Memo from the Fringes

memo from the editorial desk

2010-01-10T09:37:00.000-08:00

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven — Ecclesiastes 3:1 (King James Version)

Memo from the Fringes is officially retired. Memo enjoyed a good run from Memorial Day weekend 2005 to January 2010. Now it is time to move on.

My new blog, House Red, can be found at David Matthews Man of Letters.

Thank you for your support of Memo. I hope you will enjoy the new blog. Ciao.

making ourselves safer

2010-01-08T06:08:00.001-08:00

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), when asked by George Stephanopoulos for one recommendation President Obama could implement that would make the country safer, suggested, "One main thing would be, just himself, to use the word 'terrorism' more often."

Rep. King, ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, no doubt has thought long and hard about the threat posed by those who would employ terrorist tactics against the United States. Perhaps we should all take his recommendation to heart.

Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. There. I feel safer already.

New Year's Eve looking back

2009-12-31T21:52:00.000-08:00

I closed out 2009 with one last run in the rain and the dark and was exhilarated. As Jacques Derrida said of deconstruction, it is in some sense a pleasurable experience. In the evening I read from the 2009 journals, listened to Edith Piaf, and enjoyed an inexpensive Italian red wine I pick up at Trader Joe's.

The journals hold nothing profound but are not as pathetic as I might have feared. What follows are a few passages from the first four months of the year that for some reason or other strike me.

January

Kicked off the new year [2009] with a run, a bit soggy, as it rained throughout the day. Encountered two women just after I turned into the park [Laurelhurst] near run's end, waved, and one smiled broadly and said, "happy new year." Ah, the camaraderie of runners.

Surrealist imagery as a mutilation of conventional tropes in a quest for the fresh, the new?

Subject to mood swings, malaise, a downward spiral set off by anything, or nothing in particular.

Can I write poems when my spirit is unable to soar?

I remain pretty nutty. Apt to fly all over the place psychically at the least provocation.

I am unable to do much creatively. The surrealism essay for Memo, as far short as it falls, is the kind of thing I'd like to write for the blog, only better of course. That took several weeks to put in some semblance of decent shape, and I think I need to put something up more frequently than that. This is an ongoing source of frustration. Cutting back to 32 hours a week at work would help, but that's at least six weeks down the road — and that is the rosiest scenario.

It is absurd how anxious I get about — damn near anything and everything. More neurotic than ever about trip to SF, for crying out loud.

Excellent day [San Francisco trip]. The Rodin sculpture well worth the trek out to Stanford. The remainder of the Cantor collection not as exciting — a nice building to walk through. Got sandwiches at Cool Cafe and ate outside at a table by the sculpture garden. The day was overcast, threatening rain, similar to the day I visited Musée Rodin in Paris.... We strolled about campus a bit — lovely campus — before returning to SF early afternoon. At Sue's suggestion we went to Legion of Honor up past Golden Gate Bridge, moneyed residential district Sea Cliff, and China Beach. Legion of Honor has quite a Rodin collection itself. And like Cantor, the building itself is more interesting that the rest of the collection, which is serviceable, but nothing striking — except insofar as two El Greco pieces put me in mind of Dali — principally by way of the lighting — a certain almost garish brightness — in Dali would have been outright garish. Early dinner at Mandalay Restaurant, Burmese place Sue likes. Both had noodle dishes, hers with coconut milk sauce and broad flat noodles, mine vermicelli in curry sauce. Both quite tasty. Near end of the day thought occurred to me that we may have spent more time together than if I'd stayed at her place [instead of Beresford Hotel].

As I headed up to Coit Tower [next day], it came to me why I'm more comfortable visiting with Sue while staying at a hotel. When I stay with her, we're each trying to be thoughtful of the other, she the gracious host, I the gracious guest, so we get into this "What do you want to do?" "Well, what would you like to do?" "No, what do you want to do?"

Today's NYTimes has a story about nationalizing banks. Should it be done? Can it be done? The article noted that Summers and Geitner say the Japanese experience in 1990s shows that governments make lousy bank managers. The obvious rejoinder to that is that the American experience of recent years shows that bank managers often make lousy bank managers.

I do not as a rule write poems while travelling; however, travel experiences frequently provide fodder for poems composed at some later, often as not considerably later, date.

While strolling about Stanford campus, I was more than ever struck, more than ever convinced, that the university is where I belong, my failure to find a place there, well, I pay a high price for that.

Sue acted surprised Saturday when I mentioned I still have the drive to be creative. I believe I have the talent and intelligence to accomplish so much more than I have. I am an underachiever, and that nags at me — chafes my ass, as old Clay Carruth [Philosophy Dept college buddy] liked to put it.

February

For the first time in my life, I feel old. I feel defeated.

Another difficult week at the office. What will become of me?

When will poems come again? Will they come again? Perhaps with spring. All that I recovered late summer [2008]...is lost. That feeling for life I had got back is gone again.

March

Things are not what I want them to be. They will change or not.

The only poems I might compose now would be wholly negative. Any suggestion of hope or possibility would be in bad faith. I am not inclined to write such poems. Perhaps the poems will come back when hope and possibility come back — aha, in this statement there is hope.

This morning found a "dog tag" T-Bone dropped through mail slot on his way home from work. A chunk of metal with inscription:

David Matthews
Poet
Free Man

on one side, "chained to the wings of the sky" on the other, "from his good old buddy..." on the bottom. I can think of nothing that could have made me happier at that moment.

What we bring to a writer or a book has much to do with what we take from it...openness to a thinker...the streets wandered and trails tramped, the comings and goings, the partings, the sunsets that moved us, the books we have read — role of serendipity — and chance — My eye fell on a collection of essays by Kenneth Rexroth I'd not read before, and that collection held an essay on Martin Buber —

"I may not know the meaning of life, but the search for meaning gives meaning to life." — Nicolai Berdyaev

April

I stare at the page. No poem, not a single line or so much as a phrase comes. Stare out the window. Spring. Plants in bloom. Leaves reappearing, the very beginning of it. Allergy action. I recall Vancouver, scribbling in the journal at the Sylvia Hotel restaurant, mundane, prosaic stuff, writing just to be writing something and not nothing, in faith, or perhaps merely desperate hope, that one day it will come again. Why? I am adamant that poetry is not therapy. To present poetry, the creative act generally, in that light devalues it, strips it of meaning and worth. Poetry as nonprescription psychotropic drug, alternative to Prozac, Zoloft, and the rest. If that is all I am up to, might as well get a good piece of rope and find a tree with a sturdy limb and take care of things. "Thy flesh, near cousin to the common dust" — Keats

* * * * *

Ah, a sampling, as far as I got in the 2009 journals. I like to think that some of it may be of some modest interest. Now, on to the new year. Ciao.

The '09 Christmas Eve Blizzard

2009-12-25T09:58:00.000-08:00

The rain turned to sleet yesterday afternoon and snow on into the night. Big T was closing up Tulsa Runner at 4 when a car pulled up before we could get away, a fellow who remembered he wanted to buy a running jacket for his wife. Trani did not have exactly what the fellow had in mind, but close enough, and the guy picked up some tights and a couple of other items while he was at it. In the end the man went away happy and grateful to Trani for hanging around, and we all felt good about it.

We made it home without mishap on roads that were slushy and in the process of getting treacherous and enjoyed Christmas Eve dinner — ham, candied sweet potatoes, green beans, deviled eggs, and a tasty pinot noir — then settled in for This Is a Wonderful Life, which I abandoned at the onset of the run on the bank and went upstairs to read a bit — an Icelandic mystery I picked up for the trip, The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason, which has proven to be excellent reading, at once dark, suspenseful, and humorous.

Christmas morn brought the customary gift fest around the Christmas tree. We probably overdo that aspect a bit, but it is so much fun when a gift is well received, as this year with the scarf I found for Rachel, which she instantly wrapped around her neck and wore through the morning, and Robert Hughes' Barcelona for Dan.

I scored running shoes, ASICS GT-2140s, a watch, and some outerwear for winter running that I look forward to road testing. Alas, this will likely not happen until I return to Portland. Today is lovely, a white Christmas with sunshine and blue sky, but cold, very cold. Forecast for tomorrow morning is so bleak, temperature in the teens with a ferocious wind chill, that even the Tulsa Runner maniacs may forgo the 7 a.m. Saturday run from the store. For now we've set our sights on a Christmas afternoon movie, and I've set my sights on a little loop back in Portland on Monday morning — down to the Waterfront at Hawthorne Bridge, up the Eastbank to the Steel Bridge, back to Hawthorne Bridge and up through Ladd's Addition, build some character up Harrison to 34th, and home. That's not too shabby.

The morning was topped off when I turned on the computer to check email and make this blog entry and found a message from my childhood friend Mendal Bouknight. Enjoying Christmas with his wife and stepson, still he thought of Trani and me. That we remain in one another's thoughts after all these years is as nice a gift as any, as nice a gift as we could wish. Ciao.

Livin' on Tulsa Time 2009

2009-12-24T08:44:00.000-08:00

note to the unwary: The next few posts will be strictly journal type entries.

Trani was waiting for me at the Tulsa airport when I arrived last night a bit after 9 p.m. It was a long day of travel, but my trip from Portland by way of Phoenix came off without a hitch, the crowds, ritual undressing at the security checkpoint, where the agent checking ID drew a smiley face on my boarding pass, screaming babies, and yahoos traveling with dogs notwithstanding.

While we waited for my bag to pop up at baggage claim, I gave Big T a belated birthday present, an Old Crow Medicine Show CD, which we enjoyed on the way home while hashing over our mixed feelings about the health care reform train wreck. Back at the hacienda I was greeted by the family, Candy, Dan, and Rachel, and Dan's pal Brian, and breathed a sigh of relief when I confirmed I would not be bunking with Whipple, another pal, who shared the guest room with me a couple of Christmases ago.

Trani had come to the airport straight from the store, where he hosted the annual Tulsa Runner Christmas gathering and group run across the mighty, muddy Arkansas River to downtown Jenks to take in the Christmas lights. I regretted that my schedule caused me to miss the run, but I did get to enjoy a leftover barbecue pork sandwich as we settled in to enjoy a glass of wine and some reruns of the Daily Show, while upstairs Dan and his buddy Brian made unholy racket on their electric guitars.

This morning I'm at the store trying to stay out of the way while Trani caters to the Christmas Eve shoppers, a surprising number of whom have gotten out in the cold, driving rain that started up during the night. The weather forecast is for some bad cold the next few days. Even so I'm looking forward to seeing old Tulsa Runner friends at the Saturday morning run.

That's about all there is to report for now. I have some present wrapping to do. More anon.

working title: until we remember to dream

2009-12-20T11:39:00.000-08:00

I am listening to young Joni Mitchell, "Free Man in Paris," and thinking about retrograde flowerpots, doorknobs, and a garden with Japanese clocks when a fellow shows up looking a lot like a man who put a blowtorch to his youth, everything he used to be and much of what he never was right there in the ash around the edges of his eyes which right now are hidden by dark glasses. You could have thought he was Marcello Mastroianni in 8½ when the girl with the mortician tattoo, crossed shovels over a tombstone in a coat of arms kind of look, brings a bottle of red wine and glasses to the table where he might be sitting with a view of the river and the burden of memories we manage to forget until we remember to dream. She hands him her tennis racket, and he pushes the Ray-Bans down just enough to peer over them. There are caverns and canyons in his eyes but nothing to match the abyss that devours hers in the embrace of chaos that is the only way she can imagine she just might be alive.

The day is overcast, late afternoon, with the feel of a storm blowing down from the Gorge. The silence between the stranger and the girl is stretched out so taut you almost expect them to perform a high-wire act on it. So he says, what kind of girl are you anyway? She says she's the kind who smokes French cigarettes and reads Dostoevsky in Russian and makes bad coffee. He nods. Boredom becomes him though it's but a pose. He is too troubled to be bored. She breaks out a deck, shuffles the cards, and deals a game of solitaire. He is clearly relieved she does not expect him to play.

A gypsy xylophone and zither band sets up on the patio. They are pretty much ignored by the clientele, bohemians erstwhile and practicing, random dandies, chess freaks, Facebook Marxists, café existentialists, ubiquitous poets. A bearded figure off to the edge of things smiles wryly as his pencil dances delicately across the sketchpad. From off in the distance come the gay cries of children riding the ferris wheel and carousel down the way.

Richard! Richard Cameron! A man with a black patch over his right eye approaches without waiting for the invitation that was certain not to be forthcoming. He is an excitable young fellow, short, with a pudgy face and curly beard, a notebook in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. He places both on the table and retrieves a pen from his jacket pocket. His name is Mika. He is a freelance journalist. Some dub him a muckraker, others a scandalmonger. He tugs at the eye patch and likes to say his perspective is from the left.

Mika's questions come rapid-fire. Do you have any comment on the sparse attendance for your recent appearance at Powell's, which drew only seven people and two of them showed up to return your latest book for a refund? Are you writing new poems? Do you have plans for a new book that might answer your critics? Did bad reviews have anything to do with the breakup of your marriage? Why don't you believe in God and what do you have against transgender people anyway?

