WHAT I READ ON MY SUMMER VACATION, 2

Ponderous Gaddis

The last two summers I taught Ulysses in Summer Sessions, but not this year, this year I was supposed to be working on a writing project -- a book to be based on a course, "Gravity's Rainbow in Context," that I was able to teach twice at Yale, but altered to be more about the period 1955-75 in U.S. literature. THEN I got the bright idea that, since William Gaddis published his first two mammoth novels in 1955 and in 1975 respectively, I should get to know them. But reading Gaddis wasn't just a means to avoid writing during the hot sticky summer when it was more pleasant to be on my couch in front of the fan reading than at my desk, I had become convinced that this guy could be much more important than the general curriculum of post-1945 U.S. lit makes him out to be. And that situation persists because he's so "unreadable," apparently. But, since GR was famously called "unreadable," and since I've certainly read it with great profit, I felt that my time of Gaddis avoidance must end. And so I read The Recognitions. And read The Recognitions. And read...

Maybe the book isn't more "endless" than GR, maybe the "first-timer" relation to any such book can only be a steady forward movement, to simply cover ground, to read in as short a period as possible so that one's mind doesn't wander too far from the fictional world. That much of the task I was equal to, since I could devote as much of my day to reading it as I liked, or felt compelled to ("liked" ceased to be an applicable term fairly early on). But what I tend to forget about my other first-time experiences with overwhelming behemoths -- Moby Dick, Ulysses, GR -- is that I didn't make it all the way through. I had to come back later, start over and try again. But then actually I had gotten much further in a previous reading of The Recognitions than I realized I had (up to Otto's sojourn with the banana company -- this time it put me in mind of that damn banana plantation in La Jalousie and I could feel the glimmers of a 50s obsession with trying desperately to place one's protagonist in some kind of "Mr Kurtz he dead" situation -- in other words, the postcolonial world was a-calling, impinging on the modernist empire; the fact that Gaddis quotes Rimbaud's line about "invalids back from the tropics" showed that I was reading this in the proper spirit). So, actually, this was the second attempt, more or less.

What Kept My Interest: In this novel Gaddis creates a kind of prose that is, in many ways, an outgrowth of modernist fiction: it has the audacities of verbiage, the narrator's tendency to put before you any information or event of his choosing without feeling compelled to relate it to any immediate, already presented context; in Gaddis' hands there's far too much precious refusal to use given names for his characters -- I mean, he'll introduce someone, but from then on you'll be called upon to "recognize" that person. I say "precious" because that sense of "recognition" as theme and manner gets a bit tiresome. It does lead to some funny ironies that come off only if one persists to the end -- particularly the bringing to full circle the bit about the saint (ongoing) and Wyatt's mother (intermittent), and of course the ashes in the bread. I will say that the ending, with Wyatt abroad (actually, in 50's "we must experience exile" fashion -- to be "absolument modern" -- "everyone" goes abroad) helped to restore my admiration (somewhat).

I say restore because the part early on about Wyatt's dad and Wyatt's childhood in which, stylistically, Joyce, Hawthorne, Melville (even Faulkner?) all seem to be mixing it up led my interest into the thing in the first place. After all, TP's early prose obviously owes something to Gaddis, and not only the prose; I kept being convinced, over and over, that this was a book that Pynchon "answered" with V. Maybe if I get ambitious I will patiently trace out, for the edification of English professors, the "recognitions" of V. I found in Gaddis' novel. Another interesting bit, which kept me going with hopes that were ultimately not sustained, was the Faust/Mephisto set-up of Wyatt and Recktall Brown. Brown is just Mephisto-like enough to keep an old Mephisto-fan like myself interested. But I wanted more from that than I got. Also, in the early(er) going, the forgery elements and Wyatt's dedication not simply to copying the Flemish masters but to becoming actually one of them, to live, as it were, his life from their perspective in the modern world, offered some rich possibilities.

So what made the book the unrewarding chore it became? Answer: modern times. The 50s, I'm convinced, were an era I'm glad I missed -- it's not just that at parties everyone is playing classical music (no jazz, no rock--the latter doesn't even exist yet!) -- it's the fact that they're all living in some kind of bland interregnum waiting for the '60s to happen. Because, poor fools, they already missed the '30s and most of the '40s. This is post-war and it's the time when the U.S. is still trying to be culturally as significant as it has become militarily and economically. So, the crassness and corniness of America -- which everyone's been giving us versions of from Sinclair Lewis to Dos Passos to Fitzgerald to Mailer -- is still very much the order of the day, and not yet in the cartoon-surreal colors of Pynchon, no, it's still way too earnest. And this puts Gaddis in the unprepossessing position of having to write--dreaming of Dostoyevsky and a world where even barflies had metaphysics--about inherently silly people in a debased bohemia. It's like Our Town for the Village: interminable voices of cultural steretypes just so happy to be heard from. Though, to give him his due, Gaddis shows the gays as funny and campy, whereas in Pynchon they just tend to be sad or sinister, and in Mailer...never mind.

My main criticism of all these "extras" (some of them have stories--Otto trying to meet his father, Agnes Dei's (there's a name worthy of Pynchon!) suicide attempt, Esme's (the Salinger connection!) sorta kinda transfiguration, Sinisterra the counterfeiter, mercurial Basil Valentine, poor Stanley's joke-tragic end--that "pay off," others just provide "scenes" but all provide talk talk talk) is that Gaddis resolutely refuses to make them a) characters in that old realistic sense, or b) symbols of something in modernist dress. Then again, maybe readers who find all those extras in Ulysses tedious, or who realize that you could expand the final party in Mrs. Dalloway endlessly, won't find a distinction here, but I do. Because I'm convinced that, under it all, Gaddis wants this to be Dostoyevskian, and one reason he develops at such length the absurdities of his post-existential intellectuals and artistes is that he can't ridicule them enough for being his contemporaries. For being what he has to work with, in other words. It's as if Melville had to base his great nautical epic on the cast of Pirates of the Caribbean, or something.

But there's something else, the reek of the 50s let's call it, that makes me want to claim, in the final analysis, that those ARE Gaddis' contemporaries. He's trapped there with them, trapped trying to work magic from his modernist correspondences and ironies and ongoing-plus-intermittent sightings of "motifs" and 'themes," while never overcoming my postmodernist sense that he's come at the wrong time, that, like Mailer, that other would-be Gargantua of their generation, Gaddis is an ambitious major talent trying to be a kind of novelist whose time had passed when he tried for it, which situation would only become clearer when TV, jazz, rock, drugs, and new wave film and counter-cultural everything made hipness the watch-word (as Mailer clearly saw, doing all he could to leap on that bandwagon). Of course, Gaddis is prescient with his attention to frauds and counterfeits when soon the culture-crit term will be "simulacra."

It would be twenty years before Gaddis tried again, with JR. I'm pretty sure he has a learning curve. If I get through that one, I'll let you know...

LC POEMS

I was sitting in the office I use on campus, in the building known as LC--a room with no window but a skylight overhead, a desk with a phone and lamp but no computer, bookshelves but few books, and several chairs--reading over some Henri Cole poems for a discussion group later that evening, but really just killing time before a staff meeting for the course I'm teaching. I wrote the following on the reverse sides of four sheets of the Cole packet in these exact words and this sequence:

page one:

In the snow the boy
stands alone
with his pocket pistol.
There's a surprise behind every door.
Not for nothing can we
shift the scenery
once or twice until everyone's quiet.
The ice is everywhere
and then the rain.
It doesn't matter until it happens twice.

*****
You told me you were everywhere
and I believed you
not the way you meant it though
only as a game
where you would be as much as me
wherever I looked.

