-23T13:00:00.010-04:00

1. 'Vacate the personae.'

Having made it finally through Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), I breathe an immense sigh of relief. The book was almost as exhausting as The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and that’s saying something. Bellow is the kind of writer, I now know for sure, that can lay it on with a trowel. Charles Citrine, the first person narrator, like all Bellow narrators, is a pretty interesting guy to be around; Bellow makes him a literary celebrity in the Chicago area, and is endlessly fascinated with the kinds of wheelings and dealings such a guy (like Bellow himself) has to get involved with to keep the money flowing, no matter how many prizes he may have won and whose good graces he may be in at the moment.

I knew of the novel as the one with the character, Von Humboldt Fleisher, based on the poet Delmore Schwartz, but I really had the impression, going in, that we were going to be treated to Bellow’s fictionalized version of Schwartz’s story. Sorta, not quite. Humboldt never really has center stage: he gets his due early on with some great scenes of how rapturously wonderful he was in Charlie’s eyes early on and how much bad blood came into the relationship due to Humboldt’s later instability, but the novel -- complete with a rather unpredictable and even deus ex machina-like smalltime mafioso named Cantabile, and a femme moyen sensuelle (and quite sensual) who ditches Charlie late in the book, for a mortician no less, and an ex-wife who is mostly offstage but who is a sinkhole of monetary demands, and an old flame, and the daughter of said flame, and a brother about to undergo heart-bypass surgery (one of the best encounters in the book) -- rambles all over and is in no hurry to get anywhere particularly. Add to all that the fact that Charlie is sorta, maybe, kinda converting his thinking to the ideas of Rudolph Steiner, and you get an odd double vision in the latter stages of the book. For all the narrative’s endless interest in whatever is happening and whoever is making it happen, the narrator is ostensibly trying to divest himself of his passionate regard for those things he cannot change. He’s searching for wisdom; again: maybe. Citrine is too canny, too much embroiled in the quotidian and all its quirks to be believable as sage-on-the-mountain material, but Bellow does have some of the goods on show. There is a sense that all this earnest investigation of everything is meant to show that, wherever it may rest, the heart is deluding itself if it thinks its attachments can ever be a raison d’être for actual existence. There’s more to things than meets the eye. But it’s not as if Citrine is a seeker 'against a backdrop' of literary fortunes, mafia threats, and a sudden reinstatement of fortune via an improbable filmscript cooked up long ago with Humboldt, for Citrine is always swallowed up by the demands the world -- and all the people in it -- make on him. Like I said, exhausting.

2. Ah, ma patrie

The final screening of the semester for Cinema at the Whitney was a double feature of films by Jean-Pierre Melville, The Silence of the Sea (1947) and Army of Shadows (1969), both engaged by the situation of the Nazi occupation of France in WWII. The first is an extremely static tale that unfolds like an old French conte -- the arrival of a foreigner and how he became a part of our provincial lives -- but with the difference that the foreigner is a Nazi officer staying at the rural home of an old Frenchman, the narrator, and his young niece. Plenty of fireside monologues during which the Nazi officer -- with cultivated, genteel aplomb -- holds forth on his love for France. Though, as unwilling hosts, the man and his niece never speak to and barely acknowledge the presence of the officer, all hearts soften toward this well-meaning conqueror who speaks not of how Germany will alter France but rather how the civilizing influence of France will transform the Huns into . . . well, not Nazis, apparently, but something that history would be proud of, defined by even. Boy, is he in for a surprise when he finally realizes the intentions of his Nazi brethern! And so he goes back to the front rather than take part in the further humiliation of la belle France. Beautifully shot, composed, with a steady pacing that is almost hypnotic, the film amounts essentially to a sentimental ‘my country, ’tis of thee’ paen, understandable, given the palpable anger against the Occupation, but still weak in anything like a nuanced rendering of the situation. Beautiful clichés of both countries are presented, but with much less affecting emotional bond than is found in Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), so much more telling in its depiction of the code of officers being undermined by the realities of war.

Army of Shadows presents us with a more ostensibly realistic depiction of a cell of resisters to the Occupation, and has many memorable scenes, most gripping of which is the determination to put to death a traitor who the resistance group has abducted. They aren’t prepared for suddenly having neighbors on the other side of the wall who will hear everything -- so no guns, and no knives. And so the man must be strangled to death while all participate in holding him motionless. In Melville’s hands, the scene is almost humorous, at least in the initial failure to be properly prepared and in being so incompetent in their fell purpose, but it finally becomes definitive of what makes for solidarity: the necessity of dealing death to the enemy. The film does run on, though, and Melville’s pacing is at times truly strange, as though he has no particular interest in getting the tale told. The film has a rather flabby feel to it, rather than a taut arc that will take us to the ultimate fate of the cell -- some dead by capture, some dead as traitors, the majority left to those ‘after the film’ summaries of their ultimate fates that are always so unsatisfying.

And that’s part of the problem: one finally asks: what is this film the story of? Is it meant to show some gradual moral change or crisis in the group? Some kind of self-questioning? That does happen when the one female in the group, Mathilde, played with haughty calm by Simone Signoret, betrays the group, after capture, to save her daughter from a fate worse than death as a whore to a Polish regiment, and the group has to overcome the protests of one of their number that he won’t stand for her execution. They shoot her dead on the street and then the film quickly ends. But to get to that moment, if that is meant to be defining, we have to wander though many scenes that seem much looser than need be (including one failed attempt to rescue a comrade who is near death anyway, that simply seems comical in its incompetence, again), and a rescue of Philippe Gerbier, the figure we’ve been following since the beginning, that is almost outrageously successful.

My feeling watching the film was that I’d be watching it for the rest of my life since its pacing was so much like life: things happen, and then something else does, or doesn’t. Even so, the film was fascinating if only because I loved seeing the locations, the people, the actors who weren’t trying to be charming stars, but at the same time I couldn’t stop myself from conjuring images of much more exciting, Hollywood versions of fateful missions (The Dirty Dozen, 1967) and risky escapes (The Great Escape, 1963). Released in 1969, Army of Shadows is perhaps far enough away from the events of the Resistance to be able to take some liberties for entertainment purposes?

3. Calvino Revisited

Just for fun I re-read Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), which I first read some time in the early ‘80s and was enchanted by. What’s more, my memory of the novel has always been a reference point whenever anyone discusses fictional sleight-of-hand, as with Borges, or Cortázar, or Barth, or what-have-you. Calvino’s version of fictions that fold in on themselves provides a send-up of the reader’s dependence on a text -- a text that is never simply an object -- while at the same time conjuring the extent to which people become the texts they read or write.

One could say it’s a novel that treats the status of being ‘a reader’ as a certain kind of identity, a defining characteristic, and Calvino is charming in his evocation of the oddly personal communality of that status. What’s more he’s willing to put that very relation -- his interaction with his own readers -- at stake by treating us as hopelessly hooked on whatever he chooses to do with his narrative, which involves several ‘short stories,’ or tales within the tale, that comprise the opening pages of the novel we (or rather, ‘you,’ dear reader) are attempting to read. In other words, we read with a second-person character who is reading a series of openings to novels we never get to finish because something always happens to the text. These proferred novels are of a variety of types and are almost equally interesting, as far as they go, but they are also meant to be page-turners of a sort, things we won’t put down till we see how it all comes out. And we won’t ever know. The story of what keeps happening to interrupt our reading is the story that ‘you’ are engaged in: involving another reader (an attractive and arguably more knowledgeable female counterpart to the masculine ‘you’ of the story), the other reader’s sister, an Ian Fleming-like novelist, and a novelistic forger. It all ends with our happy couple -- you, the reader, and your female counterpart, the Other Reader -- settled in bed together as you finish If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

Fictional closure is where real life begins, but what Calvino grasps so well, and perpetrates his fiction on the premise of, is that the Reader only wants fictions to go on and on. Maybe so, but he wisely brings his to a close before the proliferation of openings becomes tiring, and before the characters, who never really are characters, seem too lacking in particularity to interest us. Why I loved the novel is that he maintains its pace well and builds up its comedy through a readerly frustration it expects us to enjoy. But also because it seemed to me that at the heart of such fiction is a clear-eyed appraisal of the ruse of fiction, of how it applies conventions to give us ‘the reality effect’ it aims for, and how, mutatis mutandis, all such details can easily be something else, if only we are reading a different kind of story with different conventions. The reality is all in the eye, so to speak, or, even more to the point, all in the terms, the language, the conventions of depiction that we trust to render what we find ourselves in the midst of. Without that, we have only opposing subjective ‘takes’ -- otherwise known as politics -- and Calvino archly sees that ultimately politics in art is a blow against the art, or artifice, itself. A refusal to be led, to be told, to suspend disbelief, or, worse, skeptical engagement with any world other than the one one knows to be the case. I saw Calvino’s approach as a great joke -- but without malice -- on all those who want to lose reality in a fiction, but also all those who can’t abide a fiction that doesn’t correspond to ‘reality.’ Bravo, Calvino!