Richard Cameron is ill at ease. He looks this way and then that, crosses his right leg over the left, then the left leg over the right. Just then Gena Angellis, his agent, makes the scene, a no-nonsense type, say fortyish, with henna-colored hair she wears in bangs and cut straight across a bit below her ears. She wears a black jacket and a short black skirt that shows off her StairMaster legs to good effect. Richard has no comment, she says to Mika and hands him her card. Call me during office hours if you want to make an appointment for an interview.

The girl with the mortician tattoo looks Gena Angellis over, like she might be impressed if being impressed were an option she allowed herself. Having reached an impasse in her game, she scoops up the cards, shuffles, and deals them out again. Her name? It could be Bongo Kirkland.

the 2009 tally

2009-12-15T06:18:00.000-08:00

high points

San Francisco in January
Portland International Film Festival
Trani's Memorial Day weekend visit
Reconnecting with my childhood friend Mendal Bouknight, who contacted me after coming upon a Memo essay about growing up in Dutch Fork and Irmo
The addition of a Kelsey Mosley painting to my modest art collection
The 3 Friends poetry reading with Norval Willey and Curtis Whitecarroll in September
Vancouver BC in October
The Oregon Literary Review/Blackbird Wine Shop poetry reading earlier this month with Michael Shay, Rogers Truax, and Ric Vrana
Dinner with Sylvia at Besaw's, The Firehouse, Indish, and other dining spots about town
Dinner with Devon at Ciao Vito
Invitations to my old Atlanta friend Jerry Pagane's art shows in New York even though I was unable to attend any of them
Cranking up the mileage on my weekly runs last summer after Trani tried to peer-pressure me into training for a marathon
The upcoming Christmas visit to Tulsa

2009 has in many respects been a difficult year, but even a difficult year may have its bright moments to redeem it and us. I look to 2010 with realism and hope, determined to cleave to the vision, sometimes in spite of all, sometimes in spite of myself. As if it were a matter of choice.

I like this time of year. Hope you are all enjoying a wonderful holiday season.

affairs of the day

2009-12-11T06:07:00.000-08:00

Americans now seem to be largely ruled by passion and ignorance. Most of the public does not read anything of value. Television shows like "24" constitute their image of foreign affairs. The Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower is enraptured by a politician who could not recall what she reads to be informed.
...
An emerging third world country can not continue to fight wars that it does not understand in places it can only vaguely imagine. — Col. Pat Lang (Ret.) read more

I first encountered Col. Lang when he appeared on The NewsHour on PBS in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Later I came upon his blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis, which I check out regularly. His background includes service in Vietnam, U.S. Military Intelligence, and U.S. Army Special Forces. He struck me from the first as intelligent and knowledgeable, something of an old-fashioned conservative (as opposed, say, to a neocon), and a patriot. I do not always agree with what I find at Sic Semper Tyrannis, but I almost always find it worth reading and considering as I attempt to fashion something coherent out of my own muddled views on affairs of the day.

'twas a night of bitter cold

2009-12-10T20:29:00.000-08:00

He went to his desk, picked up a file folder, flipped through the sheets of paper, thought in a delirium of wild optimism maybe some of the poems were almost pretty good. Yet what was there to them, these little nothings that once came to the page as if of their own accord, some phrases and some lines inexplicably bound in narrative that carried itself along without will or reason, a bit of lyric to evoke a fleeting mood or memory, an image that might give reason to take another breath and perhaps even the breath after that. Why were these so modest accomplishments so hard come by? And why did he agonize so over such things we call art, in a delirium of wild optimism compelled to place on them more burden and weight of meaning than they could ever bear? It was nothing he could hope to fathom, much less explain.

First Wednesday Poetry & Wine Tasting with Shay, Truax, Vrana, Matthews

2009-11-26T10:04:00.000-08:00

The December 2009 First Wednesday Poetry & Wine Tasting sponsored by Oregon Literary Review and Blackbird Wine Shop features

Michael Shay
Rogers Truax
Ric Vrana
David Matthews

2 December 2009
7 – 9 p.m.
Blackbird Wine Shop
4323 NE Fremont* (next to Beaumont True Value Hardware)
Portland, Oregon

We hope you can join us.

*Note: address correction posted 1 December 2009. It seems the address I got from the lit review and wine shop websites is an old one about a block away from the present location.

An Education: a film by Lone Scherfig

2009-11-22T14:11:00.000-08:00

Reviews are best taken with a sizable grain of salt, always bearing in mind the source. The review in Willamette Week, where I typically see films differently than that publication's reviewers, was the sum of what I knew about Danish director Lone Scherfig's An Education when I stepped into the Hollywood Theatre yesterday afternoon: a worldly older man seduces a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in 1961 London. An Education did not sound particularly appealing, but I was in the mood for a film and nothing else struck my fancy.

Jenny (Carey Mulligan, in a fine performance) is a very bright girl, sixteen, soon to be seventeen, who wants to attend Oxford, where she imagines she will read what she wants and say what she thinks, meet interesting people who engage in interesting conversation, watch foreign films, attend classical music concerts, and some day she will visit Paris. She is encouraged by her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour), decent people who want the best for their daughter and see an Oxford education as her great chance for a life that will be better than theirs, though exactly what will constitute this better life and how an education will be the key to it is perhaps vague, more an article of faith than a clearly articulated vision.

For her part Jenny pursues her studies diligently, is the prize student at her school, and longs to escape the humdrum, bourgeois existence of the London suburb where her family lives. She reads Camus, smokes cigarettes, and goes on about existentialism with schoolgirl chums who do not really get it. She plays cello in the youth orchestra, casually drops French phrases into conversation, and listens to a prized recording of French chanteuse Juliette Gréco. Personable and likable, Jenny is not so much alienated as intellectually and culturally isolated, an island.

Our heroine's life takes a turn when David (Peter Sarsgaard), a man twice Jenny's age, offers her a ride home in his sporty car as she waits at a bus stop with her cello in the rain. David couples an aura of worldly sophistication with genial bonhomie to seduce Jenny and her parents. For Jenny he seems to offer an escape from isolation; her parents see promise of the security they looked to an Oxford education to bring with it. A man of some means, he takes Jenny to classical music concerts, dinner at nice restaurants, jazz clubs, and the dog track, and she is soon drawn in to a world far richer and more interesting than what she had known.

From the get-go something about David strikes us as not quite right, and not just the aspect of an older man preying on a schoolgirl. We soon find that he and his pal and partner Danny (Dominic Cooper) make their money through a variety of shady and some outright criminal dealings. That their sophistication, while not wholly a facade, is less than it first seems is exemplified by Danny's girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike), a ditz the antithesis of the kind of person Jenny dreams of meeting at Oxford.

It is wrenching to watch this young woman with so much going for her risk everything for a smooth-talking scoundrel who above all else is simply not good enough for her. Yes, David has some appreciation for the finer things in life and enjoys access to them, but that appreciation is dilettantish at best and perhaps more a tool for seduction than of substance. I found myself wanting to cry out to Jenny, "What are you doing with these people?"

There were moments when I thought that for the third consecutive weekend a film would leave me cold (500 Days of Summer and The Informant! being the others). I almost considered leaving the theater. Yet I stayed and was rewarded beyond anything I might have anticipated. Jenny is fortunate. She sees David for who he is before it is too late. There is someone to whom she can turn for help as her world comes crashing down around her and everything she worked for appears to be lost, and she has the capacity to realize this and the character to tell that person she needs her help.

An Education resonates for me as it does because I see so many bits of my own story reflected in Jenny's. As the autumn day turned to dusk, shadows gathering along streets lined with piles of damp leaves, I strolled home profoundly moved by the film's affirmation of values I hold dear, happy that things turned out as they did in Jenny's story, determined not to give up on my own.

Pinker on Gladwell

2009-11-16T08:21:00.000-08:00

I suppose I ought to check out Malcolm Gladwell one of these days. My sense from reviews and excerpts is that I would find him occasionally thought provoking yet annoyingly given to superficiality, sweeping generalization, and fallacious reasoning; and I have the impression that he and David Brooks are kindred spirits, but that is just an impression and may not be fair to either man.

Steven Pinker offers a balanced appraisal in Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective (NY Times, 7 November 2009), giving Gladwell his due for what he does well while taking him to task for his flaws. For those who want to jump to Pinker's conclusion:

The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,” the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

Bloom, Crumb, Heidegger

2009-11-15T09:33:00.000-08:00

I may be the only person I know who likes Harold Bloom. Even so, some among you may enjoy Yahweh Meets R. Crumb (The New York Review of Books, Vol. 56, Number 19, 3 December 2009; alas, only a snippet is available online), where Bloom considers Crumb's illustrations for The Book of Genesis in the context of his own lifelong encounter with the great literary figure created by the Yahwist.

* * * * *

The case of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his relationship with Nazism pops up periodically, like the tides and solar eclipses, with an essay or a book by someone outraged that anything Heideggerian should be taken seriously. Most recently we have French philosopher Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (published in France in 2005 and now by Yale University Press) and Carlin Romano's Heil Heidegger! (The Chronicle Review, 18 October 2009), the latter a bit of sophomoric bombast that takes up Faye's call to label Heidegger's writings as hate speech and class them not as philosophy but under the history of Nazism.

Faye declares that "Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as 'the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.'” (Patricia Cohen, An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?, NY Times, 8 November 2009).

The spread of sinister ideas! Quelle horreur! This kind of thing is way over the top. The best face that can be put Heidegger is that he toadied up to the Nazis to further his academic career. That he behaved shamefully toward friends and colleagues, not least Edmund Husserl, who supported Heidegger early in his career and whom Heidegger succeeded as chair in philosophy at Freiburg, and his student Hannah Arendt, is beyond dispute. However, the charges that Heidegger's writings provided an ethical and metaphysical groundwork for Nazism and that fascism is the inevitable, logical consequence of his philosophical perspective are not so.

I came upon Heidegger when in college and read a fair amount of him at an impressionable age, and I am reasonably certain I came through it uncorrupted by fascist ideology. There is in Heidegger that in which I find resonance, both in the early writings such as Being and Time and in later works. There is also gibberish. The appropriate response to him is not excommunication from the halls of philosophy but disciplined and rigorous critique.

Save the date: First Wednesday Poetry Shay, Truax, Vrana, Matthews

2009-11-12T18:22:00.000-08:00

The December 2009 First Wednesday Poetry & Wine Tasting sponsored by Oregon Literary Review and Blackbird Wine Shop features

Michael Shay
Rogers Truax
Ric Vrana
David Matthews

Blackbird Wine Shop
3519 NE 44th off Fremont in Portland, Oregon
2 December 2009
7 – 9 p.m.

We hope you can join us.

Poets Who Matter: Thinking of Keats

2009-11-08T11:07:00.000-08:00

Does poetry matter, and if it does, to whom? Does reading matter? Some of us are more given than others to pose these questions. That this reflects a certain insecurity as much as an inclination to the examined life seems to me likely enough. I must ask what I am up to when I compose a poem or try to think out my thoughts in an essay. I must ask why and how it is that I consider these things to be a part of who I am in a way that the work I do to earn a living is not, however honorable or worthwhile that work might be. I must ask why it is important that I think myself a poet. What does it matter that I toil in obscurity? What would it prove if my work were well known, even celebrated? Where is the answer that satisfies any of these questions?

There are within my circle of friends and acquaintances a number who write poems and stories and read widely and seriously and care passionately about these things. However, I suspect my circle does not make up a representative segment of the population. Maybe we care and read and write only for ourselves, and maybe that is good enough. "It's for myself and my friends my stories are sung" (Bob Dylan, "Restless Farewell").

Some think that reading books is a dying art. Philip Roth, in a recent interview with Tina Brown, speculated that reading novels will soon be a cultic phenomenon.

Tina Brown: You said in an interview that you don’t think novels are going to be read 25 years from now. Were you being provocative or do you believe that to be true?
Philip Roth: I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range.
Tina Brown: Is there anything you think that novelists can do about that or do you think that it’s just that the narrative form is going to die out? It’s just the length of them or what? Is that what’s dictating you writing shorter books now?
Philip Roth: It’s the print. That’s the problem. It’s the book. It’s the object itself. To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities.
Tina Brown: Do you feel that the Kindle is not going to be that? I mean, when I’m on airplanes now, I now see people with Kindles all the time. And a lot of people I speak have Kindles—you know, I have one, but I don’t read it as often because I still like books—tell me they read more on Kindle than they did on hard copy.
Philip Roth: Maybe. I’m not familiar with the Kindle. I mean, I’ve seen one but I haven’t used it. I read the piece in the New Yorker, by Nicholson Baker, which was very good. He had his skepticism. I don’t think the Kindle will make any difference to what I’m talking about, which is that the book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen and it can’t compete with the computer screen I don’t think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can’t measure up. I may be wrong. (Philip Roth Unbound: Interview Transcript, The Daily Beast Video)

Roth's pessimism is countered by Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy, a January 2009 report from the National Endowment for the Arts:

For the first time in over a quarter-century, our survey shows that literary reading [the reading of any novels, short stories, poems, or plays in print or online] has risen among adult Americans. After decades of declining trends, there has been a decisive and unambiguous increase among virtually every group measured in this comprehensive national survey.

Among other findings: Literary reading has increased among whites, African Americans, and Hispanics, and it has increased most rapidly among the youngest adults. Most online readers also report reading books. While book readers have grown in overall numbers, they have declined slightly as an overall percentage of the adult population.

 For the first time in the history of the survey—conducted five times since 1982—the overall adult literary reading rate has risen (from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in 2008).