*****
I never sent flowers
though I knew
she was not well.
An omission
of affection? Perhaps.
But all the same
whenever she spoke of roses,
tulips, jonquils and the rest
I sensed her joy
that mine, unsent,
also were unwithered.

*****
Never return
to where you were
before
for the only purpose
is getting out,
going forth,
flinging
the heart's salt
on other shores.

*****
page two

I don't understand
the need for speech in each
tiny ear held open as if
to receive a sound
that would make of life
a series of winds
each with its own voice.

*****
The man questions nothing.
He just is.
And in that space
to which all must come
he practices appearances.

*****
Taught to register wonder
at each new shoot
the girl gazes wide-eyed
as the bud unfolds
its violent end, stretched
open, screaming
in bloom.

*****
Beneath the sea
she speaks to me, lily
of the foam.
Her steeds race across
oceans, unfurl
pennants, abandon
magics long since
past perishing.

*****
page three

Whenever we remember
the shallow city we once knew
it will be like a newly told
tale of deep retreat
where valiant avengers
withdrew their alarms
and surrendered to a time
unsanctified by blood.

So we will see, remembering,
how we stood apart
and mourned for them,
all the unfallen.

*****
Taking the way
you would've come
(had you come)
you would've found
briars overgrown upon
an untended path,
would've seen roses
gripped in their teeth,
would've heard a sigh
of sleep that never dreamed
your abrupt intrusion.

Stay away, prince,
scourge of hapless faeries.

Your nemesis awakes you.

*****
page four

Whenever we dream together
we share uncertain futures
masked by all those features
we never showed each other.

*****

WHAT I READ ON MY SUMMER VACATION, 1

Ah, youth!

This weekend was the Autumn Equinox and I managed to contract a lovely little cold, both of which facts seem determined to convince me that summer is gone. And what do you do when summer is gone? You reminisce about it, of course. So here I go in the first of what I presume will be 3 installments chronicling my summer reading (since I didn't do much else this summer I'd care to talk about). I actually read much more than can be covered by 3 installments, but, what the hell, that's all I'm up to at present, though there may be reversions to "things I read" at any point in the future.

Barry McCrea's The First Verse

I read this because I know Barry and he's a likeable guy who teaches Joyce and Proust to Yalelies and got his PhD at Princeton, so that's good enough for me. But also this, his first novel, is set in Dublin which I just visited for the first time in May '05, so I felt even more inclination to see what he would do with it. And I have to say that a feel for the newly affluent and chic Dublin is a main attraction of this novel; it gives a very clear-eyed, unromanticized but somehow loving view of the localities, many of which bristle with Joycean associations for such people as can't think "Dublin Bay" without thinking "Martello tower."

The world of the protagonist, Niall Lenihan, is not only full of names of places and pubs, it's also awash with text messages and the occult world of cellphone habitués. The novel's feel also seems to engage with one of Barry's other infatuations: Sherlock Holmes and tales of mystery. There is a mystery at the heart of this book, having to do with addiction to literature of a very uncanny kind, or with the whole notion of secretive activities that remind me of drug culture, though not-yet-out-of-the-closet gay culture is what's really the analogous experience for Niall. It's also a unique coming of age story that will resonate with anyone who bombed or nearly bombed in their first year of college (in this case Trinity) -- which is another exclusive society in and of itself, especially for those of us not preppy enough to be to the manor (or mannerisms) born. So there's a large learning curve for this protagonist, some nice work with literary allusions, and a few weird scenes of magical occurrence, for instance, walking on water -- a bit Peter Pan-esque that, now I come to think of it. Strikingly original, extremely readable, and I loved the use of the song that Orwell used in 1984 about the bells and what they say because it just seemed so damned cryptic!

Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude

The title comes from that place up in the icy regions where Superman has his headquarters set up and where he repairs when he needs a fix on his homesickness for Krypton. This novel by Lethem is also a coming-of-age story, about Dylan Ebdus, a kid in Brooklyn in the '70s. The references here are much less literary and much more pop-culture fixated, involving at one point a short insert chapter in which the protagonist dispenses liner notes for a box set of the work by his neighbor, Barnett Rude, Jr., a one-time Soul great who now pretty much just stays coked up all the time. There's lots of good attention to the friendship between the Jewish kid protagonist and Mingus the son of the musician (Dylan and Mingus, y'see?), beginning in the well-developed early chapters depicting the daily racial tensions on the street and at school. This is the kind of stuff Lethem shines in: giving the living, breathing feel of Brooklyn in its various manifestations through the years, presenting the knowing awareness of kids growing up with a mentality of life in a social minefield.

I wish though that he'd spent more time with the parents -- Dylan's absconded mother is kind of a cipher (no female characters in the book, really; Dylan's girlfriend, later, is a lit-crit-happy harpy -- who does actually get some good lines and knows just which CDs to throw at her slacker boyfriend), but the father working on his meticulous hand-painted film strip is an interesting subplot that brings in the more modernist avant-garde pretensions that comics and animation maybe have in certain quarters (and that maybe Lethem wants to take a pot-shot at, re: literary forebears). Lethem's also very good with a whole '70s dynamic of, at first, kid stuff like superhero comics and street games, then later drugs and music and graffitti art (as social ritual and competition), and shifts in sensibility as the kids age and the world gets uglier.

But the 'pay-off' of the 'magical realism' of this novel (in quotations because it isn't really that and I'm not sure Lethem's trying for it -- I hope not) makes for a final third that just goes wrong. Lethem is a very readable meister of the contemporary novel, fully informed about the world he (re)creates (except he does use a Talking Heads line anachronistically, nyah nyah), but he seems determined, in middle-brow novelist fashion, to "create excitement" -- which means: give us an ending that will make our hearts pound a bit before we leave the theater content with some kind of post-cathartic restoration of order. It feels like movieland to me, whereas the glimmering prose in the early going made me think maybe this guy was beyond all that. Maybe later.

DISMAL LIVES X2

Last night WHC screened two films that were remarkably well-paired. Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967) and Lynne Ramsey's The Ratcatcher (1999), both tales of young protagonists at odds with their environments, both in many ways merely passive spectators of degraded situations. Both end up drowning themselves.

Bresson's film is more hard-edged because it indulges no sentimentality whatsoever. The people in the film seem genuinely to belong in the rural town milieu depicted. The time of the film might be hard to place, so basic is this existence, were it not for a visit to a carny where the rock soundtrack at the bumping-cars concession is clearly post-British Invasion. That scene is important because in it Mouchette shows more life and pleasure than at any other time in the film. It's a moment when the "60s" as they are generally perceived -- fun, excitement, youth -- comes to town briefly. Mouchette's father slaps her face for flirting with a young man. Well, not just flirting, she almost seems ready to offer herself to him as a menial.

Mouchette sustains our interest as a character because of her darkly indeterminate look -- we don't know quite what she's thinking, but we know she doesn't really accept the conditions she lives in. Her mother's death (after Mouchette has been raped, acceptingly, by a local poacher) precipitates her death: we see how much she is an outcast in the town, an excuse for charity (at best) and of moralizing condemnation. Her roll down a hill into a river is a game that becomes deadly, almost a raised middle finger to the grudging way in which her town staves off death by playing its grasping social games of education, mating and subsistence. As I think about it, the kid at the carny seemed the only suggestion of a way out of the rural monotony -- since Mouchette had no hope of being like the little rich girls in her class, pampered and perfected for a life of bourgeois indifference. Rock'n'roll -- the siren song for every would be runaway -- for a brief moment shows the way to something else.