MIDLIFE CRISIS LIT

2009-04-13T21:17:00.008-04:00

2. The Obsolete Humanist

What I retained of Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) from my first reading -- about twenty-three and reading while on night duty as security at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts -- were the scenes of Moses Herzog -- a fiftysomething recently divorced father and professor of history -- ensconced in his crumbling Massachusetts farmhouse, mentally composing letters to old acquaintances, famous people, and historical figures. It gave me at the time a feeling of a certain longed-for removal from ‘the world,’ as though Herzog were -- if you subtracted the angsty Jewish intellectualism and supplanted-male rage against his former wife -- a kind of Thoreau of the early ‘60s. Reading it again, I was surprised at how little of the novel takes place in MA; most of it, as with most Bellow fiction, is set in Chicago, and much of it, too much of it, takes its tone from what Herzog has suffered at the hands of his ex-wife who has taken up part-time with a friend of them both, parttime because the friend remains married to a woman who denies what’s going on. As ever with Bellow, the best bits are simply observations of the world and the kinds of people who people it.

Bellow was schooled in the old Russian novelistic tradition (Dostoevky particularly), in which characters lead lives of suffering that seem to be waiting for exposure in long, breathless paragraphs of frenetic detail; Bellow gives us speeches of nervous energy that divulge the anxieties at the heart of everyone: the anxieties that come from not enough money, not enough power, not enough outlets for sex, growing old, death -- in other words the perennials. Let’s call them the intangibles, those misgivings and dissatisfactions that never quite become violent but which could, if only events push us that way. When Herzog finally arms himself, with a gun from his late father’s desk, we might expect, given the kind of sickness-unto-death trembling just below his consciousness, that he’s going to do himself in, but no, he’s got more moxie than that. He wants to kill that happy couple that has supplanted his unhappy marriage -- what stops him? A very affecting scene, potentially bathetic or creepy, but really rendered with full awareness of how site specific it is: Herzog stares through the bathroom window and sees his ex-wife’s lover giving Herzog’s little daughter a bath. We might say that if insane rage was ever going to break out it would do so here. But instead, the scene, in its mundanity, shows Herzog something about himself: he doesn’t really want to be the man in that bathroom, he doesn’t want to be dedicating his life to the comforts of a wife and their child. He’s free -- which is to say, in a different register, he’s his own problem, and only his. But he doesn’t get off that easy -- he still must experience indignities with the police, because of that unlicensed gun found on him in a car accident. In other words, Herzog must come to the brink, but not go over it; the world is ordered and he lets that sustain him. And it should be noted that Bellow is at his best when inhabiting mundane actions -- travel, for instance, waiting one’s turn for a court hearing -- moments when one can simply observe humanity doing the things humans do, never mind the reason.

Such is Bellow’s forte because he is one of the great humanists, one of the believers in common humanity, so called. Reading him now, one finds the usual fissures in that ‘common’: Bellow’s women are always the women of a man. If that sounds like a slur, that simply indicates the extent to which times have changed; for Bellow wants men to join him in regarding women, and wants his female readers to see what it’s like in the middle-aged male consciousness -- he’s not particularly interested in the female consciousness; he may well believe there isn’t such a thing, in the same sense at least. And that attitude spills over to other minorities as well: Bellow is always aware of Jews as the minority that matters, as the outsiders par excellence (because of Europe) -- and that awareness takes place in a world run by WASPS. Everyone else is on the periphery of that judgment, and it is a judgment in an old biblical sense. As a Jew, Bellow creates characters who are always wondering, deep down, what God means -- what does He intend by making things happen as they do. And so civilization matters because somehow it belongs to God, and therefore we must defend it.

I’ve gotten off the point, if I ever had one. I wanted to say that one element of Herzog, my reason for re-reading it, had to do with the midlife crisis as, if you will, a literary mode. What Bellow conveys effectively is that sense of being closed off from things which once gave joy -- but, one concedes, not enough joy -- so where shall joy be found before it’s too late? And every person who does not point in the direction of a greater rapport with oneself, with one’s own life as one will have to accept it from here on out, is an enemy, or at least an obstacle. And the novel relays how such an attitude leaves its hero grasping at straws, trying to make right the story for the record, dictating endless letters to all those to whom Herzog wants to explain himself while he has the time. In free fall, certain matters become clearer. Strange that at twenty-three I wanted the pressure of crisis, of seeing beyond everything ‘the unexamined life’ gives you to take up your time, the freedom of rotting away in the New England wilds if only to examine one’s embattled defense against the modern world.

Herzog, writing to a colleague who succeeded where he had failed:

. . . people of powerful imagination, given to dreaming deeply and to raising up marvelous and self-sufficient fictions, turn to suffering sometimes to cut into their bliss, as people pinch themselves to feel awake. I know that my suffering, if I may speak of it, has often been like that, a more extended form of life, a striving for true wakefulness and an antidote to illusion, and therefore I can take no moral credit for it. I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I’ve had all the monstrosity I want. We’ve reached an age in the history of mankind when we can ask about certain persons, “What is this Thing?” No more of that for me -- no, no! I am simply a human being, more or less. I am even willing to leave the more or less in your hands. You may decide about me. You have a taste for metaphors.

SEARCH ME

2009-04-06T13:11:00.006-04:00

'Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 - now reckoned to be the world's most powerful brand - does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.

This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience. There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny. And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier but somehow laid claim to Britain's civic spaces. How gratifying to hear of the villagers of Broughton, Bucks, who prevented the Google van from taking pictures of their homes.

We could do worse than follow their example for this brat needs to be stopped in its tracks and taught about the responsibilities it owes to content providers and copyright holders.'
--Henry Porter, "Google is Just an Amoral Menace," The Observer, 5 April 2009

This article, which I found because two Facebook friends linked to it, resonates very tellingly after attending a symposium, 'Library 2.0,' held at Yale Law School on Saturday.

After an intro that featured much 'lifted' content and a bright, buzzword laden welcome that urged us to Tweet and Blog and upload photographs from our cellphones, etc., and a paper from Josh Greenberg at the New York Public Library that promoted the idea that librarians need to be "digitized," we finally got to a presentation, by Michael Zimmer at Univ of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, that offered a few caveats to the collective zeitgeist of online über alles with the notion, picked up from Neil Postman, of technology as always offering a Faustian bargain.

Given the need for the internet in contemporary communications, we might think Zimmer was simply playing devil's advocate or was a Luddite at heart, a throwback to the ancient days before we all went online. But not so, what Zimmer was really cautioning us about was all the unexamined consequences of our lemming-like acceptance of internet interaction. As librarians have had to at times stand up for civil liberties, like the right to privacy about one's intellectual inquiries and sources of information, Zimmer had reason to wonder if 'Library 2.0' -- the library as modeled on Google, essentially -- will continue to provide a 'safe harbor for anonymous inquiry.' Not simply 'who owns the content' of what we post -- but who owns the documentation, who gets to data-mine, and so forth? Ted Striphas, from Indiana Univ., extended this 'Big Brother is Watching' concern into Amazon's Kindle system which relays its users' annotations, bookmarks, notes, and highlights back to the mothership.

In the course of the day, there were several references to 'the Death Star': the four huge publishing conglomerates that now exist where twice that many major publishers existed a decade before. But the real 'Death Star' emerged when the topic of Google's digitization plans for all those out of print books was on the table in the day's last panel. Already we had heard, in an excellent presentation by John Palfrey of Harvard Law School, how 100% of a focus group of what he called 'digital natives' (those hitting 13-22 since the major internet wave of the late '90s) used Google to search for information and all went to the wikipedia entry on the subject first. Though Palfrey didn't elaborate on this at the time, the point became clear in the Google discussion when Frank Pasquale, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, spoke of the possible consequences of putting all our searches for information in the hands of 'proprietary black box algorithms subject to manipulation.' Wikipedia is always the first or second entry in any Google search. The first ten are apparently all anyone looks at. Everything that gets buried by the algorithm is as good as not there. This is not how research is conducted.

Then there's the thorny matter of those out of print books. Obviously it would be to the public good to have them searchable and accessible online if only because anything not online or available through Kindle (in other words, anything not part of the Death Star of Google and Amazon) falls into the 'here be monsters' of off-the-map ignorance. Already Jonathan Band, a lawyer, had told us that 'fair use' was becoming more conducive for technological and creative appropriation, and Denise Covey of Carnegie Mellon University Libraries and Ann Wolpert of MIT Libraries had spoken about faculties pursuing an open access policy in which anything they publish can be searched and referenced online -- a blow to academic publishers, but a victory for the notion that research on the internet should not be hampered by commercial considerations.

In other words, the notion of open access to all information, via the internet, of complete 'transparency' of provider and user, was more or less the mantra of the day. But what the Faustian bargain came to seem finally was not with the technology itself, but with giants such as Google or Amazon as the Big Brothers playing Mephistopheles, offering us the interconnected, easy access world of our dreams, but a world where we sacrifice something of our own intellectual curiosity, restlessness, and desire to see outside or beyond that black box algorithm that makes things so easily manageable for us.