 More than half of the U.S. adult population—113 million Americans—did literary reading in the prior 12 months.

 Since 2002, literary reading has increased among most demographic
groups of adults examined.

Greater reading of fiction is responsible for the new growth in adult literary readers.

 Nearly half (47.0 percent) of all adults read fiction (a novel or short story) in 2008.4

 Reading in poetry and drama continues to decline.

 Most readers of poetry and drama (64.2 percent) also read fiction.

 The lower overall reading rate for poetry is due in part to a steep decline in the percentage of women who read poetry.

The U.S. adult population now breaks into two almost equally sized groups—readers and non-readers.

 A slight majority of American adults now read literature or read books.

 Reading is an important indicator of various positive individual and social behavior patterns.

 The tendency to read or not to read correlates with broader differences in educational, cultural, and civic engagement.

 Previous NEA research has shown that literary readers attend arts and sports events, play sports, do outdoor activities, exercise, and volunteer at higher rates than non-readers.

Why does this stuff matter?

It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest. You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock. Bible readers, those who search the Bible for themselves, perhaps exemplify the urgency more plainly than readers of Shakespeare, yet the quest is the same. One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change alas is universal. (Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why, p. 21. Scribner 2000.)

My initial response to the NEA report was surprise, bordering on astonishment. My next thought was to wonder exactly what these people are reading. My guess is we are not all reading Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, a surmise buttressed by a quick look at the Amazon.com bestseller list, which includes Sarah Palin Going Rogue, Dan Brown The Lost Symbol, Dinesh D'Souza Life After Death: The Evidence, and Glenn Beck Arguing with Idiots (talking to himself?).

Mom once told me that my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Martha Ballantine, said that it was fine for us to read comic books during summer vacation, as long as we were reading. Well, I read voraciously, including comic books, from the time I learned to read, at first primarily science fiction, science fact, with Isaac Asimov a favorite in both genres, biography, and history.

I am more than a little envious of someone like Harold Bloom, who read, loved, and remembered poetry from an early age; however, I suspect most of us took a different path. The literary canon was part of my education dating back to elementary school, but it made little impression until I reached college, when I discovered the likes of Dostoevsky, Camus, Stendhal, and a European poetic tradition that runs from Baudelaire through Surrealism. Along the way I turned away from science fiction and took up with the likes of Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut, along with developing for a taste for mystery and crime fiction, from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to James Lee Burke, Robert B. Parker, Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller, Henning Mankell, Ian Rankin, and any number of others.

I would not go so far as to assert that any and all reading is good; however, it does seem to me that reading generally begats more reading, and maybe even on occasion thinking. Granted, we are more apt to take up writers with whom we feel at least some affinity than those who hold views antithetical to our own. As Bloom points out, we read against the clock. There will never be time to read everything we want to read, and reread, for the best works reward repeated readings. I am far more likely to make time to read Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal than The Weekly Standard Reader: 1995-2005. Yet we expand our horizons almost in spite of ourselves.

Somewhere down the line, and fairly early on, all that reading contributed to intimations, or maybe delusions, of myself as a writer, as I took early, and I now think pretty dismal, stabs at poetry and fiction. Through all that reading I was exposed to ways of being, to possibilities for the making of a self that remains an ongoing project.

And what does any of this have to do with John Keats? We will take that up in our next installment with "The Fall of Hyperion."

more anon

on to Somalia...Yemen...

2009-11-02T13:22:00.000-08:00

"If something is not done soon about these lawless places [Somalia and Yemen], one or the other may well become the next Afghanistan -- a place where U.S. military intervention was compelled by a devastating attack on the homeland." — The threat from Somalia, Washington Post, 2 November 2009

"The COIN [counterinsurgency] prophets+the COIN generals+the neocon revolutionaries+the neocon driven corporate media; this coalition of the obsessed and the self-obsessed is driving America towards commitment to a future filled with COINist zeal for revolutionary change across the world, starting with the Islamic world.

The inevitable end of that development will be national bankruptcy and political unrest that will make the 60s and 70s look trivial by comparison." — Col. W. Patrick Lang, U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, Retired, Yesterday Iraq, today Afghanistan, tomorrow Somalia, then Yemen?

Bankers a bunch of geniuses?; kudos for FDA move on antibiotics; we hope Krugman is right

2009-11-01T08:23:00.000-08:00

From Face Value: Dummies for Finance, The Economist, 3 September 2009:

“People who want to make a lot of money fast go to work in investment banks, but people who work in commercial banks are pretty average people,” says Mr [Andreas] Treichl [head of Erste Bank, Austria's second biggest] in an office so understated that it almost seems calculatedly so. On the whiteboard near his desk are the colourful doodles of one of his three sons—testimony to a recent spot of baby-sitting. Near the door is an open carton containing dozens of boxes of chewing gum. Mr Treichl’s prescriptions for banking are as unpretentious as his office. “We should not think we can invent something brilliant. If we could we would be working somewhere else,” he says of the exotic credit derivatives that spread risk, like a contagion, through the financial system. “We bought the crap but we didn’t invent it.”

…

Mr Treichl’s keep-it-simple philosophy has steered his firm’s strategy. Instead of trying to expand into investment banking, a business with juicy margins in good times but horrible losses in bad, Erste Bank has instead concentrated on expanding its retail banking business into central and eastern Europe, where it has subsidiaries stretching from Austria to Ukraine….

[Erste] is also firmly a local bank. Most of its main markets are just a few hours’ drive away from the head office in Vienna. In the waiting room on the executive floor, the head of risk from a subsidiary in a neighbouring country is pouring himself a coffee, having driven for an hour from his own office to talk about a new computer system. This localism underscores one of Mr Treichl’s deeply held beliefs: that big banks fail because they become unmanageable. “If you run something like Citi how the hell do you know what’s going on in Poland if you only go there every three years?” he asks. “This is very much a people business. I need to touch and smell and feel what’s going on.” It is a view formed by his many years in various bits of the far-flung empire of Chase Manhattan, a company about which former employees joke that it “trained the best but kept the rest”. Mr Treichl joined it as a credit analyst in New York and worked in its offices in Brussels, Athens and Vienna before joining Erste Bank some 15 years ago.

*****
From "FDA Commits to Protecting Antibiotics," Catalyst Fall 2009, published by the Union of Concerned Scientists:

The Obama administration is prepared to combat antiobiotic resistance by setting limits on the nontherapeutic use of medically valuable antiobiotics in agriculture, according to Joshua Sharfstein, deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The announcement, which stunned the animal agriculture industry by reversing decades of agency policy, was delivered at a July congressional hearing on the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA).

*****
I am not convinced, but we should hope that Paul Krugman is right (After Reform Passes, NY Times, 25 October 2009):

[I]f the Massachusetts experience is any guide, health care reform will have broad public support once it’s in place and the scare stories are proved false. The new health care system will be criticized; people will demand changes and improvements; but only a small minority will want reform reversed.

This thing is going to work.

Sign Man: a documentary about Jerry Pagane

2009-10-25T08:44:00.000-07:00

Sign Man is a documentary about Jerry Pagane, an artist living in New York City who is one of the only sign men in the country still practicing the craft of gold leaf.

The documentary will be shown Monday, 26 October, as part of Menagerie: Creative ExPression of the Lower East Side. For more information, see Apocalynn, Silvianna Goldsmith, Jerry Pagane.

I met Jerry Pagane shortly after I moved to the Little 5 Points neighborhood in Atlanta in 1977. The following essays about Jerry and other artists from that time and place have appeared previously in this space:

We Continue to Live for Art

A Little Memory Lane Action

Poets Who Matter: More Keats

2009-10-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

cont'd from Poets Who Matter: John Keats (1795-1821)

Keats in his letters speaks of poetry so often and with such fervor we might take him to be one of those people who are caught up in the idea of being a poet, or an artist of any stripe, like to think of themselves that way and broadcast it about, but who have not the talent, drive, discipline, whatever it takes, to do the work it takes to produce much of anything.

Of course we would be wrong. Any doubt about Keats's dedication to the work is dissolved by the output and quality of poems and letters written in a tragically brief span of years. This precocity is almost intimidating, enough to give pause to any of us with the temerity to put pen to paper. Yet no less might we find in Keats's evocation of the restorative and redemptive power of art a poetry that makes us want to make poems of our own, to trace "upon vellum or wild Indian leaf / The shadows of melodious utterance."

To J.H. Reynolds, in April 1817 at the age of 21, he writes in a gush of enthusiasm:

I find that I cannot exist without poetry — without eternal poetry — half the day will not do — the whole of it — I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan — I had become all in a Tremble from not having written any thing of late — the Sonnet over leaf did me some good. I slept the better last night for it — this morning, however, I am nearly as bad again — (18 April 1817)

To John Taylor, some ten months later, he laid out his axioms of poetry:

In Poetry I have a few Axioms, and you will see how far I am from their Centre. 1st I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity — it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance — 2nd Its touches of Beauty should never be half way therby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural too him — shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the Luxury of twilight — but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. (27 February 1818)

Poetry "should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance." My first thought is that this might be an echo of Plato's idea of learning as remembrance. The passage suggests the poet not as a mightier intellect or stronger being than the ordinary run of bozo on this bus, a fount of knowledge, whose art is to reveal things of which I the reader am ignorant, but rather the poet is something of a kindred spirit, whose power is to evoke the response, "Yes, that is how things are, that is how the world is, and the poem is how I would like to have put it."

And again to Reynolds, he says "Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject."

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to puts its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. — How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, 'admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose! (3 February 1818)

The famous negative capability passage comes in a letter to his brothers on 22 December 1818.

I spent Friday evening with Wells, & went the next morning to see Death on the Pale horse [a painting by Benjamin West]. It is a wonderful picture, when West's age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality. the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth — Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness …several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason — …This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

The conjugation of intensity and art, the mild criticism of West's painting for its want of intensity given marvelous expression in "no women one feels mad to kiss," is perhaps a young man's sentiment, yet one to which I am drawn even today, when youth is at best a blur receding at dizzying speed in the rear-view mirror, when my sense of just what counts as intensity might be a bit more nuanced, and more encompassing, than it was when I was in my twenties.

to be continued

Vancouver BC October 2009

2009-10-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

I escaped for a few days to Vancouver (photos), a city where I always feel at ease.

I flew up Tuesday morning and returned yesterday. As always, I stayed at The Sylvia Hotel on English Bay at Stanley Park, just a short walk from downtown. A sizable portion of my time was passed in coffee shops, writing in my journal and reading the poems of Anna Akhmatova, sitting on a bench looking out at English Bay, and wandering through Stanley Park and various districts of downtown Vancouver. Each morning I ate breakfast at the hotel restaurant, which offered a lovely view of the bay in the drizzle.

While enjoying a midmorning coffee at the Granville Island Public Market, from a table looking out across False Creek toward the Yaletown district in downtown Vancouver, my thoughts turned to three friends who look to nature for escape, off on backpacking and camping expeditions at every opportunity. I relish invitations from T-Bone and his better half to tag along on their hikes in the Columbia River Gorge or the Mt. Hood Wilderness area, but it is to cities that I turn for escape in much the same fashion that they turn to nature. Not just any city, of course, and I am drawn to cities of great natural beauty — Vancouver, San Francisco, Seattle — though I also love New York, Boston, Toronto, Paris.

Why is this? Maybe some of it has to do with where we spent our childhoods and youth. People who grew up in Detroit or in Xian, China, might be expected to have a different view of city and nature than one whose ancestral family home was in rural South Carolina, in an area that was only beginning to be suburbanized when I was young, though 'tis now distressingly so. Mine was a good, and from this vantage an almost astonishingly innocent, childhood, but...well, for instance, the library bookmobile that came round to the community center during the summer was a special occasion. Being within easy reach of a library or a good book store remains something special.

What makes for a good city? One must be able to walk and get somewhere. Good public transportation is part of the package, as are coffee shops, restaurants, book stores, museums and galleries, public art, and parks. Okay, so you can find these things most any city, just as you can find beautiful sunsets and clouds, trees and mountains and rivers, in many places, each with its own distinctive character and beauty.

For dinner I had fine meals at Persian, Vietnamese, and Greek restaurants after a special treat the first night dining at the Raincity Grill on Denman Street. The four restaurants are located within a few blocks or so or one another, three of them on Denman, an interesting street with a range of establishments that runs the veritable gamut, a library, two small book stores, a Brit pub, hole in the wall Vietnamese pho joint, Delany's Coffee House where I whiled away a few pleasant hours, The Spot Café, excellent for an inexpensive lunch of chili or soup of the day, and restaurants and cafés for every taste, Japanese, Italian, Ukrainian, among others. If you find the Raincity Grill trop cher, you can walk a couple of blocks and dine at Fatburger.

Raincity is just a mite pricy by my modest standards but well worth every Canadian penny. My last visit there, almost ten years ago, I thoroughly enjoyed a rabbit dish. Tuesday night I had melt-in-your-mouth slow roasted lamb with three kinds of grilled onions and potato puree. A nice Shiraz, an absolutely delightful staff, ah, it does not get much better.

trash talk on your right

2009-10-11T07:47:00.000-07:00

"I would be careful if I had put my testicles in a blind trust for George W. Bush for eight years." — Joe Scarborough after Rush Limbaugh called him a "neutered, chickified moderate."