The Ratcather is set in Glasgow, Scotland in the summer of 1973, during a trash strike (the mounds of plastic garbage bags are a bit too obvious symbol of "trashed" lives, but it still works and . . . it really happened). As with Bresson, the "stars" of the film scarcely seem like actors at all, but rather people believably trapped in the "dead end streets" where the film is set. The hero James, about 12, inadvertently kills a neighbor boy in a treacherous canal behind the houses. No one, except (it turns out) another boy, Kenny, somewhat simple-minded, knows he did it. The film isn't so much about his guilt and the price of the death (James' father at one point saves Kenny from nearly drowning in the canal, a kind of payback), as it is about the lack of prospects, of any way out (the family is on a list to be moved to government housing, but that hope gets bollocksed). Again, as in Mouchette, the central character has minimal responses to any situation, seeming to look on dispassionately at a life that isn't really his anyway, it's just the one he happens to be in.

But all's not bleak: his oft-drunk but fairly decent dad, his struggling but not without humor mother, his bus-riding to somewhere else older sister and his charmingly accepting younger sister all give the film a great deal more human interest than in Bresson's film. And then there's what is for me the tour de force sequence: James rides on the empty top of a doubledecker bus to the end of the line: a rural area where a spanking new block of townhomes is underway. He tours a nearly-finished unit, lies at length in a coffin-like plastic-wrapped tub, pisses in an unconnected toilet bowl, and then enters a room with a picture window facing an open field as far as the eye can see. He goes to the sill and climbs through (no glass is in yet) and it's a thrilling moment, almost as if he is stepping out of the film into a painting. He runs through the field, flinging himself about as if in an ocean. The spontaneous joy is a bit like Mouchette taking the flirting collisions from the kid on the bumping cars. Later, James runs off again to seek solace there and finds he can't enter the unit, it's been finished and locked up. The shot of him looking through the rain-drenched glass in the window he once climbed through pretty much says it all about his dreams. There are many other fine and interesting touches in this debut film which shows a sensitive, deft hand throughout, not only with the actors, but with so many shots and sequences.

Of the two films, Ramsey's is more visually interesting, but Bresson's is the more accomplished, ultimately, because it's stripped of the sentimental touches that, perhaps, we can't help intruding into our depictions of the socially hapless. In Bresson's film its easier to see the situations as common human suffering, as in a Chekhov tale perhaps; in Ramsey's film it's easier to see the situations as something happening to someone else, who we either "like" or don't. Why that might be, other than having something to do with the exigencies of viewing in the thirty years between '67 and '99, I don't know. But if I have anything to say about it, the '60s will in time eclipse the '40s and be perceived as the Golden Age of Everything. Gaffer and gammer, we're all their gangsters, as JJ might say.

SO MUCH MOORE

And as the summer rolls along/we know not right from wrong/we improvise from day to day--Rick Moore, 1974

Rick Moore's He Won't Now, Eh? might best be considered "a collected songs" in the sense that, as Moore's brief innersleeve note notes, the songs themselves span twenty years of songwriting, 1973-92, a fact the lyric sheet won't let us overlook as it gives the date of composition for each track. Few, if any, first albums have been so deliberately fashioned as a retrospective -- a decade's worth of music, maybe, but two? -- and that fact gives HWNE more than its share of interest. So on the one hand, we can see how Moore's influences change with the times; while on the other, we can see how bringing this group of songs together at the time (1992) allows them to speak to one another and to offer their respective witnessings to an ongoing process.

"Time may change me, but I can't trace time," David Bowie sang in the early '70s. Tracing time even as it changes him could be said to be Moore's interest; thus we see the music begin with arty pop tunes whose impetus dates from the days when The Beatles ended and Bowie's glamrock briefly became queen, before rock passed on to disco beats and their eventual demise under punk and reggae and the ascendancy, in the early '80s, of New Wave eclecticism, which somehow got drowned in various wall-of-keyboard triumphs and the move to digital, a sonically bland trend that eventually faced a backlash, early '90s, in grunge and alternative roots-rock, then, as we drifted to the end of the century, the major markets were filled with the emergence of slick, pop-sounding country, teeny-bopper divas, and the verbal pyrotechnics and street beats of hip hop.

Listening to HWNE produces some suitably schizophrenic responses, due to the Jekyll-Hyde combo of Moore earlier and Moore later: Jekyll wants to write songs with familiar radio-play sounds ("Over and Under," "No Second Chances" -- I think of Squeeze and The Byrds for the first and maybe Sting on the second); Hyde wants to write songs that are difficult, ironic take-offs ("The Caress," "You Kill Me" -- unpredictable, idiosyncratic songs). The two are able to combine to give us light, melodic songs with a feel of the mellow 70s ("You Threw Me Out," "Mr. Mello"), and even a touch of "heavy" 70s ("Hero"), thoroughly satisfying songs that have the subtle, understated qualities of good contemporary alternative music ("Even Cows Go Blind," "Forever," "Bob"), and topical songs not out of place with the kind of character-driven narratives found in the '80s songs of Don Henley, Elvis Costello, Springsteen ("I Will Return," a powerful song about The Challenger disaster; "Foreign Agent," about "charming" killer Ted Bundy, has the kind of understated irony associated with Ray Davies; "Passé," kind of a "She's Staying Home," an ironic look at the Woodstock generation 20 years on; "Wishing Well,"a darkly comic take on Hansel and Gretel -- more like Zappa, that one).

When I first heard HWNE in 1992, the older stuff sat uneasily next to the newer stuff and the more predictable songs seemed out of place against the stronger songs, but now that time has passed the album holds up for me, in all its eclecticism, much more effectively as a kind of time capsule of twenty years of pop song styles. And why not? I've even found myself listening with renewed interest to tapes of songs I compiled in the late '80s and early '90s -- the grab-bag approach of HWNE helps me see (and hear) how time has changed us all.

There aren't many songwriters who would be so comfortable with such diverse styles and who could do something original each time. The maverick nature of this production should be applauded as well; Moore deserves great credit -- and listeners! -- for putting together such a varied collection on his own. Complex songs, subtle melodies from a challenging, impressive songwriter with something to say. Happy birthday, Rick!

TWO IN THE TOWER

I said to Leonard Cohen, How lonely does it get?
Lenny Cohen hasn't answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
Oh a million floors above me in the Tower of Song
--Nick Cave's version of Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song"

In Cohen's version it's Hank Williams who is "a hundred floors" above him. I won't try to decide if these numerical relations are accurate, but if they were I'd say that Nick Cave, since '97, has gained considerably, moving on up the tower to become one of the best we've got working in what I will sardonically call "the popular song."

The reason I yoke these two together is that today is Lenny Cohen's birthday (he's 72) and tomorrow is Nick Cave's (he'll be 49). Which means the least I can do is pay tribute to these two meisters of somber song, these two darkly accoutered personae of sharp perceptions and grand indulgences, of self-styled poetics that have done more to enlarge what can be done with a song lyric than anyone, short of Mr. Dylan himself.

Cohen's musical career is an on again, off again affair, but as I look at his place in my musical collection, I realize that there are periods of my life where he was the bard above all others. What odd periods of metaphysical suffering they were too; what twisted and glowing ironies abounded. Anyone who hasn't heard New Skin for the Old Ceremony should forthwith purchase it and commit it to memory, particularly if they've been anywhere near the fraying ends of a love affair. Cohen knows all about the bitter surrender of the heart to its own fantasies of love triumphant and no one has more imaginatively plumbed the areas of jealousy, compromise, despair, and the aching mysticism that focuses on the beloved as savior and persecutor in one. And if there's one song that I'd like carved on my tombstone it's "The Traitor" (1979).