Think about how Wolpert pointed out that what made the MIT professors move for Open Access was their realization that, in the world of electronic text, libraries only 'lease' access to online work, rather than owning it like all those printed copies they store in perpetuity. If something happens to the provider or to the lease, all that material is no longer available. And now the publishing world seems poised to turn over all electronic control of out of print materials to Google to broker for us, and to disseminate to us according to its lights. As Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, urged us to consider, there are alternatives. But as Ann Okerson, of Yale Libraries, said at the end of the final panel with a kind of 'fait accompli' finality: if Google accomplishes this digitization, the students and users of libraries at Yale will simply want access to it, and her job will be to work with it, not fight it.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
--George Orwell, 1984

SALUTE TO STANLEY

2009-04-01T22:53:00.005-04:00

'How did he do it, how did he become Stanley Kubrick?' I found myself wondering that last Friday night as I watched The Killing (1956), a film directed by Kubrick early in his career, screened as part of a mini retrospect at Yale’s Cinema at the Whitney, to honor the director at the tenth anniversary of his death. A B-movie all the way, it’s got minor character actors (Sterling Hayden and Elisha Cook, Jr. are the biggest names in the cast); it’s got that low budget 'hard-bitten' look to it, and it suffers from the bane of the ‘50s film, the need to have some corny resolution that stops Hayden’s character from getting away with it. Enter poodle to make suitcase full of money fall onto the airport tarmac, open, and cause bucks to blow away. I kid you not. Treasure of the Sierra Madre it ain’t.

Seeing The Killing on the big screen at Yale sorta made it seem important and of course if it is it’s because it’s early Kubrick. And what exactly is the claim to fame of Kubrick? In other words, asking how Kubrick became Kubrick also presupposes the question of who or what Kubrick is. And the answer becomes clearer when you see some of the early work. Kubrick is the American film director who managed somehow to make masterpieces of genre films, films that fit into categories overrun by numerous B-level productions.

Kubrick was not an 'arthouse film maker'; he had no interest in creating films that would only be appreciated by intellectuals and cineastes and aesthetes. And one way to avoid that fate is to make films in popular genres: The Killing is a heist film; 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; shown on Saturday night with the film’s star Keir Dullea on hand to talk about the experience) is a sci-fi movie; Full Metal Jacket (1987) is a Vietnam War movie; The Shining (1980) is a horror film. Others -- like Lolita (1962) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) -- are film adaptations of notorious novels; Barry Lyndon is a period film; Dr. Strangelove (1964) is a slapstick black comedy; Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is, I believe, Kubrick’s version of a romantic comedy.

The other film screened Friday night -- Paths of Glory (1957) -- is a bit more mixed in its genre: a war film that becomes a trial film, while at the same time being an even more devastating critique of the military than Strangelove. It’s the film where certain trademark elements of the Kubrick visual style begin to manifest themselves: like tracking shots through corridors, or, in this case, trenches; like important moments depicted in long shot; like close ups as moments of truth; but, even so, we’re not yet at the breakthrough that was and is 2001.

That film is a film like no other. Unforgettable, influential, breathtaking, mind-bending, yes, but also classical. The pacing of the film -- its epic unfolding -- must be something Kubrick learned from making Spartacus (1960; what used to be called 'the swords and sandals' genre), even though he disowned the film because he wasn’t given final cut. 2001 moves even more slowly than Spartacus if such a thing is possible, but the difference is that every frame of 2001 is loaded with portent, is a meditation on shapes and space. It’s pop art minimalism come to the big screen, and the story – featuring certain well-worn sci fi cliches like the machine that runs amok, and the secret mission that is more fearsome than expected, and the alien life form that causes us to question 'life as we know it' -- veers off into space age psychedelia with the trappings of Nietzschean metaphysics. Wow, man. Some on hand Saturday referred to viewers of the film who claimed a religous experience while watching it.

But is the film dated? Only in its late ‘60s attempt to imagine the 21st century -- in terms of style and in terms of a geopolitics where Russia and the U.S. are still the big guns in space exploration as they were in the ‘60s. But in some ways the film is wonderfully prescient: the computer HAL (acronym for ‘heuristic’ and ‘algorhythmic’) would no doubt get along wonderfully with today’s counterpart CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity). But what makes the film magnificent is its direction -- the way that Kubrick’s eye and ear (amazing cinematography and soundtrack) dominates a world he largely constructed himself. It’s an essay in cinamatic make-believe and sleight-of-hand with no computer-generated effects and with still the most convincing evocation of space travel ever presented.

After Friday night’s screening I watched on DVD the first part of Barry Lyndon (1975) and on Saturday night, part two. At various times in watching that film -- both on its release and in subsequent screenings and on the small screen -- I have felt that its distinctive distancing from the pacing and editing of other ‘70s films could be said to work to its disadvantage. In other words, I tended to be sympathetic to those who find the film 'too slow,' or 'too minimal in dialogue and action,' which most accept in 2001, because of its manifest originality, but not for a tale of an 18th century Irish upstart and ne’er-do-well. But watching it this time I felt it might be in a sense Kubrick’s most personal film.

Barry Lyndon is a timeless rendering of the early modern period that, unlike the future of 2001 or Clockwork Orange, never dates, and, unlike the settings of his other films, doesn’t suffer from the imagery that makes a film contemporary with its era. Barry Lyndon recreates the 18th century as represented by master painters of that era; it is the closest any film comes to inhabiting a world that existed long ago. The films that were its contemporaries, with rare exceptions, seem like effects of their time while Barry Lyndon remains closed in a time capsule, a living museum. That effect has been criticized (every era likes to believe its daily anxieties and joys are ignored by art at its peril), but the film stands now as a singular achievement. Which, as a phrase, sums up Kubrick’s career as well as anything I can think of.

MIDLIFE CRISIS LIT

2009-03-19T11:35:00.004-04:00

1. I Was a Teen-aged Steppenwolf!

Recently I re-read two novels to revisit certain mental territory, namely the place in my mind where I stored impressions from my earlier readings. This is one of the big attractions of re-reading after time has passed. No one, of course, has done more to extract the truths of being a different person dipping into what is supposedly the same stream than Proust. And maybe it's the changes made in my head by my first reading of Proust that have established this ongoing sense of rediscovery -- not only of the books themselves, but of me -- in the act of re-reading. Which, if so, means there's nothing quite like re-reading Proust, for then one gets to contemplate all of the narrator's re-visitings while always alive to the fact that the reader is revisiting too. It doesn't get any better than that.

The two books I was re-reading were not Proust caliber, but both had left a mark on me that I wanted to trace again. Or it might be more accurate to say that my reading of the first, Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927) occasioned an interest in re-reading Saul Bellow's Herzog (1964). Why? Well, that's the point of this commentary.

Steppenwolf is irrevocably associated with my adolescence. I can still remember sitting on the top bunk in my bedroom reading it by the light through the front window, looking out on the church across the street. I don't know why that memory is so clear, since I read the novel probably about six times in the course of high school. Was that the first reading? Probably, but so what? I can only assume -- and Proust would understand -- that my mind went on a little journey when I paused in my reading to look up and that, in some sense, my mind is still on that journey. What part of the novel was it? Of that I'm not sure. Probably it was the part when Harry Haller, the hero of the novel, is reading the little book For Madmen Only. It's at that point that a teen reader would be looking inward, trying to decide if he were in fact 'a steppenwolf' -- enthralled by bourgeois respectability but also harboring a certain lunatic urge to be a glorious outcast. The kind of reflection that comes easily when seated in one's parental home, annoyed to be called for punctual dinner before hitting a natural break in the text. 'Oh, if only I could live according to the demands of my spirit!' one says, shutting the book angrily and then taking one's place docilely at the family board.

But what hit me this time is the fact that Harry is almost fifty years old (as am I). And the book is essentially a midlife crisis book. And the fact that I strongly associated with Harry says something, indeed, about the teen I was or aspired to be. My own father was probably forty-six at the time. So here comes that premature aging that literature has a way of bequeathing. Suddenly I was a high school student in the midst of a midlife crisis: 'the wine of life is drawn and the mere lees is left this vault to brag of,' as Macbeth would say, and as I knew he said, then. There was something heady in that feeling -- which Hesse does his best to convey -- that the quaint little social rituals of high school and family life, and even of the big world of regular jobs beyond, is nothing but a sham, something to escape by means of . . . imagination? art? daring adventures? Could be. Hesse wisely refrains from making Harry some kind of undiscovered genius or former adventurer. Harry is simply what I wanted to be: a person whose interiority is entirely determined by books. And, lately, the books don't work any more. Thus the crisis. The lesson, more or less, is that one must look to one's fellow man for the meaning of life, not in books, not in the precise satisfactions of aesthetic fabrications. And yet this truth is brought home to him by a rather aesthetic night-out, a nightclub Walpurgisnacht in which he must experience something like the dissolution of his conscious, ego-driven mind. As Mozart tells him, in person (it's magic! or it's hallucination! -- in either case, it's cool for readers after the '60s); 'you must learn to laugh.' Laughter is the key.