For more about the food fight between these neo-intellects, see Leslie Savan, Joe Tells Rush Who Wears the Rants in This Party, The Nation, 9 October 2009.

Poets Who Matter: John Keats (1795-1821)

2009-10-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

The foggy mists of memory hold a vague recollection of coming across the opening lines to John Keats's "Endymion" sometime around sixth grade:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

That same haze of memory has in it the assignment to commit a bit of poetry to memory, with the Keats being one option. I chose instead something by John Masefield having to do with ships. The opening lines of Masefield's "Sea Fever" ring some kind of dim bell in me:

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's
shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea's face, and a gray dawn breaking.

It is easy enough to see that the tall ship and a star to steer her might appeal to a twelve-year-old boy lacking sophistication in every way imaginable over the stuff about beauty and sweet dreams and quiet breathing, though it may be that I am conflating altogether separate memories.

At any rate I would next have come on Keats in high school study of English literature with the standards "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." It is a safe bet I was not exposed to the likes of

Give me Women, Wine, and Snuff
Until I cry out, 'Hold, enough!'
You may do so sans objection
Till the day of resurrection;
For, bless my beard, they aye shall be
My beloved Trinity.

or "Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition":

The church bells toll a melancholy round,
Calling the people to some other prayers,
Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crowned.
Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp —
A chill as from a tomb — did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;
That 'tis their sighing, wailing ere they go
Into oblivion — that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp.

A few years later, junior year in college, there was a course in English Romanticism. There we read some longer poems, Keats's "Lamia," Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," Byron's "Childe Harold," and for me those tend to be a struggle. What sticks in mind from that class is not Keats but the professor's tongue-in-cheek interpretation of Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" as a poem about a child molester.

Keats was anything but the snaggle-toothed British dandy some might think him, perhaps mislead by his predilection for lush, aery-faery imagery, often grounded in mythology, all those gods and goddesses, nymphs and spirits, cavorting about an Edenic paradise. Nor was he some loopy forerunner of the New Age offering beauty and poetry as the recipe to happiness.

The passage that begins "A thing of beauty…" goes on to relate a darker side of things:

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits….

The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast,
They always must be with us, or we die.

Convinced that suffering plays an indispensable role in our development, Keats wrote in a letter to his brother, "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?" There is a measure of hope but no false promise. "I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness — I look not for it if it be not in the present hour."

Keats knew his share of pains and troubles. The oldest of three brothers, one of whom died in infancy, and a sister, he was eight when his father died in a riding accident. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1810, whereupon a guardian was appointed for the children.

Richard Abbey the guardian administered Keats's modest inheritance and doled it out parsimoniously. He apprenticed Keats to a surgeon in 1811. Keats took study of medicine seriously, completing his professional training as a surgeon-apothecary at Guy's Hospital in 1816, but determined that his calling lay with poetry, a decision that did not impress Abbey.

[Abbey's] Surprise was not moderate, to hear in Reply, that he did not intend to be a Surgeon — Not intend to be a Surgeon! Why what do you mean to be? I mean to rely on my Abilities as a Poet — John, you are either mad or a Fool, to talk in so absurd a Manner. My mind is made up said the youngster very quietly. I know that I possess Abilities greater than most Men, and therefore I am determined to gain my Living by exercising them. — Seeing nothing could be done Abby [sic]…called…him a Silly Boy, & prophesied a speedy Termination to his inconsiderate Enterprise. (Andrew Motion, Keats: A Biography, p. 130)

Keats harbored hope that he could earn a living as a poet until that was dashed by the vicious reviews "Endymion" received from conservative critics who lashed out at him for his association with the liberal Leigh Hunt, his politics, and what they considered the uppitiness of his poetic pretensions. Shelley and Byron, among others, held that his fatal illness was brought on by these harsh reviews. Keats was more tough-minded than that. It was damage to his health incurred during an arduous walking tour of Scotland that left him susceptible to tuberculosis when he was exposed to it while caring for his younger brother Tom.

Keats had no illusions about "Endymion," referring to the poem as slipshod but as good as it was in his power to make it. As for the criticism, he addressed that in a letter to J.A. Hessey, 8 October 1818:

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own Works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict, and also when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception & ratification of what is fine.

What exactly is it that we find in some few writers who touch us, that they speak to us, or for us, in a way that most do not?

to be continued

Caffeinated Art #63: Willey, Whitecarroll, Matthews

2009-09-29T18:47:00.000-07:00

The podcast from last night's poetry reading at 3 Friends Coffee house in SE Portland can be found at Caffeinated Art # 63.

The evening was a delight thanks to my fellow poets Norval Willey and Curtis Whitecarroll, who were in top form; Melissa Sillitoe, Luke Lefler, and their cohorts at Show and Tell Gallery Productions; and Madison the barista at 3 Friends. It is people like them who make Portland one of the finest cities in the country.

I was struck, and pleased, when Norval used the phrase "the mysticism of everyday things" in speaking of my poetry. That is an apt description of much that I am up to as a poet.

who should call the shots?

2009-09-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

"People like Senator [Kit] Bond are implying by their statements that McChrystal should be treated as an equal by the commander in chief and that the president should defer to the opnion of this general or any other general. Have we given up believing in the principle of civilian control of the military?" — Col. Pat Lang (Retired), Sic Semper Tyrannis

Read more

ah, what the heck...mandates, taxes, and twits-ter...

2009-09-26T19:44:00.000-07:00

George Stephanopoulos could have been reading from the Republican talking points memo in Sunday's interview with Barack Obama as he badgered the president about whether the individual mandate to purchase health insurance is a tax.

Tarring a proposal as a tax, thus ipso facto a crime against man and nature, is generally an effective political maneuver. It is easy to understand why the president's political opponents would want to do so whenever the opportunity presents itself. Less easy to understand is why the Baucus bill would have the penalty for people who do not have insurance come in the form of an excise tax to be collected by the Internal Revenue Service. That is handing the opposition a club and saying hit me with it.

excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and not adjudged by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid. — Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

Why should the penalty not be considered a fine, little different from a fine for speeding, a parking ticket, or the $2.3 billion fine recently levied against Pfizer for fraudulent marketing?

The individual mandate rears its head as the mechanism to ensure universal coverage because of the determination to maintain the fiction that the market is the appropriate model for provision of health care, that the relationship between doctor and patient is equivalent, or even analogous, to the relationship between the sellera and buyer of a computer, a car, a washing machine, or a house. (see Paul Krugman's blog The Conscience of a Liberal, Why markets can't cure healthcare, NY Times, 25 July 2009)

Does anyone really believe that people at the federal poverty level ($22,050 for a family of four) really have 2 percent of that income ($441) ready to hand to pay for insurance or anything else? Or that people at 300 to 400 percent of the poverty level can lay out up to 12 percent of their income? (For details of the Baucus bill as it stood earlier in the week, see Robert Pear and David M. Herszenhorn, Parties Clash on Long-Awaited Day for Health Bill, NY Times, 22 September 2009.)

The question that will remain unanswered to the bitter end is whether the positive aspects of what is certain to be a train wreck of a final bill outweigh the negative to a degree sufficient to compel our support.

on a frivolous note

Would the root of the word "twitter" be "twit"? And where does that leave us?

Related words, defintions from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary:

twittletwattle: Tattle; gabble. A vile word.

to tattle: To prate; to talk idly; to use many words with
little meaning.

today's thought, such as it is...

2009-09-21T18:30:00.001-07:00

It appears to me that what the Republican position on health care reform boils down to is this: If Obama and the Democrats will just put forward a Republican bill, they'll vote for it.

Is government possible?

Caffeinated Art #63: Willey, Whitecarroll, Matthews

2009-09-16T07:24:00.001-07:00

Norval Willey has invited Curtis Whitecarroll and me to read poems with him at 3 Friends Mondays: Caffeinated Art, September 28 at 7 p.m. We hope you can join us.

3 Friends Coffee House
SE 12th & Ash
Portland, Oregon

Produced by Show and Tell Gallery Productions

sabbatical

2009-08-25T20:50:00.001-07:00

I do not have much to say about much of anything just now. That much is clear from recent posts. Perhaps a sabbatical is in order. I will reassess at the end of September and go from there. Thanks for your patience. Ciao.

more from the political

2009-08-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

Appearing at a town hall in his home state of Iowa, Sen. Chuck Grassley told a crowd of more than 300 that they were correct to fear that the government would "pull the plug on grandma."

"There is some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end-of-life," Grassley said. "And from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma." — Sam Stein, Grassley Endorses "Death Panel" Rumor: "You Have Every Right To Fear" (Huffingtonpost.com, 12 August 2009)

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) acknowledged on Sunday that the claims he made two weeks ago -- that Democratic health care legislation would allow the government to "pull the plug on grandma" -- did not reflect the language of the bills.

In an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation," the Iowa Republican admitted that the current legislation being considered by Congress didn't include the infamous death panel provision that would allow the government to determine who should live or die.

"I know the Pelosi bill doesn't intend to do that," said Grassley. "It won't do that," he added later. — Sam Stein, Grassley Reverses Course: No Death Panels in Bill (Huffingtonpost.com, 23 August 2009)

Grassley is the, ah, voice of reason on health care reform from the Republican wing of the political bird. Criminy, as they used to say.

* * * * *

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if we have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as citizens we do not matter to our political elite, that we live in a corporate state where our welfare and our interests are irrelevant, we are in serious trouble. Our last hope is to step outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this, we will continue to undergo a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

We owe Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party an apology. They were right. If a few million of us had had the temerity to stand behind our ideals rather than our illusions and the empty slogans peddled by the Obama campaign, we would have a platform. We forgot that social reform never comes from accommodating the power structure but from frightening it. The Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists who battled for women’s rights, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement knew that the question was not how do we get good people to rule—those attracted to power tend to be venal mediocrities—but how do we limit the damage the powerful do to us. These mass movements were the engines for social reform, the correctives to our democracy and the true protectors of the rights of citizens. We have surrendered this power. It is vital to reclaim it. Where is the foreclosure movement? Where is the robust universal health care or anti-war movement? Where is the militant movement for sustainable energy? — Chris Hedges, "Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama (truthdig, 10 August 2009)

To be sure, many liberals indulged in some wishful thinking with Obama, who these days looks a lot like Clinton redux, sans the tawdry affairs, but it is not as if the country is swarming with liberals ready to vote for a Nader or McKinney if only they had not been suckered by Obama and the Democrats.

How do we reclaim this power Hedges says we have surrendered? By taking to the streets and frightening the power structure? While we are at it, do we dismiss measures that might make some small difference in the lives of individuals who are struggling to make it because those measures represent flawed compromises that fail to fundamentally change the system?

I do agree with Nader, quoted at the conclusion of the Hedges piece, when he says,

No one can predict the future. No one knows the variables. No one predicted the move on tobacco. No one predicted gay rights. No one predicted the Berkeley student rebellion. The students were supine. You never know what will light the fire. You have to keep the pressure on. I know only one thing for sure: The whole liberal-progressive constituency is going nowhere.

* * * * *

The ghost of Ronald Reagan continues to bumble about the parapets and dispense pernicious gibberish that gets passed off as common sense. Criminy.

The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming. — Paul Krugman, All the President's Zombies (NY Times, 24 August 2009)

Obama and the bad mojo

2009-08-14T17:20:00.000-07:00

I like Barack Obama. He strikes me as a man of decency and intelligence, and it is refreshing to have a president who is articulate and capable of a degree of intellectual rigor in his thinking. To his credit he is sometimes more forthright than politicians tend to be about the multitude of messes his administration inherited to which the appropriate responses are far from clear beyond being generally a matter of choice between evils, although he has been too willing of late to tell certain audiences what they want to hear and to promise too much to everyone when it comes to health care reform. Even so, there is a lot of bad mojo in the air.

Health care reform looks like a train wreck. Obama cannot escape blame, this is his baby, but I do not know anything he might do differently that would make a real difference in the outcome. The forces arrayed against substantive reform, anything that amounts to more than pouring peroxide and slapping gauze and adhesive tape over a horrifically fractured leg with the bloodied bone sticking out, are formidable and determined. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries are all for reform that will open up a new market, those presently uninsured, who will be mandated to purchase health insurance and subsidized by the government if they cannot afford it, all to the profit of the aforesaid insurance and pharmaceutical industries but not necessarily the rest of us.

Republican opposition to even the modest reforms bandied about by Congressional Democrats stems from more than just the lobbying and contributions of the insurance and pharmaceutical giants. For the party of free-market fundamentalism, the principle that government programs are uniquely, inherently, and inevitably boondoggles is an article of blind faith. It seems to escape their notice that the efforts of Republicans who devote their careers to undermining, if not outright sabotaging, government programs by denying adequate funding, ensuring that they are understaffed and underesourced, may just be a factor when those programs do not work so well.

As for the Democrats, they are a feckless bunch, not a feck to be found among the lot of them. Well, maybe Russ Feingold and the odd other, along with Bernie Sanders, but they are few and it must be lonely among them.