Nick Cave was, to my mind, for years a kind of grotesque clown of alternative rock. Like a guy who dressed like Johnny Cash, wrote like Tom Waits, and wanted to sing like Elvis -- but, y'know, punk. But he recurrently surprised me with songs so unabashedly lyrical (check out "Sad Waters" on Your Funeral, My Trial) that I was forced to concede that he might indeed be hanging out in Leonard's Tower. Ever since The Boatman's Call ("Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere" strikes me as New Skin revisited), he has been keen to show that he's the premier song-poet of his generation (which is to say, my generation) and I'm inclined to concede that status if only for his double CD release of 2004: Abbatoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus whose "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" is one of the most infectious raves I've ever heard, coupling the likes of Nabokov ("wrote on index cards in his socks") with the New York Doll's Johnny Thunders ("was half alive when he wrote 'Chinese Rocks') and, memorably, Philip Larkin ("stuck it out in a library in Hull") and Paul Gauguin ("he buggered off, man, and went all tropical'). But don't go straight to that album. No More Shall We Part was released in 2001, the same year Dylan released Love and Theft and Cohen New Songs, and muscled its way to the top of the heap, in my estimation. Cave, unlike those other worthies, isn't reclaiming a bit of his early glory in the late glow of twilight, he's in the fine flush of his mature worth, delivering on a promise, and it's a welcome sight to see him grappling for the right to be crowned the moodiest dude of them all.

ASHBERY AT THE CHAPEL

Alas, Edie, we are no longer ourselves.

Battell Chapel at Yale has been the site for several readings I've attended. It's always a bit strange to see some literary great standing up there in front of the ornate apse with that big cross and the huge pipe organ off to the side. Poetry readings in churches -- the Bollingen reading was also in a church -- but I'm not going to go on about poetry as a secular religion and all that. But, as if it were a real church service of my youth, I stand at the back.

Heaney packed 'em in; Rushdie was overflow; Rich more or less filled the place. John Ashbery, famous for his "inaccessible" poetry, had a more modest draw. And the reading itself was modest, despite Prof. Langdon Hammer's enthused intro that should have alerted the merely curious in attendance that this guy is the real thing. If there's a poet amongst us, his name is Ashbery (for my money). But listening to him tonight, and thinking of all the astute grad students who are willing to admit -- it's almost a badge of defiance around Yale I guess -- they "don't get" Ashbery, I tried to think what it is that convinces me about this poetry whereas with Heaney, Rich, whoever, I'm almost always nearly bored by the mannerism of accomplishment, put off by the obvious stretch to "poeticize" -- embarrassed by riches? Maybe.

Ashbery is effortless. And maybe that's why "they" can't get it. It doesn't reward the patented Yale close reading very much (which is not to say it doesn't at all); it resists any kind of paraphrase, it mainly disregards "topics" or "themes." But to say, which is generally perceived as the answer, that it's "about" language or poetry is to act as if those concepts are something other than a particular instance of language. And to say, like Beckett about the Wake, that it is not 'about something' it simply is the thing is to kick against the pricks, as it were, making of language a closed system with no communicative value, an object to be looked at. But Ashbery's poetry convinces me because it confronts the arbitrariness of language, the sheer audacity and weirdness of giving names to things, of pretending that words are adequate to experience, of daring to act like what you say "makes sense" in more than some slippery, provisional, and ultimately idiosyncratic way. And yet we do know what the words mean. And we do recognize that this is a poetic use of language, a manner, as if one might wear one's hair never the same way twice and be known for that, recognized even.

And I don't mean to say that all Ashbery poems do the same thing. Tonight he read half the time from Where Shall I Wander -- which I've read and which I found jokey and deliberately laconic in poems he read like "Interesting People of Newfoundland" and "Coma Berenices" -- and the other half from A Worldly Country, due out in February. The latter stuff had a much edgier tone and seemed darker, even at times testy; I'm looking forward to seeing the pantoum "Phantoum" in print (no doubt it's already appeared somewhere) -- in any batch of Ashbery poems there's always one that does it for me. He ended with a rhymed poem -- not great (rhymes like "closet" and "deposit" kept a light tone), but more accessible, perhaps, in that with something as artificial as rhyme involved, it sounded unusually straightforward and direct. Paradoxical? Perverse? Very Ashbery.

SPECTRES OF BOB

"First of all, we have said it often enough, one cannot establish the state of a debt . . . as one would a balance sheet or an exhaustive record, in a static and statistical manner. These accounts cannot be tabulated. One makes oneself accountable by an engagement that selects, interprets, reorients. In a practical and performative manner, and by a decision that begins by getting caught up, like a responsibility, in the snares of an injunction that is already multiple, heterogeneous, contradictory, divided--thus an inheritance that will always keep its secret. And the secret of a crime. The secret of its very author."--Jacques Derrida, "Spectres of Marx"

The Derrida quotation is from the reading for a Marxist Study Group meeting tonight. Reading it this afternoon, it seemed to me apropos of some recent flak about Dylan's theft of some of Henry Timrod's lines and images and wording in several songs on Modern Times. What Derrida is describing, re: Marx, is how it is that an intellectual debt cannot really be reduced to a series of demonstrated "borrowings" or cribbings or shared discourse. I particularly like his stress on "selects, interprets, reorients," for this is much like what T. S. Eliot has in mind when he says "mature poets steal" rather than imitate. Further, the inheritance, the debt, is always clandestine unless it comes to light. The entire history of influence studies is based on just such secret "crimes" where, as Derrida says, the "very author" can be obscured or "multiple."

Derrida's method of deconstruction famously fixes upon those textual moments not in "control" of a given subject; those moments when language takes over and to ascribe "authority" to it -- as a claim of personal identity -- is retrograde or at least naive. What I notice in Dylan's songs these days is how much they are a tissue of lines, and who knows the provenance of them all (such as the knock-knock joke on "Po' Boy") -- as the Mekons song says: "these lines are all individuals, and there's no such thing as a song." I think Dylan's thefts are radical in that sense -- a mature method from the musical artist most imitated by immature talents of our times.

Recently I came to know the song "Mole in the Ground" from which Dylan steals a line for "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" -- one could imagine that Dylan knew certain listeners, unlike me, would immediately recognize it (like all those scholars and crooks who have been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books and so recognize Dylan's theft of a famous line from Gatsby on "Love and Theft"). Could be there's some admirer of Timrod Dylan is regaling with the lines, or maybe it's just a tribute to someone whose lines stuck in his mind -- so that, as Derrida says, the state of debt is an injunction one is caught up in. Dylan's lines (at least I think they're his) have stuck in my mind for ages and there's no way I could attribute them all, but keep it in your mind and don't forget that it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to.

AMERICANA, 09/06

Trains
"my ears hear a symphony of two mules, trains and rain"--Dylan

Trains in the rain are poetic enough; you feel like you're in the heart of some hard-bitten novel about life on the rails, bumming with the nomad people...or maybe you're just awake too early, sitting on Amtrak near a family bound for New York. And you've got a CD player feeding your ears Dylan's new one while the guy in the seat behind confers on his cell with a woman named Gail about how much money he's been losing in card games. He tells her he'll be wearing his porkpie hat when they meet. Solid, Jackson!

The vistas Amtrak rides through are as beat as any hobo could wish. I found myself studying the graffiti, my attention no doubt inspired by Jonathen Lethem's Fortress of Solitude which I read in June (more on that later, maybe). I found the big puffy letters way too standard and liked whenever anyone introduced a distinctive color sense. But why were some naked spaces seeming to cry for graffiti left unadorned?

The Septa local to Norristown (the town of Norris?) afforded the only "sight": riverfront houses on the Wissahickon in Miquon, an area where the scenery made me recall great battles of the Revolutionary War and such. Best soundtrack moment: pulling into Philly's 30th street station as George Harrison went into the fade on the long version of "Isn't It a Pity."