To give Hesse credit: it's thanks to him and his rather tendentious evocation of humor that I sought out the philosopher I like to call 'the laughing lion': Nietzsche and his Zarathustra. But that story's for another time. For the moment, it's enough to say that humor, even if not much in evidence in Hesse's novel, is a good lesson to give to a painfully self-conscious and shy kid with a mind full of literature and little else. Fair enough, but is it a good lesson for the same kid pushing fifty? I wanted to think so, reading Steppenwolf again and charmed to find Harry deciding that he'd end his life on his fiftieth birthday. But then a lovely young woman takes him in hand and shows him a good time. What more is there? I'm sure as a kid I thought this was a cop-out. Girls! Jeeze, as if. They (the teen version in the 'burbs anyway) were the fiercest upholders of bourgeois sanctity and social rituals -- all seemingly eager for dating, mating, and the whole long slog through parenthood. Who needs it? But of course Hesse had his answer to that -- enough to beguile any teen with a fondness for fantasized versions of otherwise flesh and blood females -- a woman of the demimonde! And even if it was too late to find someone with the panache of Hesse's Hermione -- essentially a flapper with a penchant for existentialism -- in the age of feminism and the aftermath of the sexual revolution, there was still cause for hope, sorta, in the idea of a woman who knows (cf Page/Plant).

What does she know? As a teen I couldn't quite figure that out. But she knew something, enough anyway to master the Steppenwolf and treat him fondly as though a child. Is it a truth that an aging, played out artist manqué merely wants to be fondled fondly? I guess so, and, since I was reading this in the Gay Lib era, the suggestion that Harry needed to go bi a little really to live wasn't exactly a headtrip. Later, in both lit history and my reading, the Beats would be more aggressive on that point; in Hesse, it was Freudian thematics of the self, but without the hilarity at the unconscious that Joyce whipped up in his own Magic Theater in Ulysses. In any case, it should be pretty evident that a teenaged Steppenwolf grows into a middle-aged Steppenwolf, still enthralled primarily to literature, no matter how funny popular culture is, or how laughable the times. In Steppenwolf, Harry/Hesse has to try mightily to overcome his dislike of jazz (Pablo, the sax player, being both the purveyor of animalistic jazz and androgynous sex), but when I was first reading the novel, the kids had already killed the man, and so I had to break up the band (cf Bowie).

And that, I think, is the main point about midlife crisis lit like Steppenwolf. Hesse turned fifty the year it was published and all it can offer, as a means to overcome the malaise, is some kind of detente with youth and whatever they're into at the time. In a sense it's about surrendering one's heroes to the times, leaving off the querulous dissatisfaction that underwrites every evocation of "in my day." But what Hesse tries to push to -- to give him credit -- is dissatisfaction with the consolations of literature. It's a cautionary tale about a man who let his texts furnish him a world and then found that world stale. While outside, the times they were a-changin'. As far as the '20s were from Hesse's twenties in the 1890's, in other words, is the 2010s from the 1980's? Guess so. Tattoo it, pierce it, and upload it, Harry, it's a brave new world.

And what about Herzog? 'That's for another time,' Daddy said, as he put the book back on the shelf.

TRÈS BON, BONNARD

2009-03-07T21:54:00.001-05:00

Friday I visited an exhibition at the Met: "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors." The exhibit features luminous canvases painted from 1923 to 1947 that provide ample evidence for a reading of Bonnard as a great modernist, a relentless experimenter with color and form. In sharing those interests with the better known and more protean Henri Matisse, Bonnard does not suffer from the comparison. Bonnard, unlike Matisse, creates a sense of unease and disruption, of those forces -- such as love of beauty -- that sustain the artist, as well as those forces -- such as existential dread and a sense of the arbitrary interplay of imagination and perception -- that question art's purpose and reach. While Matisse feels, for the most part, celebratory about art's role in life, Bonnard suggests a burden in life that art can only suggest, never expiate.

In Bonnard's work the color is dense, featuring many virtuoso overlays, but it is also color that departs from any merely mimetic function. While always interested in depicting light as it demarcates different areas in a room, or as it reflects off some surfaces and is swallowed by others, Bonnard's sense of color makes light a pattern more than a presence. It doesn't simply illuminate his subjects, it makes a phantasmagoria of color effects play upon them. Along with the liberties of palette and the merging of foreground and background that occur because of the difficulty of reading gradations of color in a straight-forward manner -- in which they would be employed to create depth -- Bonnard's canvases present effects of composition that constantly keep the viewer off-guard, never able to settle into a comfortable viewing space where the frame "captures" all we need to see, and where spatial orientation is consistent. Tables appear vertical creating a sense of objects floating rather than sitting upon them; objects and figures are cut-off by the edge of the painting, sometimes looming like vague shapes in our periphery, sometimes sliding in like apparitions that haven't quite taken shape; shadows beneath plates, or within a fireplace, or -- most ominously -- within a partially open door are fraught with somber implications; figures -- most often Bonnard's wife, Marthe -- seem crouched, furtive, at times alive with vibrant colors that seem a mask or covering, at times rendered in schematic lines that recall Gauguin or Matisse; windows look out upon a landscape in which a garden or the distant strand of Cannes may appear as flat as a wall-painting or as radiant as a celestial realm.

But nothing I've said gives any sense of what it's like to stand before these paintings, engaged in reading the interplay of colors that truly create a world of their own without ever completely departing from the assumptions that govern our perceptions of our world. Bonnard only occasionally risks utter abstraction or the extremely notational manner of Picasso. Meanwhile, a tablecloth seems to contain a Diebenkorn, a stretch of wall offers subtle color relations that put to shame a "colorist" such as Guston. Bonnard learned from the Impressionists the mannerism of light rendered as overlayed brushstrokes of color, but he took that technique in a direction more extreme, which is to say, more self-involved. Painting from memory and notes rather than in situ, Bonnard creates an art of the mind's eye, an interior view of interiors that circle, again and again, upon a tablecloth that seems to stand for the canvas itself and a window that stands for the external world as yet another painting. If this sounds claustrophobic, it is, but at the same time, these paintings offer vistas of tension that play before one's eyes like astounding drugged or dream visions.

WHERE THE BOYS WERE

2009-02-27T12:24:00.004-05:00

Last night the WHC featured a well-paired double feature I couldn't resist: John Cassavetes' Husbands (1970) and Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973). Both films feature a trio of men and the dynamic that evolves amongst them during what could be called 'a bender.' In the Cassavetes film, the fun begins after the funeral for the fourth member of the jolly band, but is prolonged when the three buddies, Harry (Ben Gazzara), Gus (Cassavetes), Archie (Peter Falk) go to London together: Harry because he's just become estranged from his wife, the other two as moral support. In Ashby's film, two 'lifers' in the Navy, 'Badass' Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and 'Mule' Mulhall (Otis Young) are given the detail of escorting young kleptomaniac Meadows (Randy Quaid) to Portsmouith, MA, where he will be incarcerated for eight years.

In other words, the boys in Husbands bond as one of their number is 'sprung' -- first, from life, via death, second, from wedlock via an erratic path of self-indulgence and occasional violence. While the boys in Detail bond while trying to introduce self-indulgence to one of their number who is about to lose all freedoms.

The guys in Husbands are a bit older; settled, married, family men, so the need to let loose is simply a given. We do see Gazzara trying to make amends with his wife -- which features her pulling a kitchen knife on him, and him slapping and man-handling both his wife and mother-in-law -- but otherwise the families are simply in the background as the world forever in the periphery of whatever husbands might be doing at the moment. What makes the film so appealing is the naturalness of the actors -- Falk, Gazzara, and Cassavetes are friends and their interactions seem spontaneous, much of their dialogue at times feeling improvised, the way real friends josh each other, take exception over trivial things like certain verbal or facial expressions, bond affectionately on moments just as fleeting, and generally create a collectivity that unites them against the world, even if, among themselves, there is real doubt and a lot of uncertain longings. Gazzara's Harry is the most 'troubled' -- in the sense of dissatisfied with his life, but also in the sense of having a personality that seems to bristle simply because that's his nature. Falk's Archie is the funniest; his efforts to pick up women, particularly an older, 'madam'-looking woman in a casino in London, would be simply sad if he weren't somehow so likeably incompetent. Then there's Cassavetes' Gus who is fascinatingly mercurial in his interactions; there's the sense that his patience is always being tested, always on edge, which translates into a feeling of his intense attachment to these fellows, despite everything. The film is wise, wry, knowing, affectionate but clear-eyed, showing us the kind of hollow underbelly of the midlingly successful breadwinner of the period without a lot of posturing about it. It feels like spending time with guys you might find drinking in any bar in town at any time. In the end you know them a bit better for having drunk with them and gone to the places they go, and for having seen them 'behind closed doors' with the women they pick up in London, but you don't really know them that well because they really don't know themselves or each other all that well either.