Madame Pelosi, Monsieur Reid, and their colleagues are all too ready to demonize the greedy insurance companies with the charge that they are the problem, and we can pay for reform that will provide coverage for the uninsured and guarantee coverage for all of us by increasing the tax rate of the wealthiest among us, at whatever level that is determined to be. Do not get me wrong. To be sure, private insurance companies are part of the problem. But are the insurance companies really doing anything other than what businesses are supposed to do in a capitalist economy when they seek to maximize profits for themselves and their shareholders? Is it possible to reconcile the capitalist's imperative to maximize profit with government's obligation, our obligation, to provide for the common good and general welfare by doing everything we can to make access to health care equitable and open to all?

I think not, being convinced that the market is not the appropriate model for health care. The relationship between patient and doctor is categorically different, altogether other, from that between buyer and vendor in a typical market transaction such as the purchase of an automobile, a washing machine, a television, or a computer system. The conclusion is foregone that whatever health care reform bill that is spit out of the legislative sausage grinder will fail to address this conflict between the market imperative and what is increasingly coming to be seen as a moral imperative.

The facts on the ground, to borrow a phrase from another conflict, militate against implementation of a single-payer system that would represent the overhaul of the system that is needed. Too much money and power is arrayed against it. The so-called public option in some guise or other, if it is included at all as a sop to the liberals, is sure to be watered-down and ineffectual, designed to serve as a dumping ground for high-risk individuals, leaving the for-profit insurance companies to cherry-pick the healthy. Republicans and Blue Dogs, having set up the public option to fail, can be counted on to then rear up on their hind legs and howl that this proves a public option cannot work.

So-called reform will be at best a mishmash of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Presumably whatever emerges will extend health insurance to a substantial number of Americans who do not presently have it and will contain some mechanism to ensure that coverage will remain, uninterrupted, if individuals change employers or lose their jobs or become seriously ill. This will make a real difference for the better in the lives of concrete, individual human beings. Does it follow that we are obliged to support any legislation that contains measures that will accomplish this desirable outcome regardless of how flawed, ill-timed, in some instances downright pernicious, other aspects of that legislation are? Once more we find ourselves impaled on the horns of a dilemma.

Then there is Afghanistan

From the Wall Street Journal, 10 August 2009:

Gen. McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, had a request outstanding for 10,000 more troops. Gen. McChrystal said he hadn't decided whether to request additional U.S. forces. "We're still working it," he said.

Several officials who have taken part in Gen. McChrystal's 60-day review of the war effort said they expect him to ultimately request as many as 10,000 more troops -- a request many observers say will be a tough sell at the White House, where several senior administration officials have said publicly that they want to hold off on sending more troops until the impact of the initial influx of 21,000 reinforcements can be gauged. (Yochi J. Dreazen and Peter Spiegel, Taliban Now Winning)

From Col. Pat Lang, retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets):

A couple of month's back, an old soldier employed as a cameraman at a discussion of the Afghan War remarked to me, "sir, its 1963 again." And that it is. (It's 1963 again. This time, Afghanistan.)

nutcake department

Rush Limbaugh compares the Obama health care logo to a swastika: “They accuse of us being Nazis, and Obama's got a healthcare logo that's right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook." (LA Times blog Top of the Ticket). The health care logo, it turns out, is a combination of the Obama campaign logo and the ancient Greek symbol of medicine. So who in their right mind takes Rush Limbaugh seriously anyway? No, better not go there.

birther mania

Robert Schlesinger at USNews & World rpt re: poll from Research 2000, commissioned by Daily Kos:

Only 47 percent of Southern respondents believe Obama was born in the USA. By contrast, 93 percent of Northeasterns said yes, he was born here, 90 percent of Midwesterners did and 87 percent of Westerners.

And while 93 percent of Democrats say he was born in the country and 83 percent of Independents, the figure is only 42 percent for Republicans. A majority of Republicans either believe he was born abroad (28 percent) or don't know (30 percent).

The punditocracy tends to zero in on the percentage of Southerners and Republicans who have doubts about Obama's birthplace. It seems to me at least as disturbing that the poll indicates that fully 7 percent of Democrats and 17 percent of independents buy into this nonsense to some degree or other.

For the record, FactCheck.org made this determination:

FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said. (Born in the U.S.A.: The truth about Obama's birth certificate)

Night Bomb Review #1

2009-08-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

While bound for the Belmont branch of the library to return a book and see if I could find some garbage reading (mystery novel), I had the pleasure to encounter Amber Ridenour hanging with some friends outside Sound Grounds Coffee House on Belmont and 37th Avenue. Amber and Chris Ridenour are editors of Night Bomb Press and the just released Night Bomb Review #1.

I was delighted to hear that the book release Thursday at Tony's Tavern was a tremendous success because Amber and Chris are two people I like and respect and because this is one fine collection of poems. I should acknowledge that I am not altogether without bias or least a vested interest in promoting the book. Night Bomb #1 includes one of my poems. I know about half of the contributors and count a number of them among my friends.

I was struck from the get-go by the opening poem, "After Dinner," by Rachel Robertshaw, not among the poets I knew previously. From the opening stanza: "...You / sat patiently at dinner waiting for someone / to arrive. / When he didn't / you got drunk and ruined someone / else's life. I'm not saying / this is all your fault."

Then I turned the page and found "Mermaid Ave." by H.L. Evanson, who was a shining light of the Mojo's Writer's Right open mic a few years back.

he calls at 2 am
having
8 bottles of wine
and a 9 mm
as payment
for 7 days of
house-sitting in
the middle of nowhere
with a cockatoo
and a horse

He tells her he is going to shoot himself, she says good, then he asks her, again, to marry him, and it goes on from there.

It went like that, from poets of my generation such as longtime luminary of the Portland scene Doug Spangle ("Blue Streak I"), Elizabeth Archers ("when my brother was sick"), and Dennis McBride ("Prophesy") to Tommy Gaffney ("Banshee Time"), Curtis Whitecarroll (VINCENT'S SUNFLOWERS"), and Judith Faye Pulman (the lovely "Bird Breath": "Dickinson heard the breath of a hummingbird / One morning / … Ever windowed Emily / bee stung bird lady"), who recently celebrated publication of her own Encounters with the Pane of Reality.

There is a wonderful range and diversity of styles, themes, and voices in this collection that is topnotch from beginning to end. Each poem lives up to the Night Bomb slogan "Verse at the intersection of guts and craft." I look forward to seeing where Amber and Chris take Night Bomb from here.

summer hours, autumn memories

2009-08-03T16:22:00.000-07:00

L'heure d'été (Summer Hours), un film par Olivier Assayas (Paris, je t'aime) avec Juliette Binoche — who alone is ample reason to venture to Cinema 21 on a Sunday afternoon in August, the Juliette Binoche of Le hussard sur le toit (The Horseman on the Roof), Trois coleurs: Bleu (Three Colors: Blue), Caché, La veuve de Saint-Pierre (The Widow of Saint-Pierre), The English Patient, Les amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to list only those of her films that I have seen.

L'heure d'été opens with a family gathering, three siblings, Adrienne (Binoche), Frédéric, and Jérémie, the brothers accompanied by their families, on summer holiday returned to the home of their childhood in the country outside Paris to visit their mother, Hélène. Frédéric is an economist who lives in Paris. Jérémie's career with Puma, the athletic shoe company, has taken him to Shanghai, and Adrienne is a successful designer of tableware, tea sets, that kind of thing, in New York. For her part Hélène, seventy-five and in good health, remains committed to her lifelong project of tending to the legacy of her uncle, Paul Berthier, an artist of sufficient accomplishment that a touring exhibit of his work is slated to open in San Francisco later in the year.

The holiday comes to an end as holidays do, and Adrienne, Frédéric, and Jérémie go their separate ways. They are brought back the following year by Hélène's unexpected death. Loss, grief, and the flood of memories that go to make up such times are accompanied by the practical concern of what to do with the house and family possessions, which include a desk and armoire in which the Musée d'Orsay has expressed interest, two paintings by Corot, two panels by Odile Redon, the remains of a Degas plaster the brothers broke when they were boys, and assorted other objets d'art.

There is no question of a falling out, no melodrama, over what to do with the family home, even though they come at it with quite different assumptions and expectations. Frédéric assumes that they will maintain the house and property in place, gather there as always on summer holiday, and pass it on to their children to do with it as they please. Jérémie and Adrienne are not a whit less attached to the place than Frédéric, but out of a variety of reasons believe that they should dispose of everything other than a few articles of sentimental value.

Sometimes a film has a special resonance somewhat apart from its realization, as for instance when it is set in a city we know and love, or when it addresses circumstances with which we have personal experience. As the film played out, my thoughts could not but turn back almost twelve years to the time of my mother's death. Trani, Elaine, and I were roughly the same age as Adrienne, Frédéric, and Jérémie. Trani and I had long since moved away, but Elaine still lived in the Midlands of South Carolina, not far from the old home place. As with Adrienne, Frédéric, and Jérémie, the likelihood that any of us would ever return to our childhood home to live was slim to none.

While I watched the film I found myself thinking back, family from all over gathered at the house waiting to go to the church for the funeral, people coming by to express condolences, all that food the neighbors bring by at such times, my old college buddy Allen Mackey driving three hours from Charlotte just to be with me for a few minutes. My thoughts turned further back to childhood, stirring memories that stir anew as I think of it now. I see the sun setting over the bottoms, hear Granny calling up the cows, recollect those lovely flower beds and family gatherings where we grilled hamburgers in the yard and ate until we could hardly move, and there's Mom returning home from work in the evening with an armload of science fiction she picked up for me at the library on her lunch hour.

Assayas strikes the emotional notes pretty much as right as it gets. L'heure d'été is a serious film about ordinary life, addressing its themes of family, loss, and memory with a deft and rewarding touch.

Poets Who Matter: Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997)

2009-07-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

"I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people." — Allen Ginsberg, "Improvisation in Beijing," 21 October 1984

Interviewer: It seems Allen Ginsberg is the diametrical opposite of you.

James Dickey: I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that. They damn themselves to a life of inconsequentiality when they could have been doing something more useful. They could have been garbage collectors, or grocery-store managers. Poetry is, as Yeats said, “a high and lonely profession.” It’s very easy, too easy, to pick up on the latest thing in the newspapers and write a poem. That’s all Ginsberg does. He just doesn’t have any talent. —Paris Review, Issue 65, Spring 1976

This is a heavy indictment to level against a member of the Academy of American Poets, recipient of the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (the Order of Arts and Letters) from the French Minister of Culture, Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College, and 1973 winner of the National Book Award in Poetry for The Fall of America: Poems of These States. Ginsberg could still be a hack, the honors notwithstanding, but he cannot be so easily dismissed as Dickey would have it.

Camille Paglia offers a counter appraisal:

Ginsberg is, just as he claimed, in the main line of modern, prophetic poetry from William Blake through Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. Therefore it saddens me that my illustrious graduate-school mentor, Harold Bloom, has always dismissed Ginsberg and even refused to list him among important contemporary American writers in the long appendix to "The Western Canon," which contains many, far lesser figures.

Through his influence on Bob Dylan (who in turn influenced the Beatles), Ginsberg revolutionized rock lyrics and directly affected the thinking of several generations of young people around the world. For this alone, he deserved the Nobel Prize — which continues to be awarded to safe, standard, derivative, politely leftish, literary humanitarians. Ginsberg's Buddhist mysticism, Hebrew severity, Hindu comedy and African polyrhythm were too original a mix for the stuffy patriarchs of Stockholm.

Helen Vendler is another distinguished witness for the defense, calling Ginsberg her fiercest liberator:

Before I say something about Allen Ginsberg's great gifts to world culture, I want to mention my own profound gratitude for his work and for the life out of which it came. I read him when I first came to Harvard, in 1957, and he became one of my liberators. "Nor can there be work so great," says Yeats, "As that which cleans man's dirty slate," but perhaps as great as that deathbed work is the work art does for the dissatisfied and baffled young. It gives them, perhaps, the first truthful words they have ever heard. Ginsberg's were the first truthful family poems I had ever read (Robert Lowell's "Life Studies" was yet to come). Later, when I taught "Kaddish," a student asked me, "How can he say such things about his mother?" That inhibition must have arisen for Ginsberg himself, but he reached through it and beyond it. Even if one can't aspire to equal Ginsberg's courage, one is encouraged by it. But of course candor alone wouldn't have struck to my heart as the words of Howl did; it was Ginsberg's onrushing rhythms--already in my mind from the Psalms and the prophets and Blake and Whitman, but differently cadenced in Ginsberg's lines--that swept away all objections. In Howl (and in all Ginsberg's subsequent books) rage came mixed with tenderness, prophetic denunciation alternated with visionary hope, the coarse consorted with the delicate. He allowed me my own rage, social criticism, and coarseness, while showing that he perfectly understood the aesthetic yearning that argued for modulation, harmony, and refinement. He wasn't my only liberator in my twenties, but he was the fiercest.

This is the kind of personal encounter many of us had with Ginsberg. He was the first poet I came to outside high school textbooks. The news magazines of the day, Time, Newsweek, Life, were the vehicles. This would have been during the late 1960s, and this was Ginsberg the celebrity, public figure, and minor pop icon as much as Ginsberg the poet, Ginsberg crowned king of May in Czechoslovakia in 1965, Ginsberg at the Democratic Convention in Chicago 1968, Ginsberg showing up with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

I do not recall if I actually read anything by Ginsberg before 1970, my freshman year at the University of South Carolina. If I did, it was an isolated poem printed in Time or Newsweek or, more likely, Rolling Stone or Ramparts. I was disappointed to find that Ginsberg was not on the reading list for an Honors class in contemporary poetry spring semester of that year. We read T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, but no Ginsberg; not only that, the professor took the Beatles seriously enough to discuss them in class but not Bob Dylan.