Malls"he looks pretty good and he's knockin' 'em dead down at the mall"--Greg Brown

Whoever King of Prussia was, he can claim one gargantuan mall in his name. This seems to have become my mall of preference, maybe because my wife always seems happy to spend money there and if my wife's happy to spend money then I'm happy. But it's also because the layout features the mall equivalent to boulevards (spacious! great for pushing a kid in a stroller) and because the light inside is the kind of filtered daylight that I associate with museums -- natural history museums, and because I don't know my way around at all and am perpetually surprised by where I am, here in this living exhibit of how people spent money in the early years of the 21st century.

Fields"this was a shopping mall, now it's turned into a cornfield"--Talking Heads

New Jersey has lots of fields, still. I know this is the East Coast corridor known for its unceasing and unappealing suburban sprawl, but there ARE still fields in southern Jersey. They stretch far and wide separating the two lane roads with no curbs and not much shoulder where I and a friend and friend's son hiked along for a few hours in sun that got more and more intense, as sun will. But it's late summer in Jersey, how bad can it be? Those fields, filled with vegetation whose names I'll probably never know, boasting an occasional silo, path, outbuilding, pond, also separate the older homes from the newbies springing up as yuppies build ostentatious homes in the sticks, to kick back, far from the civilization that pursues them in the form of stripmalls and commuter crawls and mysterious attractions like "the Oasis Ballroom" which boasts "dancing" "receptions" "sandwiches" on placards in windows with blinds closed.

Freeways
"a prisoner of the lines, the fine white lines, of the lines on the free, free way"--Joni Mitchell

If you don't take the train, you take the freeway. The irony of the freeway is that it's not free -- it costs money (the tolls, paid by EZ Pass, kept telling me my balance was low -- that's true in many senses I'm sure) and speed restrictions are set not only by posted limits but by the long line of fellow travelers caught in the same northward expansion on this mellow late summer Sunday, crawling from here to there . . . eventually (as Steppenwolf would say). I won't even talk about the "blue route" (the name has suddenly acquired new meaning) last Friday afternoon en route to NJ because those stout yeomen and yeowomen who face it regularly would no doubt gnash teeth at my parvenu status. Colossal bummer, this creeping caravan of automotive zombies. The best soundtrack moment (in the car): crawling up the NJ TP and hearing (on "deep tracks" on satellite radio) a little known and mostly forgotten Kinks track from 1979 (the beginning of the gas shortage): "A Gallon of Gas ... can't be purchased any more for any amount of cash . . ." Highway '79 Revisited: fitting, since everything from the Delaware Memorial to the Trumbull Street exit on 91 is déjà vu and ripe with the nostalgia of fossil fuels long gone to ozone.

GOING, GOING...

It was a train that took me away from here
But a train can't bring me home--Tom Waits

True enough, Tom. Tomorrow I'm leaving New Haven on a train -- to the Tri-State area of my youth: PA, NJ, maybe even DE -- but I'll be coming back by car. But the mode of transport isn't all that important, what is important is the feeling of "getting the hell outta here." It's a bit of shaking the wings before real fall sets in, before the school year's many papers to grade begin to descend on my hapless head. Maybe the only thing I like more than "getting the hell outta here," is "staying home no matter what" -- the insular feeling of being holed-up, in hibernation, "some groceries and peanut butter to last a couple of days" and no need to poke out of the oubliette for anything or anybody. That will come soon enough I guess. In the meantime there's an exhilarating sense of ducking out, of running away from the "welcome backs," of going "back to where you once belonged," of saying, summer's gone, and so am I.

Funny too how leaving home these days also means, for those of us who leave the computer behind and aren't pursued by text-messages into the infinite horizon, being "offline"! Think of it -- an odyssey out into a world where text doesn't exist! It feels a bit like stepping outside the module in outer-space with no frail lifeline allowing one to cling on to the great Internet Mothership. Incommunicado. Arrivaderci . . . sayonara . . . as Bugs used to say.

DON'T SPEAK TOO SOON FOR THE WHEEL'S STILL IN SPIN

Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts
--Dylan, "Idiot Wind," 1975
It's all true, everything you've heard--Dylan, "Workingman's Blues #2," 2006

Five years ago yesterday Bob Dylan released Love and Theft, an album that has grown in stature in the intervening years. Two weeks ago today he released Modern Times, an estimable follow-up. There seems to be talk of these two albums, together with 1997's Time Out of Mind, creating a "trilogy." Where does this idea of trilogy come from? Is it LOTR spawned? Or by the two sets of "Star Wars trilogies"? And what does the idea have to do with Dylan?

Dylan's career is what Nietzsche calls "a continuous sign-chain"--the question is always: does this new record extend the chain or does it simply mark time? Arguably, no Dylan album completely stays in the same place as its predecessor. But it's pointless to talk of "trilogies." Was Another Side, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, a trilogy? Or was it BIABH, H 61 and Blonde on Blonde? How about Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks and Desire? Almost, not quite. And that's the point. It's much easier to see Love and Theft as a breakthrough and MT as the "follow up." One problem with posing TOoM as part of a trilogy is that it ignores the fact that that album is "a follow up" to Oh Mercy, as a second Daniel Lanois produced project -- a fact that did much to raise both Oh Mercy and TOoM above the other recordings that preceded them respectively (in fact most talk of "trilogy" seems to be based on Dylan's increasing sales, in which case it's a marketing or hype trilogy).

But the other reason I find "trilogy" talk facile is that, for me, there's still a centralized Dylanesque persona at work on TOoM, particularly on songs like "Not Dark Yet" and "Highlands." In fact both songs strongly attest to a need to "get beyond Bob Dylan" (whoever that is and whatever he's come to mean). L&T and MT are similar in the way they do just that; they are songs (MT even moreso than L&T) that are pastiches of cliché and borrowed phrases, of a range of musical styles (L&T moreso than MT) that re-create Dylan as a premiere purveyor of Americana. L&T reminded me of Self-Portrait in that regard, an album almost nobody likes to talk about but which showed Dylan trying to come to terms with the pop song, Tin Pan alley, and his contemporaries (Paul Simon, Gordon Lightfoot) and, most would say, failing miserably. But what he did was Dylanize his sources in a way that confused and irritated the rabid fans raised on his '65-'66 period. My sense, in hearing L&T, was that he finally was "bringing it all back home," creating a new incarnation of Dylan as nothing more than a loose affiliation of lyrical tag-ends and associations -- and, on the new album, stolen lines from blues greats and obscure 19th century poets (see Modern Times).

As Chronicles Vol. I relates, when Dylan was making Oh Mercy, Lanois expected songs of strong perspective and rich metaphor that had been associated with Dylan's name for eons. Dylan said "I don't write those kind of songs no more." But he clearly hadn't yet determined what kind of songs he does write. I think it was the "Bob Dylan [his first album] Revisited" albums in the early '90s that planted the seed whose yield is now being reaped in his two accomplished, classic, magisterial and amusingly mannered 21st century releases.

Trilogy? Well, if so, then why isn't the next one the "culmination" of the trilogy? Where do you draw the line? I wouldn't be annoyed by yet another "Jack Frost" offering of rambling reconstructions of a '30s mentality adjusted for our times (Modern Times is a '30s Chaplin film after all--and anyone who thinks Chaplin isn't relevant should watch "Little Tramp" Bob on the video for "Times Have Changed," included on the DVD with the CD), but if the career of Dylan has taught us anything, it's to expect something different than we expected. I don't think MT satisfies that criteria, but I'm not complaining. I like it better than the last album in some ways, primarily because I think it's the purer distillation of the sound that Jack Frost seems to be looking for, and it does resonate now for some reason (maybe the same reason I find myself unable to stop listening to Johnny Cash's American Recordings and find myself playing Springsteen's Seeger Sessions more than I would have expected to).