The guys in Last Detail are thrown together by chance and necessity, which gives the film more immediate drama right from the start. Neither Badass or Mule wants to be on the detail, and Meadows is a clueless, pathetic, but goofily likeable klepto who is facing a harsh reprimand simply for trying to rip off a polio collection box. But Nicholson's Badass, noticeably shorter than Mule and the towering, gawky Meadows, as the somewhat stereotypical sailor looking for a good time, is a telling portrait of a man's man, trying to do a decent job of older mate showing the youngun a good time: telling, because Nicholson exposes us to Badass' masculine bragging, his manly charm, his sense of the thrill and allure of violence, his love of drinking, his savvy sense of his place in the world, his generous feelings toward his charge, his pity for the boy mixed with his disgust at the boy's docility toward his fate, and even his schadenfreude at the hapless kid's plight. The moment of insight comes when Badass tells Mule that the kid won't run off because, deep down, he's glad he's going to jail. Out in the world anything that would happen to him would be mostly bad; now, the worst has already happened and that's a relief. The moment of truth comes when Meadows tries to run off in the 11th hour, his growth beyond the pathetic victim Badass read him as, correctly, having occurred under Badass' tutelage.

Both films show us something about the dynamics of male bonding: in Husbands, because these men have families, the bond is based on asserting a hold upon the identity of guys free to do what guys want to do -- drinking, sports, gambling, picking up girls. In Last Detail, the bond is the Navy: it makes Badass and Mule equals, if not friends, and it makes their sympathy with Meadows not personal so much as institutional: he is the uncertain young recruit they might have felt in themselves once upon a time, or at least is a type they have seen before, only now they can try to intervene, to show him what life is all about: getting drunk, going to a party, going to a whorehouse, and so on. The party is the funniest part: there, a number of vaguely counter-cultural early '70s types clash memorably with the working-class bluntness and social allegiances of Badass and Mule. There the greenness of Meadows is to his advantage because he's a type who could be recruited for anything, such as the Hare Krishna chanting he picks up in a New York temple and which acts as his entree to the counter-culture party.

What both films manage is avoiding the 'bittersweet' tag that often lands on such efforts to present both the harshness and the affection of such interactions. Both are better than that in refusing the kinds of moves toward ersatz emotional catharsis (aka sappiness) that have become de rigeur in American movies in the Spielberg era. In that sense, both films kindle a nostalgia for '70s indies: both Cassavetes and Ashby were outsiders to the Hollywood system, treating its execs with disdain and avoiding the kinds of 'improvements' that would spell bigger box office. And that fact also creates a bond between a certain audience and these aging boys.

SCIENCE / ENTERTAINMENT / ART

2009-02-26T12:37:00.002-05:00

There's been more talk about the humanities again recently, this time in a NYTimes article called 'In Tough Times, The Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,' fueled by a book by Anthony T. Kronman, a law professor at Yale, called Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (catchy title). There was also a review in the Sunday Book section of Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, which tries to find scientific corroboration of insights found in fiction -- in the case of Proust, insights about how memory works. That review contained a mention of E. O. Wilson's 'biopoetics' that seeks to understand the evolutionary value of literature. The upshot is that the humanities are having to justify themselves in the 'cost effective' world of economists or in the adaptive world of biologists, while also coming to grips with the fact that, surprise, humanists really aren't well adapted to market-driven rationales. And so, like dinosaurs, they're coming to seem a species that shall eventually perish.

But I also watched the Academy Awards Sunday night and the tension between movies that strive to be 'art' or to have 'a message' vs. movies that simply seek to entertain was already on my mind. Clearly, the latter get the box office, and are best adapted to the fiercely competitive economies that demand the constant headcount -- or show of hands -- of the box office. Show of hands, how many saw film X, vs. film blockbuster? The answer is obvious. And of course it extends to books -- how many have read, of their own volition, a classic vs. an entertaining page-turner? And of course there are headcounts for every discipline or field of study, how many students graduate with a degree in the humanities, how many graduate students still strive for excellence in the field?

The writing was on the wall a long time ago on this one. And unlike religion, which can sustain itself against such reliance on the money talks, rational findings of our econo-scientistic worldview, the humanities are supposed to be part of 'education,' and 'education' is supposed to help students to live in the modern world, which comes increasingly to mean, survive in whatever human endeavor is best bankrolled. Law and medicine have always been growth industries. And business majors . . . and economics . . . and lab work. And it goes further: 'Languages,' at least, was able to sustain itself as a field because it was important to understand how language affects our culture, and how language determines our worldview, and, just on a practical level, to learn languages for the sake of communication. But even there the humanities have lost ground. Does anyone need to read the poetry of a given language to understand how to speak that language, how to make deals in that language? Yes, it helps to appreciate nuance in the use of words, but how relevant is the history of the language, how necessary is familiarity with the most distinguished -- which is to say idiosyncratic, inspired, woefully underpaid -- users of that language?

Many great writers, let's face it, were horribly ill-adapted not just to the modern world with its scientistic worldview, but were even poorly adapted to 'the world of letters.' And the success of those adept at producing their product -- whether Stephen King or John Updike -- no matter how different their readerships might be, no matter how different their aims in what they write, adds up to the valuing of a hold on a certain niche, which is to say 'a market.' I mention Updike because of a piece today by Roger Cohen which, while touting 'the inner life,' is an odd blend of callous indifference, casual curiosity, and critical judgment, the latter on Ian McEwan and on McEwan's comment on the recently deceased Updike. Cohen is trying to think about what really good writing does for us, but he's looking in the wrong places: McEwan and Updike are both symptoms, examples of the kind of 'lack' that our letters have long upheld as the best we have. They are, as writers, well-adapted to readers who don't really read. They entertain us with a process that is 'like' what reading literature should be.

So when D. T. Max writes in his review of Lehrer's book on Proust and science, that E. O. Wilson would like 'to wire a reader with Madame Bovary on a gurney to see what parts of his brain light up when Emma Bovary has sex with Rodolphe and which when she commits suicide,' this notion misses the point. We could read all sorts of things which feature adultery and suicide, even 'creative non-fiction.' But what 'lights up' when we actually enter a fiction? What lights up when we encounter a truly unique and challenging use of language? What does it mean to be inside Flaubert's prose, or James', or Proust's? What goes dark when you just can't find that cerebral connection any more, at any price?

I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. With books outlawed, book lovers committed entire volumes to memory. One assumes that if you couldn't remember the book word for word, you could still retell 'what happens.' But what no one can retell or recapture is 'what happens' when you are actually reading the book. The problem that literature, as education, faces is that such lit courses are just a dodge: an excuse to make students read books. Show of hands: how many students who took the course did 'all the reading'? But why should they? our unbookish culture of 'light' readers continues to ask. And there's no real answer to that question, other than a curiosity about the world 'inside' books, which comes to seem more and more a copout on or escape from 'the real world' -- the one science explains to us and whose necessities require negotiable skills in fields essentially comprised of scientific modes of discourse. And in that world, what we flock to is entertainment, with the few -- mostly practitioners of some form of art or humanities -- paying lip service to and sometimes dedicating their lives to something more. Something I like to call 'the supreme fiction,' in honor of an insurance company executive who wrote 'let Be be finale of seem / the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.'

IN DREAMS

2009-02-16T11:39:00.009-05:00

'In dreams begin responsibilities' is the title of a story written by Delmore Schwartz and published in a volume of that name in 1938. I read the story a long time ago and have nothing to say about it now, and yet I can’t type the words 'in dreams' and not think of the writer who I will always think of as 'Delmore' because of John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, and Lou Reed.

He came to a bad end, didn’t he. Indeed, and perhaps that’s why he’s lurking somewhere in the background even now. The man who, in Lowell’s poem, changed Wordsworth’s 'poets in their youth begin in gladness, thereof in the end come despondency and sadness' to end with 'madness,' and then -- followed suit.

But the ostensible point of this post is that I might not be mad enough, even yet. One reason, among others perhaps, that my blogging has languished somewhat of late (I seem to hear Hamlet saying, 'I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth') is that 'the things of this world' -- let’s call it prosaic reality -- have become things I care not much about. So, for instance, the state of the academy, à la Stanley Fish, or the state of the economy, à la Paul Krugman, or the state of Hollywood, à la Carpetbagger, or even the state of Joaquin Phoenix, à la Gawker, diverting as those questions might be, haven’t been taxing my mental lobes enough to crank out 'copy.'

And why not? Because of dreams. Fittingly, this week’s assignments in Daily Themes, for the first time in the many years (8?) that I’ve been involved with the course, are to write about a dream, to write a dream for a character, to write with 'dream logic.' I say fittingly because, fitfully, I’ve become a bit dissatisfied with my own waking reality quite a bit of late -- which extends, dear reader, to my own belabored prose. From which we get 'prosaic' reality, literally, in the first place. And what has inspired such low libidinal urges toward what we in -- we have to come up with another substance, it should be clear by now that whatever those towers are made of, 'ivory' is not the material -- academia like to call 'expository prose'? Well, besides my own cruel fiction’s requirement of exposition, it is, you guessed it, poetry! Oh, and film.