It was in a sociology class that same semester that I first delved deeply into the Beats as the subject for a term paper. It is all but a given that the paper was no great shakes, but I had a lot of fun digging around in the stacks at McKissick Memorial Library for interviews and articles in magazines like Paris Review and Evergreen Review, or almost as neat, viewing them on a microfiche reader, which seemed kind of high tech at the time. My research led me to the dank confines of theMcKissick back basement, ducking low-hanging pipes on the prowl for books like Seymour Krim's Shake It for the World, Smartass and John Clellon Holmes' Go, a 1952 novel with fictionalized versions of young Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke. Those were sweet times. But I digress.

So what did Ginsberg mean to a young fellow from Irmo first dipping a toe into the literary waters? I read voraciously pretty much from when I first learned to read. The focus was on science fiction, science, primarily astronomy and physics, history, and biographies of scientific and historical figures until the college years when I slowly broadened my horizons. Not much of literary value crept in before that. The upshot is that I came to Ginsberg and the Beats without a solid grounding, though I was coming on that simultaneously, at which the Beats helped with their many references to Blake, Whitman, the European avant-garde tradition dating from the mid 19th century, and so on.

My early debt to Rimbaud, Surrealism, and Gregory Corso, and later debt to Wordsworth, Keats, and to a lesser extent Dickinson, is unquestioned and great. Not so for Ginsberg. What I wrote drawing on him, consciously or not, is of little if any value. His importance lies in his model for the role of poet as a noble calling, for which Keats and others also served. Poetry in this view is not simply a pastime, a hobby, even a glorified hobby. To be a poet is to adopt a certain existential stance, a way of being, that is at the heart of who one is.

Ginsberg also presented a model of the poet as citizen, with an obligation to speak to the issues of the day. This may account in part for Dickey's animus toward Ginsberg. Dickey rightly observes that

[t]here is a tendency in American life to assume that because someone is good or maybe just notorious or publicized in one realm that he's a universal authority on everything. So, Frank Sinatra or John Wayne can tell you how to vote. What competence do they have in politics? Or that a poet can tell you about ecology or something of that sort. A poet is only a professional sensibility. His opinion in politics is no better than anyone else's ninety-nine percent of the time.

This is sound enough as far it goes, but it does not follow that poets should never weigh in on these things. Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry are to be taken seriously when they write about ecology not because they are poets but because they study and are knowledgeable about the subject. What their status as literary figures provides is a forum or platform from which to speak and be heard that might not otherwise be there for them. As citizens they have an obligation to use this forum, and their views should be accepted no more nor less critically than those of anyone else.

Ginsberg was prone to naïveté, as with the claim that Jack Kerouac was the greatest poet in the United States based on his ability to write haiku, which Ginsberg asserted is the one sign of being a great poet, an absurdity all the way around, or when on William Buckley's Firing Line (24 September 1968), he said things like, "our motivation [in Vietnam] is fear of the yellow life-form virus taking over the planet. I don't think we're going to make it with the Chinese unless we display a certain amount of acceptance of their existence on the planet and helpfulness and cooperation [reasonable enough]. The cause of their paranoia is our paranoia…." After a while Buckley broke in: "If you keep this up I'm going to ask you to read more poetry."

My memory of the show is fuzzy, mostly a vague recollection of Ginsberg chanting Hare Krishna. The transcript reveals Ginsberg's self-assurance matching Buckley's. There was not a doubt in either man's military mind as they debated free speech, censorship, and American policy in Vietnam. Ginsberg tried to explain hippie consciousness to Buckley and read a poem written while on LSD, at which Buckley, to his credit, clapped and said, "I kind of like that." (See the abridged sock puppet version for this portion of the interview.)

Dickey’s charge of bad influence goes way too far, more Dickey pissing to mark his territory than serious criticism. There is, however, a kernel worth considering. It is not exactly a leap from Ginsberg’s insistence on freedom and spontaneity in poetry, the imperative to break down “the distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse,” the call to write in the plainspoken American idiom eschewing the artificialities of traditional craft, to the notion that poetry is simply the expression of strong feeling, revelation of the poet’s self, composed more or less off the top of the head. That is arguably what we get from the worst of Ginsberg, but we judge poets by their best, not their worst, poems. The canon would be considerably diminished if we did otherwise. Nor should we hold Ginsberg responsible for the shortcomings of some of his followers any more than we hold Christ responsible for the inquisition or Marx for the gulag.

Kenneth Rexroth staked out a more middle ground in his essay "The New Poetry," and I am inclined to believe he more nearly gets it right than Paglia or Dickey, though granted the essay, published in Assays, 1961, was written when much of Ginsberg's career lay ahead of him:

About four years ago a young man in violent revolt against the polite literary world of Columbia University, where he had been the student "most likely to succeed" in literature, showed up in San Francisco and stayed for a brief visit. The permissive atmosphere seems to have exploded him. His name, of course, is Allen Ginsberg. I am not prepared to defend Ginsberg's fantastic public image, one of the most unfortunate hallucinations publicitaires of our time. Once he throws away the worn-out Davy Crockett cap of the Beat Generation, it will be apparent that he is a typical American popular poet, in the tradition of Vachel Linday and Carl Sandburg. Certainly the youth now gaining headlines in the journalistically fashionable "new revolt of Youth" accept him as a spokesman, and well they might. This does not mean that his poetry is not thoroughly traditional — in one of the oldest traditions, that of Hosea or the other angry, Minor Prophets of the Bible.

two nice little films: Lemon Tree, Jerichow

2009-07-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

Lemon Tree
dir Eran Riklis

Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbass) is a Palestinian woman, a middle-aged widow with a son in the U.S., who ekes out a meager living tending a lemon grove on the Green Line border between Israel and the West Bank. Her life is turned upside down when Israel's Defense Minister and his wife move into a house on the Israeli side of the line and the security guys decide the lemon grove is a security risk. Salma battles the system and appeals the case all the way to Israel's supreme court before her efforts come to an unsatisfactory end.

Minor plotlines add complexity: the strained relationship between the defense minister and his wife, who sympathizes with Salma and after a fashion bonds with her, and the subtly depicted relationship between the Salma and her considerably younger male attorney, which makes trouble for her within the Palestinian community where it is seen as dishonoring her dead husband.

People caught up in circumstances not of their making act horribly. The concerns of the security team are not unfounded, but their heavy-handed response is rooted in the dehumanization of the Palestinians, who cannot be seen as anything but potential terrorists.

Meantime, the security wall goes up and construction in the settlements continues. The Israelis live constantly on edge, while the Palestinians are ground down day after day. Even Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), the Defense Minister's wife, and Salma communicate for the most part only in distant gazes.

This is a quietly moving film, with a superb performance by Abbass and a very nice one by Lipaz-Michael. It offers no answers and not much in the way of hope beyond an uplifting depiction of decency and dignity in the face of great obstacles.

Jerichow
dir. Christian Petzold

Jerichow is a fine reworking of The Postman Always Rings Twice. The basic scenario has a man of no means employed by a well-to-do businessman with an attractive wife and a marriage that is not what it first seems. Next thing you know, there is a powderkeg of desire just waiting to blow.

The setting is a small town in northeastern Germany. Thomas (Benno Fürmann) is a down and out, dishonorably discharged vet who served in Afghanistan. One afternoon he comes to the aid of a drunk driver whose car runs off the road and down an embankment. The driver, Ali (Hilmi Sözer), matter of factly tells the police officer who stops to investigate that Thomas was driving. Thomas shrugs and takes the rap in something of a gratuitous act.

A few days later Ali loses his license for a year after another drunk-driving incident. It turns out he is a wealthy businessman who owns twenty-five snack shops around town. He offers Thomas a job driving him around to deliver supplies and check to see that his shops are operating as they should. In the fine tradition of taciturn, existentialist protagonists, Thomas shrugs and says, okay, sure, why not.

Ali's wife, Laura (Nina Hoss), keeps the books for the business. Theirs is not a loveless marriage, but clearly something is askew. Ali, though capable of generosity, is missing a face cards from his deck. He drinks heavily and is given to fits of temper and violence, a pathological case convinced that Laura is unfaithful, the people running his snack bars are stealing from him, and the police are out to get him. Yet he trusts Thomas, despite recognizing the gaze Thomas fixes on Laura the first morning he shows up for work.

Laura, like Thomas, is reticent, not given to small talk, keeping her thoughts to herself. She is compellingly sensuous, and Thomas is a good-looking guy. That they will throw themselves at one another is a foregone conclusion.

Like Thomas, Laura has a past, and Petzold knows to show only enough to tell how she and Ali came to be together, what she owes him, and why it is so difficult for her to escape. As for Ali, he is deeply unhappy and despite his flaws not unsympathetic, a wealthy man in a country that does not want him, with a wife he bought. Petzold throws a nice twist on the conventional Postman plot where the two lovers connive to murder the husband to give us a denouement delivered with tragic inevitability.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

2009-07-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

In December 1957 Harold Norse, then 41 years old and having lived the past four years in Europe, wrote in a letter to William Carlos Williams, 74 at the time, that he hoped to return to the U.S. soon, explaining

Really, Bill, one of the few chief reasons why I want to come back—if I can swing it financially—is to see you again. I am now beginning to realize, much as I love it here, that I am getting out of touch with that which, in the end, matters most to me—namely the most important people in one's life. Of course, I have that here—but they are not of the same background. And one's language belongs to that.

Williams responded on 7 January 1958:

Keep out of this country as long as you can eat! It's poison to the intellectual. It's going to get worse for many years to come, in my opinion, or just as long as money governs the conduct of our lives. Can you see any end to that juggernautery? The horrible sight of our swollen cars that infest our roads should be enough for any man who has kept a vestige of his brains about him.

(from the correspondence of Williams and Norse in The American Idiom, Bright Tyger Press, 1990)

Index of Flight: new art by Kelsey Mosley

2009-07-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

art opening and reception with Kelsey Mosley

Thursday, 16 July

6–8 p.m.

seven virtues coffeehouse

5936 NE Glisan Street

Portland OR

Kelsey's talents include painting, drawing, latte art (reindeer and hummingbirds in your latte foam), and a smile that brightens any room she is in. Her illustrations grace my little collection of poems titled A Portable Bohemia.

The show runs through 18 August. I suggest you check it out if you get a chance.

Whatever Works: the world through Woody Allen's rose-tinted glasses

2009-07-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

We tend to identify the protagonists Woody Allen portrayed in so many of his finest films with Allen himself to such a degree that we now think of the protagonist as the Woody Allen character even in more recent films where Allen does not appear. It requires something of an imaginative leap to refrain from imagining Allen as the character and measuring another actor's performance against that standard, as with Larry David's Boris Yellnikov in Whatever Works. That this is unfair to Allen and to David in could go without saying, but even so, the heart has its reasons, as Allen once noted in another context.

There is something winsome about Allen the actor’s portrayals even at their whiniest that is absent from David’s Yellnikoff, a misanthropic, hypochondriac, self-acknowledged genius given to panic attacks at 4 a.m., outbursts of spleen, and failed attempts at suicide. Once considered for a Nobel Prize in physics, Boris has been reduced to giving chess lessons to children, at whose shortcomings he is just as foul-tempered and impatient as with the rest of the human race, in his view morons and inchworms all.

Comes into Boris’s life the lovely and sweet Melodie St. Anne Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), an unsophisticated young beauty queen runaway from Mississippi. It seems she had sex with a boy who wasn’t her husband and quite enjoyed it, and that sort of thing did not go down well in the household of her Christian fundamentalist parents. Naturally Boris takes her in, and soon enough she develops a crush on the old curmudgeon despite the stream of insults and invective, never a good word for her or anyone else, and his conviction that only a cretin could fail to see that we stand at the abyss, at which he can only invoke Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: the horror, the horror.

A year passes. The improbable couple are married. Boris is about as happy as he is capable of being. Melodie, for whom happiness generally does not seem to be a problem, much less an issue, finds work first as a dogwalker, then looking after other people's children. So who turns up on the doorstep but Melodie’s mother (Patricia Clarkson, magnificently chewing up some scenery), who has tracked down her daughter after her husband took up with her best friend, saw his investments go south, lost his job in the economic downturn, lost the house, leaving her abandoned, homeless, and all but destitute. Where else is she to turn but to her wayward daughter?

Marietta the mother paws at her Bible and will pray to Jesus at a heartbeat, but she’ll also demand a drink, and when told there's no bourbon, instructs her daughter to bring whatever she’s got with the highest alcohol content, foreshadowing the transformation that follows. Before we know it, Marietta either loses her soul entirely as she falls into a life of depravation or, from another perspective, finds herself as a woman and an artist, a successful photographer and collagist living in a very happy ménage à trois with a philosophy professor and the owner of an art gallery.

The plot is twisted by Marietta’s refusal to accept Boris as a suitable husband for her daughter. She contrives to set Melodie up with Randy James, a young actor who’s fallen head over heels for her. Henry Cavill may be able to act his way out of a pay toilet, but he’s not called on to do it here. All he needs is to be eye candy, innocuous and pleasant enough in an empty-headed sort of way. Melodie at first resists his advances, but we all know that's not going to last.