Tin Pan Alley -- that's where most of the songs are written nowadays. This song wasn't written there. This song was written ... down in the United States!---Bob Dylan, 1962

CALL 911

you build your towers strong and tall
don't you know they've got to fall
someday--Townes van Zandt

It seems it's become obligatory to mark this date somehow. In the popular mind, seemingly, there is a pre-9/11 and a post-9/11. I can concur with that estimation only to the extent that the current war takes its PR rationale from a perception that the public needs to believe in some kind of retaliation against, or defense from, or clean-up of terrorism as the basis for whatever policy the Bush administration wants to push, and we all live in a country that shamelessly rallied around the flag of Bushdom in the "wake" of 9/11. So we do live post-9/11 because, before then, however divisive the 2000 election was (and it was), it was still politics as usual (with examples from JFK on one side and of Nixon on the other showing that vote or voter manipulation is a given in a society free to seek its own level). But after 9/11 it became politics to a higher degree, politics with a vengeance, as it were.

But what I want really to mark on this date is not the fall of the towers as successful targets of Al Queda terrorist attacks but as emblems of human disaster. The fact of the matter is that the towers were always sitting ducks, and anyone in them potentially at risk. Because there was no sufficient way to evacuate them should a disaster occur. Oh, so engineers hadn't factored-in the result on the structure of so many tons of burning steel and gas? Why not, they were begun in the '70s, after all, when hijacked planes were a standard hazard. My point is that watching the towers go down on television was like watching the Titanic sink or the Hindenberg go down, because humanity apparently isn't content to build a colossus, it wants to live and work and travel in it too. Something there is that doesn't love a colossus? Something like that.

The other comment I'd like to make, five years on, pertains to another rallying that occurred after that date: the sense that the decimation of the towers gave tragic grandeur to New York and made of New Yorkers the moral equivalent, at one fell swoop, of those who survived the Holocaust or who participated in the French resistance, or escaped the Killing Fields, or what have you. They all became survivors with a tale to tell, and living in New York took on new significance which is still being traded upon in literature, writing and other arts by the intelligentsia based in NYC.

But what does that significance amount to? What does it mean that thousands went to work one day and ended up blending their beings with two fallen colossi? They gave their lives for what? If those who survived could find a meaning in those deaths, then maybe they could find what it means to "bear witness" or "take stock" or any other equally loaded gesture. Otherwise they're simply trading on the "psychic wound" as cultural capital, and the towers "experience" becomes the equivalent of the day JFK got shot. If there is a moral claim to be made about that day, I don't think it's come to light yet, and possibly it won't while so much jive-ass nonsense continues in its name.

I wouldn't know
I'm just holding the fort
But answer me this
I won't take you to court
Did you go crazy
Or did you report
On that day
On that day
They wounded New York
--Leonard Cohen

DADA, MOMA

Saturday I went to the closing weekend of the Dada Show at MoMA. I put it off because I'm not really a fan of this phase of modern art, though of course its influence can be found in things I do admire. And Duchamp, one of the unavoidables of this crew, is particularly well-represented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (which has the Large Glass), so I feel most of the show is of the "seen it, seen it, taped it" variety.

What I saw that I'd never seen before (always the notch on the pistol for the museum maven): Picabia and Clair's "Entr'acte," an alternately poetic and hilarious 20 min. film that contains the seeds of the visual style of vintage Monty Python. The slow-mo, giant steps of the staid bourgeois funeral train was funny enough, but when the hearse-cart gets away and plunges pell mell down a steep street, the footage of the pursuit is Keystone Cops worthy. Then follows an increasingly hysterical montage of speed shots, dissolves, overlaps, and a camera on the front of a roller-coaster. Great stuff.

The other item worth the price of admission was a fairly large sampling of Kurt Schwitters, most of whose work is available for viewing only in Hannover (not a town I'm liable to visit any time soon). I'd seen the ones MoMA owns before, but the range of his work was greater than I'd supposed, and it was a great addition to the exhibit to see Schwitters' unique brand of "Merz" (his self-styled version of Dada, which began as competition but was a hit with some dadaists and so his Merz publications embraced some of the latter as well). These compositions of cast-off bits of paper (tickets, rolling papers and packaging, newsclippsings, colored papers, etc.) have such meticulous compositional sense that they stand as treatises on abstract composition. While many of the dadaists still strike me as amateurish when it comes to a grasp of visual aesthetics, Schwitters, and also Max Ernst and Man Ray, stand out as true innovators who developed a unique aesthetic that it took the dada movement to bring to light.

The exhibit was fairly mobbed by midday. The diversity of people present was a kind of "dada" of its own, especially with some of those outfits. I joked to my daughter that we should've designed and printed some T-shirts -- "I'm gaga for dada" borrowing various non-copyrightable squiggles and "chance" arrangements a la Arp, ticket stubs to the exhibit and collage elements from various Moma handouts -- and hawked them outside. We could've covered the day's expenses at least. Given the dadaist predilection for representations of biological process as mechanical, especially sex and reproduction, one can't ignore the irony of "Dada"(a renegade who never considered child support for his progeny) and "Moma" (everyone's favorite midtown generatrix of art for the masses) hooking up to produce such an array of modern children.

The spirit of Dada was discernible in some of the work in the "Out of Time" show, featuring work of latter day artists. Only one thing I saw there bears comment: A huge circle filled with sand. A mechanical blade bisects the circle and circles endlessly, one half of the blade digging grooves in the sand, the other half of the blade erasing them, so that the circle is always half grooved and half smooth. I've never seen a more succinct expression of the relation between time and human endeavor. Cheers!

(BA)DIOUING NASHVILLE

The WHC welcomed us back with a Friday night screening of Nashville (1975), my favorite Robert Altman film. I read a bit of Badiou earlier today and I was thinking of his distinctions, when speaking of film, among "the indistinct judgment" (I really like that movie!--personal reaction), the "diacritical judgment" (clearly this is one of Altman's most representative films--an opinion of the film informed by an opinion of the film-maker) and the "axiomatic judgment, what are the effects for thought of such and such a film" (the Idea expressed by the final scene at the Parthenon in Nashville is that America is a land of senseless violence, comic irony, rich pastiche, proud indifference and stubborn resilience).

I'm willing to indulge in all three kinds of judgments in favor of this movie. But I think Badiou is too dismissive of "diacritical judgment" because, as a philosopher, he's in pursuit of the big Idea and not particularly interested, seemingly, in how a film gets made. One of the fascinating aspects of Nashville is that it works at all. This may be the first time I saw the film in a theater, certainly the first time I saw it in a crowded theater, and I kept doubting that the film's meandering, discursive narrative of a series of cameos and minimal interactions could possibly hold the audience's attention, that not one, not two, but three Karen Black numbers were going to send people to the doors, or that the lack of a central conflict/resolution story would bore the young and restless. Scarcely anyone left once the film started.

So what holds it all together? Some might say the music -- and this was suggested by the Whitney kicking off the film with a performance of bluegrass by administrators and instructors at Yale. Yes, there's something heartening about seeing the Dean of the Graduate School playing standup bass and telling us they're going to play "Dark Hollow" the way The Grateful Dead arranged it. And the music of Nashville, in the theater, does have a stronger performance tension than when I watch it on my little screen at home. This is particularly true in tour de force moments like Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" as he looks past several girlfriends gazing at him to find the new one he's trying to seduce, or every time Ronee Blakely sings with the force of an ecstatic who delivers every word and note as if it would end her being.