Recently I’ve read Marie Étienne’s Le roi des cents cavaliers (2002) (King of a Hundred Horsemen in the English rendering by Marilyn Hacker, 2008), and Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life (2007) and some achingly familiar but often disenfranchised area of my brain was coaxed back to what feels like posthumous existence by re-acquaintance with the 'dream state' of poetry which, while having everything to do with the modern world (particularly Harvey), makes no attempt to name it as such, to produce exposition, in other words.

Harvey’s volume does come at times to seem something of a 'one-trick pony' -- I’m thinking of the almost-not-quite abecedarian poems in the sections called 'The Future of Terror' and 'The Terror of the Future' -- but it’s still quite a nice trick. And other poems, for instance those delineating the existence of 'Robo-Boy,' were quite charming. I think I’m well-disposed toward this poetry because it studiously avoids doing all the things that tend to bore me about poetry -- the increasingly prosaic variety, particularly. Then there’s Étienne who is simply a joy to behold, in French at least, because, even when exposing, er, expositing, er, positing or expounding, Étienne’s prose line (and these are poems often written in 'prose') is so succinct, so attentive to its aural associations, so emphatically particular that 'the dream' is all in the ears. The poems induce an almost surreal dream state simply by virtue of how it sounds to say simply things like: 'Derrière les volets clos, la lumière extérieure.'

And as to 'the dream' on film: somewhere in, what Joyce in his great dream work calls, 'the bacbuccus of the mind' (in this case my mind, but, collectivists, who can say for sure?) are percolating thoughts ('fish got in the percolator'?) of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), and to some extent Blue Velvet (1986), which I watched again recently. Suffice to say that a journey through Inland Empire left me for a week or so rather dissatisfied with the heavy 'reality effect' proceeding apace in my own W in P. I’ve coped with that with what coping mechanisms were at my disposal, but I want to take this opportunity, such as it is, to again express wonderment of an enterprise that can make nightmares take on reality in Normalville, U.S.A., as in Blue Velvet, but can also disengage from how things normally look and act, not only in ‘the real world’ but also in the ‘fictive world’ of that real world provided us by standard-issue cinema -- even such cinema as purports to provide us entry into a ‘fantasy world.’

So, getting back to Delmore’s dreams (recall, the protagonist in his story was 'at the movies' in a dream, watching a movie about his parents) -- what kind of responsibilities begin in them? Is it a responsibility to ‘the world’ as it really is? Or to the dreamer as the self or subjectivity ‘exposed’ by exposition of what goes on in that bacbuccus (the ruckus in the bacbuccus, let's call it)? Or to the reader (if we transpose such dreams into prose or film or poem)? Like those Three Witchy Women at the start of The Magic Flute (which I just saw for the first time on Valentine’s Day -- talk about dream logic!), I’ll say 'nein, nein, nein.' It’s a responsibility only to the dream itself. To the ‘dream logic,’ if your rational cranium must have it so, herr professor, but what that logic makes manifest is what you must follow through the eye of the needle, down the rabbit hole, there and back again, and wherever it lead you, because such method, madness enough in itself, is the only way to arrive -- 'O phoenix cruelprints' -- finally at something, as the aging kids in the gingerbread tower like to say, ‘wholly other.’ Utter!

A candy-colored clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
--Roy Orbison, "In Dreams" (1963)

CINEMAGIC

2009-02-02T12:52:00.001-05:00

Recent viewings: on Saturday at WHC, two films by the silent film master Erich von Stroheim, Foolish Wives (1922) and The Wedding March (1928), then on Sunday, instead of the Super Bowl, I finally sat down with David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006), which was "filmed" in digital video.

And what went through my mind, wonderingly, as I watched the completely silent Foolish Wives (not even a score since that would've made the film play at a faster speed) was admiration for the ability to tell a story without words. There were the title cards, certainly, both as narration and as dialogue -- the narration titles were often rather amusing in their disjointed scene-setting -- but much of the fascination of the film derived solely from the act of watching. And what I admired was that von Stroheim had such a complete grasp of his medium that he was able to keep us focused on whatever scene was before us.

I realized that much of that fascination had to do with watching "dumb show." In other words, just as when we observe people at a distance in real life, we have to interpret what's going on solely by what we see. So we have to remain attentive so as not to miss something. And von Stroheim has an easy, superb naturalness in his way of keeping our attention on what he wants to show us. But it's a method that has to know exactly how every scene should be shot and how played. Top it off with the fact that Stroheim was himself the male lead in both films: in one film, heartless; in the other, forced to become heartless. In both cases, the story of how that plays out is faultless in its pacing, its sets, its grasp of how to communicate with the audience.

Von Stroheim is known as the man who made Greed, a 21 reel film that would've taken about eight to nine hours to watch. All but two hours' worth was destroyed by the studio. Would it be possible to make a fully watchable film at that length? I can believe von Stroheim did it, and it suggests possibilities of a film that would truly feel like a novel in its plots and subplots and diversity.

Watching Inland Empire after the von Stroheim films convinced me that might in fact be an idea worth pursuing. Shooting in digital video rather than film means no one can destroy the stock, no one has to pay for processing, so one can be as prolix as one likes. This could be a great danger in creating a sprawling, pointless opus which, no doubt, some find Inland Empire to be. But what this kind of license -- the film runs to 179 minutes -- requires, for justification, is no less a compelling grasp of the medium than von Stroheim shows.

Lynch is a master at delineating his own dream world universe. Inland Empire shows possibilities for what an "art film" can be once we no longer have the driving logic of narrative continuity to buttress what we're seeing. Lynch has often strayed into this realm, but his movies have tended to downplay the possible breaks with narrative norms in favor of "a story." Inland Empire instead creates "a world." Rather than try to follow narrative progress, we follow narrative juxtaposition. This bit of the world set against this other bit of the world. There is great beauty, humor, drama, and a very unsettling, almost metaphysical suspense, as though at any moment the very borders of sanity were being skirted.

But what makes Inland Empire work is the same thing that makes Foolish Wives work: a complete grasp of how to portray action, how to make it live on the screen, how to create and sustain our interest in watching by constantly giving us something interesting to watch. Von Stroheim tells a story one could easily recap; Lynch tells a story that one can only sum up, scene by scene. But both rely entirely on what the eye registers in watching. The effect is always in excess of what a description of the scene would provide. And that, my friends, is cinemagic.

SOMETHING FISHY

2009-01-30T14:19:00.004-05:00

In his online site, Think Again, Stanley Fish has posted several columns on the humanities -- 'Will the Humanities Save Us?,' 'The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two,' 'The Last Professor' -- asserting, a) the humanities, as academic disciplines, serve no purpose beyond themselves, b) the funding of the humanities in the university becomes harder and harder to justify, c) the existence of humanities departments will continue to decline. All of which is obviously true. But why bring this up now as though it were controversial?

Perhaps to make it controversial, so that talk might inspire more appreciation of the humanities? Unlikely, since Fish himself prefers to shoot down efforts to justify the humanities (albeit, when the justification invokes a reference to some "good" achieved or aimed at outside the humanities themselves).

Perhaps to take some final potshots at the discipline that has served him well (and which he has served) but which he believes has gone astray? Maybe so, but Fish is no Bloom with his 'school of resentment' fulminations, standing as hoary prophet unappreciated in his field. Fish is a pragmatist, essentially, and what he's describing he isn't necessarily decrying. In other words, he sees the writing on the wall, and has merely the glib good fortune to be ahead of the deluge. As plugs get pulled on more and more tenure track appointments, he can, from happy retirement, write his intellectual memoirs of the glory days, should he choose.

Perhaps to maintain his 'cred' as a tenured nihilist, quite willing to 'decontruct' (I use the term loosely) the claims of humanistic self-importance: 'critical thinking,' 'moral value,' and so on? There is something there, perhaps, since Fish finally, as justification for his own work, comes down in favor only of 'pleasure,' the 'isn't that great?' of the admiring reader, though he is willing to expand that concept of pleasure with requisite references to 'cognitive awareness' -- because, you see, the literature professor not only experiences the pleasure but is clever enough to be able explain it as well.

Ah, but there's the rub. That explanation of the pleasure immediately brings into play 'values' -- this line is good because it gives pleasure, this pleasure is good because I can explain its complexity or its sonority or its succinctness, and, eventually, this pleasure is good because it partakes of certain aesthetic or intellectual values which, in the history of the humanities (and, by extension, humanity) have been deemed worthy of attention, discussion, explication. And, ultimately, right appreciation of this pleasure requires mastery of a body of knowledge and explication and critique that exists by virtue of the pleasure of discussing a pre-existent pleasure?