Not surprisingly, John Celestine (Ed Begley, Jr.,) makes the scene next, come to put his marriage back together after things didn’t work out with Marietta’s best friend. John ends up throwing down drinks in a bar where he meets the love of his life, which is no less improbable than the Boris's hook-up with the woman he lands atop when he flings himself out the window in a failed suicide attempt after Melodie leaves him for Randy.

I am not altogether sold on Larry David as Boris, the Southern characters are overdone, played too much to stereotype, and much of the plot is predictable; but Whatever Works works despite these minor flaws, not least because it is outrageously funny. As always, Woody Allen writes for an educated audience. One does not have to get the scientific, philosophical, and literary allusions or the skewering of intellectual pretension to enjoy the film, but it helps. And believe it or not, the ending is upbeat, as no one ends up alone.

Harold Norse (1916–2009)

2009-06-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

Harold Norse first popped up on my radar through his association with the Beats. However, Norse was quite a bit more than just some minor Beat figure who happened into the orb of the daddies, as Gregory Corso referred to himself, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs.

Norse was born in Brooklyn in 1916, his mother an unmarried Russian immigrant. He never knew his father.

In 1939, a year after he graduated from Brooklyn College, Norse and his boyfriend, Chester Kallman, made W.H. Auden’s acquaintance by “flirting outrageously” (Norse quoted in Neeli Cherkovski, Whitman’s Wild Children) from the front row at Auden’s first public reading in America. Kallman went on to become Auden’s longtime companion, and Norse served for a time as the poet’s personal secretary.

Norse had a knack for meeting and knowing people who were somebody, or would go on to become somebody. In 1944 while on a subway train in Manhattan, he noticed a young man who seemed to be reciting poetry from memory. Over the rattle of the subway car, he made out that the poetry was in French. When the train stopped at the next station, Norse said to the young man, “Rimbaud,” to which eighteen-year-old Allen Ginsberg replied, “You’re a poet.” (Cherkovski)

Over the years he counted among his friends James Baldwin, James Jones (From Here to Eternity), actor and theatrical director Julian Beck, Anaïs Nin, and Paul Bowles. He drank with Dylan Thomas, spent a summer with Tennessee Williams while Williams was writing The Glass Menagerie, and crossed paths with Leonard Cohen in Greece.

Norse met William Carlos Williams while a graduate student in English at New York University circa 1951. Williams became his mentor, encouraged him to write in a more conversational, less academic style, and called him “the best poet of his generation.” He received his master’s degree and was published in the prestigious journals of the day, among them Poetry, Hudson Review, Commentary, New Republic, and The Nation.

He abandonned plans to pursue a doctorate and for fifteen years lived the expatriate life in Europe and North Africa. From 1960 to 1963 he lived in the Latin Quarter in Paris at 9, rue Git-le-Coeur, in what came to be known as the Beat Hotel, where his neighbors included Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso.

On returning to the U.S. in 1968, he lived in Los Angeles, where he met Charles Bukowski, who admired Norse's writing and initiated a correpondence between them that had been going on for several years. Neeli Cherkovski was present at that first meeting and reports that Bukowski was as nervous as he'd ever seen him. When Norse knocked on the door of the bungalow, Bukowski whispered, "Jesus, he's here. What are we gonna do, kid?" Cherkovski replied, "Open the door." Bukowski did and in came Norse, "in faded Levi's, bundled in what looked like a thousand European scarfs." Bukowski looked down at the diminutive Norse, all of five-six in height, and said, "Jesus, is this all there is?" Norse playfully punched Bukowski in the belly, and Bukowski said, "Kid, I think a fly hit me."

Like Bukowski, Norse found poetry a dicey way to make a living, so he wrote for Hustler and other such magazines to generate the income that poetry failed to bring his way. About this time he also did some bodybuilding with young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Norse moved to San Francisco in 1972 and became a leading figure in the city’s cultural life and the gay liberation movement with the publication of Hotel Nirvana: Selected Poems, 1953–1973 (1974) and Carnivorous Saint: Gay Poems, 1941–1976 (1977).

While in San Francisco in April 1999 (if I’ve got the chronology right; otherwise, thereabouts), by chance I spotted a flier on a pole or maybe a plate-glass window in North Beach advertising a poetry reading by Harold Norse at the North Beach branch of the public library. The reading was in a small room that did not require many to make a crowd, but there was a crowd. What I recall most is Norse and Lawrence Ferlinghetti being pretty spry for a couple of young bohemian fellows in their eighties, Norse reading his poems with humor and quiet dignity, Ferlinghetti clambering around with his video camera to preserve the scene for posterity.

A few treasures from the Beat era remain with us, Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure. Harold Norse joins the ranks of the illustrious departed: Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), Bob Kaufman (1925–1986), Ginsberg (1926–1997), Burroughs ((1914–1997), Corso (1930–2001), Philip Whalen (1923–2002), and Philip Lamantia (1927–2005).

For all that “Beat Generation” is a Time magazine kind of term, with all the pop superficiality that implies, this is quite a roster, a pretty solid bunch. Each has a body of work that is distinctive and substantive. Through a web of friendships, common themes, overlapping interests, shared values, and perhaps most of all devotion to the writing, they form a significant tradition that lives on for those who come after.

References

Mark Athitakis, The Return of the Bastard Angel, SF Weekly.com, 8 November 2000

Neeli Cherkovski, Whitman's Wild Children (1999)

Harold Norse, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: a Fifty Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (1989) (not used for this piece; I read Bastard Angel years ago but do not have a copy in my possession)

Obituaries

Douglas Field, Harold Norse, The Guardian, 17 June 2009

William Grimes, Harold Norse, a Beat Poet, Dies at 92, The New York Times, 13 June 2009

Poets Who Matter: Introduction

2009-06-28T15:42:00.000-07:00

Why are there texts? Why do we need the mediation of art, not only to record otherwise fugitive thoughts but as a contemplative necessity? In what way is literature a “construction” essential to life, and what part is played by its tapping of anarchic or apocalyptic energies? — Geoffrey Hartman, “Polemical Memoir,” intro. to A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections 1958–1998

I have in mind taking up poets who matter as the theme for a series of essays. These will be poets who matter, or have mattered, to me. The origination will be thus subjective, starting from a personal encounter, as all reading is a personal encounter. If my observations are well founded and conveyed, if I think and write well and interestingly, maybe this will amount to more than pretentious naval-gazing. Who knows, a genuine insight or several may come of it.

Poets and poems matter to us in all sorts of ways, shapes, and guises, and in this mattering they influence us, overtly or subtly, for good or ill. It is not that they must matter, but that we open ourselves to them so that they may matter. As so often, I find Harold Bloom relevant and provocative, here addressing the question, why read?

I turn to reading as a solitary praxis, rather than as an educational enterprise. The way we read now, when we are alone with ourselves, retains considerable continuity with the past, however it is performed in the academies. My ideal reader (and lifelong hero) is Dr. Samuel Johnson, who knew and expressed both the power and the limitation of incessant reading. Like every other activity of the mind, it must satisfy Johnson’s prime concern, which is with “what comes near to ourself, what we can put to use.” Sir Francis Bacon, who provided some of the ideas that Johnson put to use, famously gave the advice: “Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.” I add to Bacon and Johnson a third sage of reading, Emerson, fierce enemy of history and of all historicisms, who remarked that the best books “impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads.” Let me fuse Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson into a formula of how to read: find what comes near to you that can be put to the use of weighing and considering, and that addresses you as though you share the one nature, free of time’s tyranny. (Bloom, How to Read and Why)

Read to weigh and consider. What we weigh and consider, how we are open to the influence of poets and poems, hinges on not just on them but how we come to them, with all the reading and other life experience we bring to bear, and moreover, whether we come to them as poets, as general readers, as critics, or as reviewers.

Again I turn to Bloom, this time to the influential early work The Anxiety of Influence, which “offers a theory of poetry by way of a description of poetic influence, or the story of intra-poetic relationships.”

Poetic history, in this book’s argument, is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.

My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing [Emerson], and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?

When I read a poem I wrote years or even decades ago, I often get a pretty good notion who I was reading at the time the poem was composed. It is not, at least in most cases, as if I consciously imitated other poets. Rather, what was at work was a kind of internalization of those thematic and stylistic elements that I found interesting or pleasurable, or to put it in Bloomian terms, what most struck me as ways a poem can to be written that spoke to me.

No poet is created, or creates, ex nihilo. No poet is sui generis. Well, maybe Shakespeare, but that is far beyond the scope of today's meditation. Even the archetypal rebel poet Rimbaud studied Greek, Latin, and French literature, won prizes in school, and at the age of fifteen, under the influence of the Parnassian school of poetry, penned a poem published in La Revue pour Tous.

Romanticism is the English tradition on which I draw. The Romantics were among the first to strike me when I encountered them in high school textbooks, in particular Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Early on, I put the Romantics aside, and with them the Anglo-American tradition more generally, as the Beats came in through the door opened by the zeitgeist of the late sixties and early seventies. The Beats led me to the continental European avant-garde tradition that began with Baudelaire and ran through Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Rilke, Mayakovsky, the French Surrealists, Garcia Lorca, Neruda. The Beats and their American kin, such as Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen, embraced a cosmopolitanism and radicalism in politics and philosophy as well as poetic practice that put them at odds with Eliotic-Poundian modernism and those Rexroth referred to as the corn-belt metaphysicals and country gentlemen, the professor-poets who took their stand with the New Criticism and made up the literary establishment of the day. How after many years of reading and writing poetry I came back to certain major, canonical figures in the English tradition, notably Wordsworth, Keats, and Dickinson, how they came to matter, is part of the tale.

This will not be an essay a week, off the top of my head, kind of thing. I look forward to rereading and studying these guys — they are almost all guys, and why that might be would be good subject for an essay in the series — weighing and considering them anew. We shall see how it turns out.

Responding to Events in Iran

2009-06-21T10:17:00.000-07:00

Like the rest of the world, President Obama must have been surprised by the magnitude of the protests in Iran. Iranians are protesting not just election fraud but also the growing abuses of the Iranian people by a dictatorial regime. Now is not the time for the president to dig in to a neutral posture. It is time to change course. — Paul Wolfowitz, ‘No Comment’ is Not an Option, Washington Post, 19 June 2009

Millions of Iranians take to the streets to defy a theocratic dictatorship that, among its other finer qualities, is a self-declared enemy of America and the tolerance and liberties it represents. The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.
…

This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.

The latter is improbable but, for the first time in 30 years, not impossible. Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism -- leave it forever spent and discredited.

In the region, it would launch a second Arab spring. The first in 2005 -- the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon, the first elections in Iraq and early liberalization in the Gulf states and Egypt -- was aborted by a fierce counterattack from the forces of repression and reaction, led and funded by Iran.

Now, with Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and with Iraq establishing the institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect. The exception -- Iraq and Lebanon -- becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed. — Charles Krauthammer, Hope and Change — But Not for Iran, Washington Post, 19 June 2009

That Wolfowitz, Krauthammer, and their confreres have whipped themselves up into a state of high dudgeon over Obama’s response to the situation in Iran should not surprise us. That the venerable Washington Post would serve as a vehicle for their bluster is…. Well, maybe that should be no surprise either, merely distressing.

Assertions such as Krauthammer's that the demonstrators “await just a word that America is on their side” have no basis. The signs, the words, they await come from prominent opposition figures such as Mousavi, Khatami, and Rafsanjani, not from the U.S.

John McCain argued passionately this morning on Face the Nation that America needs to be “on the right side of history.” Yet even he was hard-pressed to suggest that the administration could, or should, do anything more than ratchet up the rhetoric.

Pat Lang, retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, makes no bones about his position: "Let us side with the Iranians in the streets…. Americans should now stand with those who want to be free people."

At issue is how to side with the Iranians in the streets, what actions, including rhetoric, are likely to be effective, and what would be counterproductive. A couple of days later, Lang offered this assessment:

In my opinion, McCain went too far, and Obama so far has the amount of expressed concern about right. McCain foolishly indicated in his statement that we Westerners should seek to end the theocratic regime in Iran and Obama expressed a kind of vague concern. Does McCain think that the mullahs are going to do anything that will tend toward an end to their power? What does he want us to do, invade the country? Silly.

McCain did made clear this morning that he is not suggesting any such thing, though I would venture to guess he has no qualms about longtime CIA efforts to destabilize the Iranian regime, which Obama has not reined in.

Lang's belief that Obama's response thus far has been "about right" is shared by a wide number of observers of disparate backgrounds and political persuasions, e.g., Gary Sick, senior research scholar at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) Middle East Institute and adjunct professor of international affairs at SIPA, who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan; and Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan; by way of just two examples among many.

Yet the neocons would have it that only Obama’s so-called neutrality is holding back the overthrow of a brutal dictatorship, democracy and all its fruits, an Arab spring, security for Israel, the free flow of oil, peace and freedom, same as happened in Iraq. This sort of thing is more suited to Fantasy & Science Fiction than a major American newspaper.