There's also the humor. The audience seemed to laugh most at the '70s aspects of the film -- most of the characters look like they could be in a "realistic" TV sitcom from the era and so there's something familiar about them already, some aura of "we've all lived through this" that makes the film part of a collective memory even if many in the audience weren't here in the '70s. But it's also a collective memory that -- particularly in the circulating desire (who sleeps with whom), the circulating longing (who gets to sing where and with whom), and the circulating frustration (who gets to be president, who gets to be famous, who gets shot by whom) -- plays into a collective experience of America as an unpredictable throng of loose ends and a collective fantasy of America as a set of possibilities where the apocalyptic event could come at any moment.

S IS FOR SHAKESPEARE, SANGRIA, STUBBS, SEUSS

Tonight the two Yale art galleries had a block party; I wandered into Yale British Art Center to see the "Searching for Shakespeare" exhibit. Not a whole lot, but I liked seeing the books from his day and of course that famous will with "the second best bed." Seems only one image claiming to be Shakespeare indisputably is -- the engraving Ben Jonson commented on.

While there I paused to drink non-alcoholic sangria in a room lined with paintings by George Stubbs. I've never really admired that era of painting (even though I copied one of his horse paintings once upon a time), but I thought how it must have tickled some rich dude of the day to find his image emblazoned in a painting of two men out on a hunt. "By George, George, if it's not myself to the quick!" Then I gazed awhile at a painting of a zebra, the first ever brought to England. Set against the facile English park it looked almost surreal. What would it be like to live your whole life not knowing of the zebra's existence, secure in your knowledge of the equine family, and then suddenly to be confronted with such a bizarre creature?

The zebra reminded me of my all-time favorite Dr. Seuss book--On Beyond Zebra--in which a precocious young man refuses to believe the alphabet stops with "Z" or zed, or zebra. "That's fine for those who stop with Z, but not me!" is his cry. I loved it in my pre-school days; perhaps that was the origin of my inordinate demands upon language.

HECKLE THYSELF

Last spring I attended Tom Verlaine's first night show at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC. Now, I've never seen Verlaine live before and so there was considerable anticipation. After all, TV, as front man for Television, was the guiding light in the darkness of late '70s music where I found myself stranded in my suburban youth -- a situation glanced at in "Between Days," but to expand on it: Verlaine, born Tom Miller in 1949, lived in Wilmington, DE, and then became the houseband guitar hero at CBGB's in those heady days of New Wave when London punk was calling from across the waves and all that. Whatever, in my neck of the woods (or rather lawns) the cockney safety pin crowd were a bit of a lawwph -- awful skank y'know -- and the story of Johnny Rotten was yet another rock'n'roll swindle of when the hype hits the fan. If you lived in NYC or LA, fine, you could live in an alley behind the club and do the whole brew for breakfast bit, but we were still (some of us anyway) down to our shoulders in hairy bands of blissful rock godhood playing in hockey rinks, toking on paraphenalia scored from headshops/record stores and riding around in grand boats of the road ($2 apiece for gas and you could drive all night). And this meant we wanted bands that could PLAY. (But don't mind me, we also thought Andy Warhol would be so much better if he could paint).

Tom Verlaine could and can play, what's more he took the cool name of the not-so-cool French poet in love with Rimbaud who the latter dumped on in "A Season in Hell" (Une saison en enfer, for those at home in the lingo), and he played on Patti Smith's first album which was produced by John Cale late of the Velvet Underground, whose first album had been produced by Andy Warhol and, ummm, anyway, I finally, 22 years late, got to hear the man in person. Of course, I didn't expect to hear anything from those two Television albums so firmly burned into the grooves of my brain, but I was overjoyed to hear "Kingdom Come" from the first solo album. Then, late in the show, some dickhead* a bit behind me called out "you suck tonight!"

Was it true? I'd been swept up in the trademark latter day Verlaine guitar licks and happy as the night was long, but maybe...? It is true that I was disappointed when "Kingdom Come," after some rapid dexterous digital (i.e., of the fingers, not of technology) manipulation that seemed not to achieve satori, didn't return our erring souls back to the main riff (the way "Marquee Moon" comes back around to its place of setting out), so maybe this was only a pale imitation, a distant relation of the man in his heyday, and it was time to face the fact that a belated era has overwhelmed us all.

But I did come out of the experience with an insight: Artists are like your children: even though you love them, they can still disappoint you. Or flip it the other way: An audience is like your parents: even though you need them, they can still be a pain in the ass.

*************
*dickhead, n.: a cephalic protuberance which, like the phallus, has no ability to process thought (despite myths that it "has a mind of its own"); especially, but not always, the portion of a driver's head visible above the neck-guard in a car that has been observed to do something utterly stupid. Usage: Look at that dickhead driving 55 miles an hour in the far left lane!

THAT TIME OF YEAR...

One friend tells me he has enacted his annual ritual of listening to The Kinks' "End of the Season" (from Something Else) another tells me he's got Joe Walsh's "Indian Summer" going through his head . . . however you parse it, August is gone and it's time for everything after. Actually The Kinks' song always feels a little later to me, after the equinox and just before Joni Mitchell's "Urge for Going," and "Indian Summer" makes me think of those days in October when it shoots up near 80 (and it will, oh yes, it will) and everything is mellow and golden and there's rotting leaves all over the ground (and for the mood of that, check out The Doors "Indian Summer" on Morrison Hotel...and for the mood now, try "Summer's Almost Gone" on Waiting for the Sun). But what both comments signal is that The Kids Are Back In Town and another school year is upon us, soon we shall (to use the Bard's most excellent phrase) "fall into the sere, the yellow leaf."

Me? I got trapped by rain in Labyrinth Books on York Street. Among the various tomes I scanned with interest: Stephen Dixon's new novel, The End of I (maybe a little too close to home); an anthology of Baudrillard writings on Utopia from the late '60s, Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (good opening, but do I care about New York models?), three novels by Patrick MacCabe--think I'll read Breakfast on Pluto first, some time--a new book by T. J. Clark, a glance at Vattimo's Dialogue with Nietzsche (but I've got the library's copy), Girly Man by Charles Bernstein (I was tempted by the "war is" poem), Mark Strand's latest (but the first poem made me shut the book); various McSweeney's editions (give them credit for design, also some of the prose was decidedly entertaining), Claire Messud's Emperor's Children (sorry; note: God is in the tonalities), a copy of New German Critique with an essay on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory by my friend Gerhard Richter (I'll have to ask him for a reprint), and, when the rain had settled enough for me to be on my way, what was my choice? Tony Judt's Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945. I guess I'm in no mood for literature . . . "we had some good times, but they're gone/the winter's coming on, summer's . . . al-most . . . go-o-oone."

STILL GOOD (AND BAD, AND UGLY)

Sunday night, the Whitney Humanities Center screened a print of Sergio Leone's best-known "spaghetti western," The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) and though I've seen the film many times over the years, I don't think I've ever seen it on the big screen. That was reason enough to go, but also because last summer I was making up a list of films definitive for my viewing life, and considered including GBU. I think it has to do with my sense that the film represents a significant shift in sensibility from the Western of my father's generation (i.e., John Wayne Westerns, many directed by John Ford or by Howard Hawks) to that of my older brother's age group -- the teens of the late '60s.