In other words, Fish is adamant that he does not, by 'humanities,' mean to indicate works of poetry or fiction, or paintings or plays and their creation. He means the discussion and investigation of such works. But ultimately the only reason any culture would take such a discipline seriously, and support it, is because it considers the 'primary texts' important enough to merit the attention and investigation. 'As a culture,' we want there to be a body of knowledge about the great works of the past.

Indeed, that attitude did underwrite the classics as a body of knowledge (no one wrote 'the classics' any longer, one simply studied them). But as the study of the humanities has become more up to date, including, first, 'the moderns,' then contemporary literary works and visual works and film and TV and internet, that justification fades away, and you have, simply, people educating themselves to talk a certain kind of educated jargon about common (or more arcane) features of our intellectual environment. Is this a waste of time or money? Yes, if we want there to be some 'outcome.' No, if we simply want the discussion to continue.

What Fish is pointing out is that the discussion may not be continued, much, for the next generation of would-be humanists. This has always happened, in the sense that what has been the 'justification' for the practice has often had to shift its ground. In fact, it's rather amusing to look at the history of literary criticism and the history of intellectual fashion, for the 'lip service' the discipline itself pays to whatever is 'critical' or 'crucial' in an era inevitably comes to the fore. In other words, there's always a bit of that corporate 'run it up the flagpole and see who salutes' ideology at work, even in the 'objective' and 'non-utilitarian' reaches of academic knowledge. But what Fish sees as different is that now all the 'lip service' is on the side of those who at least want to pretend they value the humanities, though they -- regretfully or not -- have to cut the funds. And Fish is right in seeing such people as a dying breed, since literary 'cultural capital' has disappeared faster than the capital in all those retirement funds.

So, I'm all for Fish's testy 'last stand': 'love me as I am or leave me.' Either value 'debate' for debate's sake, or be done with it. Don't try to swell the ranks of believers by selling a false bill of goods. The humanities, as disciplines supporting a doctorate of philosophy, are about nothing but training the mind to take part in the discipline, much as is true of any academic discipline. To assert a 'pay-off' for trustees or parents or investors or general humanity is to pretend that the work the mind does to attain such lucidity is supposed to support some other effort, an effort 'anyone,' (i.e., those not schooled in the discipline) can appreciate and see the benefit of. And that's simply false.

In terms of the relation between the scholars and theorists in the field and the undergraduates they teach and the university they serve, well, at that point there is some grounds for a discussion of whether there is any practical gain from taking a course in the humanities, whether it adds anything tangible to the mind or to the capabilities of the students thus exposed. And it's that side of the question that I feel Fish willfully skirts because, I assume, he's been long removed from 'the trenches,' where his TAs and other hapless adjuncts toil, trying to justify how they assign grades to the writing of the students who sit through Fish's clever, brilliant and insightful lectures -- who pay, in other words, for the privilege of listening to the professoriat exercise its mind.

Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar,
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr
Herauf, herab und quer und krumm
Meine Schüler an der Nase herum --
Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!
--Goethe, Faust

(To Be Continued)

HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE

2009-01-24T12:06:00.003-05:00

So, the past week. It began with an impending sense of the Inauguration as the main event for a necessary transition of power, but also as a collective expression of the current Zeitgeist in the U.S. And that's what I heard Obama strive to give words to in his address: how to ring in the changes he will bring, but also how to attest to the change that his election already manifests.

It was a tall order, and it's easy to believe that, if the State of the Union at present were not so dire, then the speech could've been more uplifting. But the fact of the matter is that being president at this moment has to be one of the worst jobs imaginable, so the speech was in-keeping with that state of things, but what was moving about it, to me, was how carefully worded and emphatic it was. Obama didn't over-reach with rhetorical flourishes or empty, windy phrases. And there's a point there, I think, about the kind of president we can expect him to be: think back to JFK's inaugural speech with its claim for a new generation -- the urgency of the speech had in fact little enough to do with the situation. The drama came from Kennedy himself as the new, young ideologue with his hands on power, ready to take the Cold War up a notch. Or think of Reagan's paternal-sounding intention to remove paternalistic government from our lives. In both cases, the new leader had to distance himself significantly from his predecessor. Obama had that task as well, and he met it with a confident urgency closer to Reagan than to Kennedy, though like Kennedy he emphasized service to the country. But Reagan's "we can't live beyond our means" rhetoric and his "these problems will go away" riposte to the economic problems the U.S. faced in 1981 had nothing like the rhetorical force of Obama's "time to put away childish things." There was at least a glimmer for a moment -- amidst all the back-patting for how great America is, which every politician has to indulge to stroke our collective egos -- of a vision of Americans as essentially frivolous people. A bit of diagnostic self-recognition that would be welcome at this time.

But just as strong was the statement that "we will not apologize for our way of life," and, what was for me the finest line: "the price and the promise of citizenship" which packed the idea of "ask what you can do for your country" into the promise of a government still trying to do things for its citizenry, as opposed to the "government is not the solution" write-off of Reagan's take on things. But the "new generation" rhetoric has remained in play from JFK to Clinton to Obama -- and for Clinton, the first new president after the fall of the USSR, it perhaps should have rang strongest, and yet not so. For Obama speaks more tellingly to the hopes and fears of the generation born and coming of age since the Reagan/Bush years, in the post-Cold War, internet-boom and bust, increased terrorist threat, 9-11 aftermath, credit obliteration, and W.'s rogue executive branch. Clinton marked the moment when the liberal-based Baby Boomers, with their hopes for government-led change, came to power; W. marked the moment when the business-based Baby Boomers, with their 'every man for himself' profit margins, took it back. Obama marks the moment when both a dread of what government can do to us, if it acts wrongly, and a hope of what government can do for us, if it pursues enlightened ideas, hover over the question of the U.S.'s place in the world at the close of the first decade of the new century.

Finally, the most emotional moment for me in the speech was, oddly, the evocation of George Washington at war in winter, on the banks of a frozen river. While I'm not much on invoking "our forefathers," since every President, regardless of his policies or effectiveness, seems able to invoke them at will, Obama did make me glimpse for a moment how perilous and tenuous the birth of the country was, and with that went the reflection that nothing the U.S. has faced since has ever been as dire, that in almost anything the country has undertaken it has had a significant upper hand. So that brief vision of courage in the face of a major threat was timely in putting current fears into perspective -- a vision that could reach back through the nuclear war fears of JFK's speech to FDR's "nothing to fear but fear itself" speech on the dire economic crisis in 1933.

"The practices of unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and the minds of men. True, they have tried; but, faced by the failure of credit, they have proposed only lending more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow them they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and where there is no vision the people perish."
--Franklin Roosevelt, inaugural address, 6 March 1933

ODE TO JOY

2009-01-17T16:56:00.003-05:00

This past week I watched two films about the fortunes of the band that began life as Warsaw, changed to Joy Division, then, after the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, became New Order. Anton Corbijn's Control (2007), based on a memoir by Curtis' wife, Deborah, hews to the biopic vein of "early life" (in this case, when Curtis and Debbie first meet) to struggling early years, to rise to fame, and, in this case, to untimely demise. What's different in Curtis' case is that the time from first meeting to death is about seven years. People take longer to get through high school and college. Joy Division (2007), the documentary by Grant Gee, covers a bit of the same ground but in round robin reminiscences by some of the principle figures in the Joy Division story: the three remaining band members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Manchester pop authority Tony Wilson, Terry Mason, an early manager, Annik Honore, the Belgian girlfriend, that, according to Control, created the main tension in the Curtis marriage, and numerous others. There are some amusing overlaps -- as when Terry admits he didn't have a phone, which made it difficult to arrange gigs for the band, while Rob Gretton, the fast-talking man with a plan who takes over the job from Terry, "had access to a phone." Sure enough, in Control, Rob dismisses Terry as someone who probably doesn't have a phone, and we get to see Rob answering the pay phone in the hall of the building he lives in. Such are the humble beginnings.

Both films are fairly short on pretension, which is a strength. For whatever Joy Division is or was, they aren't exactly a household name, nor have they yet proven themselves to be the kind of durable reference point for everyone coming of nihilistic age at a certain moment -- as for instance The Velvet Underground, or The Sex Pistols, or Nirvana were in their respective days. Joy Division did concoct a novel sound that rides the 'new wave' that combines a certain love for glam -- Bowie, Roxy Music get soundtrack time in Control -- with a Sex Pistols-inspired punk ethos. It's a heady sound and, as New Order, becomes brighter, crisper and more dance-friendly. But there's no denying there's an aura about Joy Division that both these films are in the business of perpetuating, fixing upon Curtis as the fallen figurehead. Kinda the Syd Barrett in the mix.