GBU, starring Clint Eastwood, has many of the familiar tropes of Westerns -- the loner (Clint, "the Good" known as Blondie), the mean, sadistic cuss (Lee Van Cleef, "the Bad" known as Angel Eyes), the ornery comic sidekick (often played by Edmund O'Brien or Walter Brennan in Hollywood Westerns, but here even more robust and mercurial -- "The Ugly" (Il Brutto) played for all it's worth by Eli Wallach as Tuco), the predominantly male camaraderie (in GBU there are only three women -- the speechless wife of the guy Van Cleef guns down in his first scene, a whore with info who Van Cleef slaps around in another scene, and "an old hen" who Tuco shushes when she's about to give him a piece of her mind), the picaresque adventures -- and here GBU really shines in dragging out the story as long as possible, always heading circuitously toward the big pay off of the paybox buried in the sprawling cemetary on Sand Hill -- plenty of gunplay (in Clint's hands shooting has comic timing, blowing hats off spectators and severing the rope, or not, when someone is about to be hanged) and, somewhat gratuitously, a long walk through the center of town with death aiming from any roof or window or doorway.

But what is "the new sensibility" of this kind of Western? Well, for one thing there's that cooler than cool modulated whisper that Clint employs in every scene; his opening line, off camera, "Yeah, but you don't look like you'll be collecting," spoken to a bounty hunter who has Tuco cornered, introduces the dry, ironic attitude of our hero. And his good deeds -- blowing up the bridge for the jaded and drunken Union captain, and offering a few last puffs on his ever-present cigar to a dying Confederate soldier -- are tinged with a disaffected nonchalance that suggests he's "good" because he's free from the evil side-taking that perpetuates the war (its foolishness signaled by the bridge that -- in a switch on Bridge Over the River Kwai -- the captain wants to abandon rather than defend against all good sense). Clint's "above it all" or "outside it all" status is dramatised in that epic final showdown of mounting tension (and no one does it like Sergio) over who will shoot first, when in fact it's a foregone conclusion: Clint will kill Van Cleef while Tuco, as usual when it comes to Clint, will be ineffectual (Tuco is never really an opponent, he's more the sidekick you can't really trust but whose every move is predictable).

But what's the deal with Blondie and Tuco anyway? How did Jon Stewart in his Oscar montage of vaguely homoerotic moments in Westerns of the past miss the scene when Clint sneaks up on Tuco straight from his bath with soap suds all over his gun? And why is Clint always leaving his playmate tied up in some godforsaken desert place? Time was, when archetypes were more the rage in our collective unconscious than socially tinged cultural criticism, much would be made of how "The Good" (or reason, or talent) and "the Ugly" (or "The Animal") must align themselves in an odd give-and-take, love/hate oneupmanship that, if nothing else, advances the plot and gives them adventures.

Today, looking back on Clint's iconic status in the '60s, I was thinking how Blondie and Tuco are just a few tokes (on a joint -- rather than that cigar they're always passing around) away from transforming -- no, not into the Duke and Ward Bond, but into those freewheeling icons of the '60s, Captain America and Billy in Easy Rider, or How The West Was Stoned.

OLD FAMILIARS RETURN TO FORM

2005 was notable for the release of music by some artists who have either been missing in action or who haven't done much to merit my attention in recent years...

Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is surprisingly listenable all the way through! I'm someone who tends to cringe when recalling how Sir Paul went from the most musically gifted and various Beatle to that unrepentant purveyor of insipid ditties best avoided. A friend steeped in the mythos of McCartney patiently points out how almost every McC album offers something worth the listener's time. I've never been convinced and have avoided his records because worse than burning out or fading away is the spectacle of turning into a self-parody. But this album, I found, suddenly, out of nowhere, made me reflect on what it was that made The Beatles' ringleader so distinctive: his labile voice, his insouciant confidence with melody, and his ability to shape a lyric that is clever and elegant, though rarely profound. Even that latter failing is overcome in "Riding to Vanity Fair," a song that looks at the pitfalls of friendship that's as good as almost anything he's written. True, there's a song, "Jenny Wren" (lovely in itself) that comes perilously close to being "Blackbird Revisited" and "A Certain Softness" actually rips off Squeeze's "There's No Tomorrow" (which is a rip-off of McCartney to begin with!). What goes around, comes around, I guess, but it's nice to know that even if SirP loses his shirt in his divorce, he's got some skills to fall back on.

John Cale's Black Acetate does something I find very hard to define. The Cale albums I love best (Vintage Violence and Paris 1919) are distinctive in the way that each song sounds like it could be set on a different album, as if each song is a particular self-contained aural world. Acetate doesn't quite amount to that -- it's an album dominated by the kind of processed rhythm tracks Cale has been working with since at least 1996's Walking on Locusts (which was the last album he made with such fine craft in each song) -- but on Acetate each song seems to find Cale twisting the listener's assumptions in some direction they weren't expecting to go. Which means the album is repeatedly unpredictable. No matter how much I listen to it, it never becomes really familiar. I think this may be the highest accomplishment I can imagine in "popular music." And this effect is not achieved by being particularly "arty" in the established way that classically trained and avant-garde raised Cale can be when he wants (and which marred, for me, much of 2004's Hobo Sapiens). Acetate is accessible, music that melds into its mix styles and rhythms that seem somehow borrowed or "found," as if Cale is creating a unique work built upon a repertoire of mannerisms derived from the music of our day. Some favorite tracks: "Perfect" (the "hit"), "OuttaTheBag," "InAFlood" (which comes as close to a Dylanesque delivery as Cale ever has), "TurnTheLightsOn," "Satisfied": "You'll be wondering at it/I'll be standing by/You'll be smiling at it/I'll be wondering why/Will it stand the test of time/It will stand the test of time." Indeed. Cheers!

CASH'D

After picking up Johnny Cash's American Recordings V: A Hundred Highways in my birthday binge at Bert's in Newark, DE, the dwindling days of the summer found me listening repeatedly to several CDs I'd culled from Johnny Cash's series of extraordinary discs, produced by Rick Rubin, from 1994 to 2006.

The sparseness of these recordings, captured with glowing fidelity to the quavers and slurs and spellbinding presence of Cash's voice, remake in a timeless mode every song presented. Old Top 40s hits like "If You Could Read My Mind" and "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" achieve a degree of unaffected honesty that shows how shielded by commercial artifice most songs are. Songs of faith like "Spiritual" and "Unchained" and "Help Me" convince us that Cash's spirit was able to touch deep places of doubt and affirmation that most singers couldn't possibly conceive of; even the Gospel tradition, with its choruses and histrionic singers soaring in rapturous testimony, could learn from the simplicity of Cash's humble, direct and deliberate readings. Songs so familiar one forgets one ever heard all the words -- like "Danny Boy" and "Streets of Laredo" -- are interpreted by Cash as if newly formed, with no history of schmaltzy sentimental versions to distract from the basic emotions of loss the songs evoke.

Then there are the songs from rock artists -- Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down" and "Southern Accents," Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" and "Pocahontas," Nick Cave's "Mercy Seat," Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," Sting's "I Hung My Head" -- that Cash simply takes away from the original artists, making them at once songs of our common folk heritage and his own personal statements, imbued with the dignity and grandeur and unstinting passion of Johnny Cash in his 60s and 70s. Even the corn-pone aspects of Cash's persona are well-represented and, in songs like "Country Trash" and "Nobody," representative of Cash's enduring maverick status as a simple person celebrating simple joys while knowing full well the complex, difficult path of fame and failure.

Bob Dylan was recently quoted as saying that recordings in the last 20 years (the digital age, essentially) simply sound bad -- an estimation of analog recording and vinyl pressings as superior to the flattened and somewhat processed sound our ears have become accustomed to. However true that may be in the main, Rubin's recordings of Johnny Cash are a victory over so much that is misguided in the production of records. Dylan, who at various times has eschewed all studio gimmickry and at other times -- most notably in Empire Burlesque -- fallen victim to it, wasn't able to achieve in his stripped-down renderings of standards in the early '90s anything nearly as powerful as what Cash achieved with Rubin.