But the case that sticks best is that Joy Division was the quintessential Manchester band, and when their fortunes were taking them far afield -- first to Europe, then to America -- the pressure was too much for the fragile psyche of Ian Curtis. As lead singer/front man, he felt the strain of trying to market worldwide the DIY ethos of a crowd of Manchester mates. One of the surprising admissions in the documentary is that Curtis' erstwhile band mates never paid much attention to what the guy was singing about. The fact that Curtis' "vision" is unremittingly bleak and terminally depressed never seems to have dawned on these savants. Or at least that's the way they see it now, well-fêted as they are in middle-age. One of the statements I liked best came from one of the band's entourage who says they "never talked to each other" -- and it's not an indictment of these guys in particular, it's a simple statement of fact: as twentysomething new wave rockers trying to foster their own idiosyncratic grasp of cool, the last thing anyone would do, post-punk, is get all emo about things.

Temperament is one thing that separates the suicide of Curtis from the suicide of Kurt Cobain: Cobain was always way more ironic, humorous, and -- at a concert such as Unplugged in New York (1994) -- laidback than Curtis ever seemed to be. Curtis -- in the footage in the documentary, and as recreated to great effect by Sam Riley in Control -- seems driven by a daemon or maybe even a demon. Rather than the old chestnut "he died for rock'n'roll,' Control seems to suggest he died to escape rock'n'roll -- or maybe it was to escape his wife and girlfriend. Both, as depicted in the film, are kinda downers each in her own way, in the sense that both have emotional claims on Curtis that he seems not able to divest himself of. Sure, we can all relate: when he's with one, he'd rather be done with the other one; or, when he's with one, he'd rather be back with the other one. What's a fledgling rock star to do? Whatever was riding the real Curtis, his fictional version just seems intensely ineffectual.

Control is beautifully photographed, and the chemistry of the band and its entourage is made entertaining stuff, with Curtis's epileptic seizures and medications filling the dramatic role of the inevitable drug addiction period in the typical music biopic. Since Control is based on Deborah Curtis' book, it's surprising that, as played with winsome, girl-next-door good intentions by Samantha Morton, her character in the movie comes across as the inevitable ball-and-chain. Certainly we don't see much evidence of her really digging the band's sound and Curtis' put-me-out-of-my-misery lyrics. Annik, in Control, seems nothing more than the starry-eyed believer who finds the interplay of the man and his persona irresistible. In the documentary, Annik speaks intensely about Curtis, but with what seems an outsider's view. In other words, the feeling at the end of Control and Joy Division, is that the people who knew Curtis best didn't know him much at all.

That leaves the music, of course. As someone not that much younger than the principles of these stories, I can attest to the fact that Joy Division, more than the Sex Pistols, for me, caught something of the bleakness of the late '70s to early '80s malaise. And that, with an anthemic song like "Love Will Tear Us Apart," they said -- in a very catchy way -- what a losing battle that whole "committed relationship" number is. But I didn't hear JD till after New Order was up and running and so sought out the songs by JD that were closest to the songs I liked on Power, Corruption, and Lies (1983). Curtis, vocally, is too much of a one trick pony, and their handful of great songs makes laughable Peter Hook's assertion that, if Curtis hadn't died, JD would've gone on to do what U2 did. Yeah, right. The idea of the Curtis-led band becoming as popular as New Order is enough of a stretch -- to become U2-like there would have to have been some major remake-remodeling going on via the U.S. tour that Curtis hung himself literally on the eve of. But, again, since the band never listened much to what Curtis was singing, maybe they actually believe that the masses who rallied to "Sunday Bloody Sunday" or swayed to "With or Without You" would jump for joy to songs like "Decades":

Weary inside, now our heart's lost forever,
Can't replace the fear, or the thrill of the chase,
Each ritual showed up the door for our wanderings,
Open then shut, then slammed in our face.
--Joy Division, "Decades" (1980)

'AND IN THE END...'

2009-01-08T16:16:00.003-05:00

A book I read over break was Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (2007) by Jonathan Gould, a very good read on the four lads from Liverpool and the major sensation they caused. What Gould does well is set the Beatles' music -- from formation to first singles, touring, and album to album -- in the context with which it interacts. Familiar as stories of the period are, featuring the usual cast of notables, Gould gives very succinct summations that hit the main cultural markers, but also provides useful historical background of pop music and recording. Such material, it kept occurring to me as I read, is important for any readership whose interest in The Beatles might postdate the band itself -- which is now a large percentage of the music-buying population. A kid listening to a Beatles song today might find it, as music, fun or fascinating or even corny, but should know something of how that music was perceived in its time really to evaluate it.

That statement probably defines my own vexed relation to pop culture, and thus one reason I was interested in reading this book in the first place. For, having lived through the reign of The Beatles while I was in grade school, and having come to terms with what their music "meant" in my teens, I can't help feeling that anything I think about rock-pop music comes filtered through The Fab Four and their sense of what a song could be, no matter how much I willingly dropped interest in John, Paul, George, and Ringo subsequent to The Beatles' breakup. Gould's story of the band helped me to remember why: by the end of the story, The Beatles are pretty tedious company -- especially to each other, but to the reader as well.

Gould is also good at doing something that lots of bios don't do: describing in nuanced detail the work the band did. So often, the story of a creative artist tells us lots about how said artist interacted with others, and how success affected the person, but what gets left out of account is what the artist was trying to do, as an artist. Gould puts the music first because, after all, that's the only reason we care about these four guys, and because, as he paints them, The Beatles themselves put the music first. As long as they were united in that drive to make the best music they could, they were a first-rate band. Once the burden of being the creators of the most popular music ever started to take precedence, to say nothing of trying to have lives that were not relentlessly "Beatled," the music started to become something four celebrities had to find time to do -- and, worse, do with each other: the same four guys who were no longer the same four guys.

Gould's description of the songs is usually informative at least. Generally he also goes beyond mere description of what a song does musically to talk about the implications of the song. At times, in that dimension of interpretive evaluation, he's not all he could be, but he's at least always a discerning listener and quite capable at getting down on paper what he's hearing. For that alone, the book is worthwhile. But it's for his engaging sense of what it was like to be alive when The Beatles were rising and peaking and disassembling, that I strongly recommend this book's clear and concise account.

If you really like it you can have the rights
It could make a million for you overnight
--Lennon/McCartney, "Paperback Writer" (1966)

THE YEAR THAT WAS

2009-01-01T20:56:00.001-05:00

Beginning the new year, blogwise, starts with a recap of the previous year. Here are the first sentences of the first blogs of each month of 2008. It starts with a statement about resolutions, fittingly. And of course I didn't live up to those resolutions. But, perhaps interestingly, some example of the kinds of topics I "resolved" to write about does appear in this sample. What's not so surprising is that, with the summer, comes my fixation on Musil's The Man Without Qualities; and, with the fall, fixation on topical stories dealing with the election biz. Topical this blog was never intended to be, so the prevalence of such entries says something about the media blitz of Election 2008.

To mark the new year, I thought I'd make some resolutions for blogging. ("New Year, Old Year" 1/1/08)

From a literary work that can be read in about four hours, let's turn to a film that takes about four hours to view: Jacques Rivette's L'amour fou (1969) which the WHC screened a week ago. ("Riveting Rivette" 2/3/08)

I suppose my recent foray into male-centered Western sagas of bonding, agon and identity must have propelled me to the other end of the pendulum-swing: to female-centered urban sagas of bonding, agon and identity -- in this case Alison Lurie’s novel The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988). ("Some Chicklits...?" 3/3/08)

The first of April has acquired some significance for me, in part because it's the date dedicated to my favorite Tarot card, The Fool -- which is also the name of the rock group on whose album cover Pynchon's Tyrone Slothrop is supposedly visible in the background -- and the date has meaning in Gravity's Rainbow because of the fact that in 1945 Easter and April Fool's Day were the same day. ("April Fools" 4/13/08)

World War II has been the setting of so many films, it seems dangerous terrain for a filmmaker attempting anything new. ("World War II Revisited" 5/5/08)

There was a fairly amusing piece in The New York Times Book Review today, about the rigors of reading “jumbo lit” and the toll it takes on one’s day to day life. ("Caveat Lector" 6/1/08)

One could do worse on Independence Day than read Robert Pinsky’s long poem, “An Explanation of America” (1979). ("And It's Almost Independence Day" 7/4/08)

I've made it to the end of the portion of Der Mann that Musil published in 1930 (725 pages). ("Thou Wouldst Be Great" 8/5/08)

After hearing more about Gov. Palin, I realize that her choice is not quite the bad faith move that I originally claimed; it initially struck me as aimed primarily at the disgruntled Hilaryites who might decide to jump to the Republican side. ("Addendum" 9/1/08)

In the best tradition of Nero -- "he fiddled while Rome burned" -- I'm going to talk about music while debate about the debate rages, while the presidential candidates compare bracelets, while the Dow Jones drops and rallies and drops and whatever, while the bailout efforts continue and my own bank gets the kiss of life from a bigger bank. ("The CDs: BabyShambles" 10/1/08)

David Brooks has some sobering thoughts in the New York Times today, even assuming "our guy" wins. ("End of an Era?" 11/4/08)

At long last, I've made it through the 1,130 pages of The Man Without Qualities that Musil published in his lifetime. ("Of Ulrich and Agathe" 12/11/08)