For background about CIA involvement in the coup against the democratically elected Mosadegh after he proposed nationalization of the oil industry, check out James Risen, Secrets of History: The CIA in Iran. Among other things, “Iranians working for the C.I.A. and posing as Communists harassed religious leaders and staged the bombing of one cleric's home in a campaign to turn the country's Islamic religious community against Mossadegh's government.” Does anyone doubt that the spooks are mucking around right now to foment unrest, if only at the edges and at risk of discrediting the opposition?

skullduggery in the hallowed halls

2009-06-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

Poetry got some press last month when the Ruth Padel-Derek Walcott affair hit the fan. Padel and Walcott were the top two candidates for the chair of poetry at Oxford University, second only to the post of poet laureate in terms of prestige and formal recognition for a British poet. Padel got the chair after Walcott withdrew from consideration, saying,

I am disappointed that such low tactics have been used in this election, and I do not want to get into a race for a post where it causes embarrassment to those who have chosen to support me for the role or to myself.... While I was happy to be put forward for the post, if it has degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination, I do not want to be part of it. (Sara Lyall, Walcott Withdraws From Poetry Professor Election, NY Times, 12 May 2009)

The low tactics to which Walcott refers included an anonymous mailing received by dozens of Oxford academics containing " photocopied pages from a book [Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner, The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus] describing decades-old allegations of sexual harassment" against Walcott.

Padel was then elected to the position only to resign ten days later after admitting that she emailed two reporters the previous month alerting them of allegations of Walcott's misconduct, one an incident that took place at Harvard almost 30 years ago, the other involving a Boston Unversity student in the early 1990s.

Padel claims she was only passing on concerns voiced to her by women students. An extract of one email, to a "gossip diarist" at the London Evening Standard (Jerome Taylor, Ruth Padel: 'I've gone but I've done nothing wrong', The Independent, 27 May 2009), is so filled with typos as to lead your oft humbled scribe to recall a time or several when, somewhat in his cups, as it were, he fired off an email he would like to have pulled back, and wonder if something of that sort might have happened with Padel.

Further details and commentary on the affair can found in the following articles, which are but a few among many:

Allison Floor, Paper reveals Ruth Padel's 'smear' email, The Guardian, 27 May 2009

David Orr, Poets, Academia: A Couplet in Conflict, NY Times, 30 May 2009

John F. Burns, Poetic Justice: Briton Says She Helped Taint Rival, NY Times, 25 May 2009

Chuck Oliveros, Pity the Poets, Hawking Up Hairballs, 26 May 2009

My friend Chuck Oliveros sees this sorry episode as

yet further evidence, if it is needed, that poetry is now so beside the point that poets are scrambling for crumbs at the academic table. If it were still a truly vital art form, poets wouldn't be resorting to this sort of chicanery and they wouldn't be seeking refuge in academia. They'd be making their livings from the sales of their books and the proceeds from their readings, but poetry as an art form has been in decline for a long time. Back in the 1960's, when I was of college age, the sensitive souls among my contemporaries often looked to poets when seeking meaning and consolation. That doesn't seem to be the case today.

Crumbs at the academic table is an apt description, notwithstanding that the chair is largely an honorary position that carries with it only a relatively small stipend:

Chairs at Oxford and Cambridge rank their holders at the top of the academic hierarchy, and Ms. Padel’s predecessors have included literary giants like W. H. Auden and Robert Graves.

But the chair draws a salary of barely $11,000 a year and requires nothing more of the holder than three public lectures a year. (Burns)

Honors of this sort may open the door to other opportunities or lead to more prominent reviews of one's books, increased sales, invitations to appear on National Public Radio during National Poetry Month, and so on, but nothing likely to generate considerable income.

Beyond that, I am sympathetic to Chuck's view and consider his conclusions arguable, but I do not quite buy them. When have American poets ever made their livings from the sales of their books and proceeds from their readings? Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski come to mind, but who else? For that matter, how many fiction writers make a living from book sales? A few megastars who pen blockbusters and sell the movie rights to Hollywood make out like Russian mafiosi, but they are rare exceptions. For the rest, writers of poetry and fiction alike, there is the MFA-writing workshop racket for those who can worm their way into it; the post office, à la Bukowski up until he was about fifty, or whatever other wage work one can find; landlord of a brothel, which Faulkner said was the best job ever offered him; sponge off and steal from friends (Gregory Corso) and relatives; unless of course one has the foresight to be born into or marry wealth.

As for the matter of poetry as a vital art form, how would we measure that? Would it be by comparing the important poets of the day with their predecessors and asking if they measure up? Who would those poets be anyway? Billy Collins? Robert Pinsky? Jorie Graham? John Ashbery? Recent poet laureates Louise Glück,Ted Kooser, Donald Hall, Charles Simic? Stars of the poetry slam circuit, of which I acknowledge ignorance? What American poet writing in the first decade of the 21st century approaches the stature of counterparts in the first half of the 20th century, Eliot and Pound, Frost, Moore, Bishop, Williams?

Are these even the right questions? Ought we rather to be asking if there are poets writing today who offer the sublime and often difficult pleasures to be found in the best poetry? Is it only the best poetry that matters? Ginsberg and Bukowksi do not rate with Whitman and Dickinson, far from it; however, it seems to me clear that their writing mattered to readers of my generation when we were young and continues to speak to discerning readers of diverse ages and backgrounds.

I do not pretend to definitive answers to any of these questions. Instead I offer a few observations, admittedly anecdotal in nature, so from which we should not be too ready generalize. Since coming to Portland in 1998, I have been an irregular participant in the city's thriving poetry-reading scene. Almost from the beginning I was struck by a characteristic feature of open mics that runs a bit against stereotype, that many attend not just for their moments on stage but to listen attentively to other readers, and it is not rare for that moment on stage to be used not to read their own poems but to read John Keats, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, and other poets firmly ensconced in the canon.

Portland is not a typical American city, but I doubt that it is unique in this respect. In addition, there is so much poetry around on the Internet and published by small and university presses that even a diligent reader can hope to do little more than sample here and there. The quality varies widely. Much of it is no great shakes, as has always been the case, but more than one might anticipate is perceptive, clever, inventive, humorous, insightful. I take these things as evidence that reports of poetry's irrelevance, if not outright demise, which have been with us for some time, remain premature.

Poetry does not change the world. Poets are not legislators, unacknowledged as Shelley would have it or otherwise. What poetry does is touch and matter to individuals in countless small ways, and on occasion in ways that are not so small. Those who look to poetry for meaning and consolation may find it there, but they are apt to come up empty too, the same as those who seek these things in religion or philosophy. The best poetry holds out for us pleasure, wonder, a sense of the sublime more likely to be unsettling than consolatory, and when we are fortunate kinship with a poet who shares our ongoing questioning, perhaps articulating it better than we have and in ways that shed new light on our wondering, prompting an ever deepening questioning but never providing a final resolution.

One last note from Burns on the Oxford affair:

When Mr. Walcott quit the race, commentators in British newspapers noted the irony of hounding a distinguished literary figure on the basis of long-ago sexual transgressions when many of Britain’s greatest poets were social or political reprobates by the standards of modern-day Britain.

Michael Deacon in The Telegraph cited Lord Byron (“womanizer”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“drug fiend”), John Keats (“smackhead”), Rudyard Kipling (“imperialist”), T. S. Eliot (“lines that could be construed as racist”) and Dylan Thomas (“drank like a drain, begged and stole from friends”), among others, and concluded, “Not one of them, were they alive today, could hope to land the Oxford post — they just don’t meet the exacting moral standards set by people who conduct smear campaigns.”

Fellini Remembers

2009-06-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

The best novels and poems reward each reading, the best films each viewing. Federico Fellini's Amarcord (click here for poster) is one of those films, a banquet where we feast each time the theater lights go down and the screen lights up and puffballs blowing through the air of a little Italian town on the coast augur the end of winter and the coming of spring.

Made in 1973 when the director was fifty-three, Amarcord draws on Fellini's youth in Rimini, a town on the Adriatic Sea. Fellini uses music to masterful effect to create a canivalesque framework filled in by the escapades of exaggerated and fanciful characters, at once realistic and slapstick, a glorious concoction of ribald humor, adolescent pranks, sexual fantasy, and somehow not at all out of place in this mix, genuine pathos, all played out against the dark backdrop of Mussolini and Fascism in 1930's Italy.

The camera follows the town and its characters through the cycle of a year, closing as it opens with puffballs, the end of winter, the coming of spring. The Biondi family are the central characters, though I hesitate to use the term, for the film is about life itself, humanity, the human, in all its many idiosyncratic, wacky, individual manifestations. Character and family dynamics are laid out in classic fashion at the dinner table, where Aurelio the father, a house builder and man of the left who flies into fury at the drop of a hat, is outraged because he has to pay for a man's hat ruined when son Titta pissed onto it from the balcony of the movie theater the night before. Meanwhile, Aurelio's dandyish, freeloading, Fascist brother-in-law wolfs down more than his share of soup while Aurelio's father enthusiastically tells his grandsons of his father's father who was called Big Meat and lived to be 107 and was doing it till he died, the old man smiling and making a pumping motion with his arm and a whistling sound through his teeth. Aurelio berates Titta and chews on the brim of the ruined hat in frustration, until mother Miranda is driven to scream above the bedlam, "I'll kill you all, I'll put strychnine in your soup," brandishing the soup pot, "but first I'll kill myself."

Once a month the Biondis pick mad Uncle Teo up at the Catholic-run institution where he is cared for and take a carriage ride to a farmhouse in the country for a picnic. Soon Uncle Teo is at the top of a tree screaming, "I want a woman! I want a woman!" Teo's coat pockets are filled with stones, which he hurls at anyone who tries to climb the tree to bring him down. Finally the carriage driver is sent back to the institution to fetch a doctor, an attendant, and the dwarf nun who climbs a ladder partway up the tree and demands that Teo come down, she does not have all day to mess around with him. Teo comes down, and the doctor explains to Aurelio that some days Teo is okay, and some days not, just like the rest of us.

The dazzling parade of characters ranges from Gradisca, the glamorous town beauty waiting for her Gary Cooper to the motorcyclist who careens through the streets at odd intervals; the amply bosomed tobacconist who after a fashion has her way with young Titta when he ventures into the shop at closing time; the much abused fellow who pops up from time to time as a kind of tour guide relating the town's history with anecdotes about the architecture, the grand hotel, and the local populace, e.g., the probably amorous adventures of Biscein the peddler with twenty-eight of a visiting emir's thirty concubines; Volpina the prostitute; the brutally lampooned Fascists; the equally brutally lampooned schoolteachers; Titta and his friends in an old jalopy masturbating to fantasies of Jean Harlow and Gradisca, causing the car to rock up and down while the lights flash on and off.

Juxtaposed against the burlesque are moments of transcendent beauty, as when townspeople clamber into boats and row and motor out into the ocean to see close up the dazzling luxury liner passing by, and when the count's peacock lights down on the fountain in the piazza and spreads its brilliant feathers wide in the snow. Luxury liner and peacock alike are looked on with awe and amazement, with an element of complexity part of the former, for this astounding boat is a symbol of Italy's recapture of past glory, which is the heart of Fascism's promise and appeal.

So is it true? Did such people exist and do such things in the Rimini of Fellini's boyhood? I remember a discussion of The Brothers Karamazov in a college classroom where Mr. Mandell the professor exclaimed, "But is this realistic? They scream at one another!" Does it matter?

Our dreams are our real life. My fantasies and obsessions are not only my reality, but the stuff of which my films are made.
. . .
Anyone who lives, as I do, in a world of imagination must make an enormous and unnatural effort to be factual in the ordinary sense. I confess I would be a terrible witness in court because of this—and a terrible journalist. I feel compelled to tell a story the way I see it and this is seldom the way it happened, in all its documentary detail.
— Fellini

The truth of a Fellini and a Dostoevsky lies not in the documentary detail of so-called real life but in expression of grandiose dreams and heartfelt longing, passion and madness, the melancholy of fading beauty and unrequited love, the sureness of mortality, the momentary beauty of that peacock in the snow, presented in a way that amuses and delights and, sometimes, confounds and saddens us, so that fantastic as it is, we leave the theater or close the book thinking, yes, that is something of what life is.

Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine: Twenty-seven

2009-05-31T15:04:00.000-07:00

Cullen was on the landline with her contact at the agency, Kirby on his cell with shadowy subordinates, call them Frick and Frack, who were surveiling the fringe group holding Burford. Stone took a quick shower and came out wearing a black turtleneck, khakis, fresh Asics.

Livia was at her desk, swilling coffee and grimacing as she graded papers, muttering about pathetic fallacies, dangling participles, quasi-literates who use "I" when the objective case of the first-person pronoun is called for.

The headline proclaiming the arrest of a local scientist screamed out at Charlotte when she picked up the paper after pouring another cup of coffee. There was a photo purported to be J. Fred Keck, hunched over with a plaid sport jacket pulled up over his head to hide his face. A quick skim of the first few paragraphs revealed that J. Fred was involved in organs for transplant on the black market. Stone stepped up and read over Charlotte's shoulder. "Aha," he said.

"Aha, indeed."

"That's the guy you were working for?"

She nodded. A dark thought reared its head. "Think I'll get subpoenaed?"

Stone poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. "I wouldn't be surprised. You know anything you can tell me about without your attorney present?" Speaking of whom, what the heck was up with Binky Balkrite? Where was that guy?

Charlotte shook her head. "I figured J. Fred was kinked some way or other. Probably multiple ways. It's not like I'm surprised, but no, I don't know anything. I was just the temp. What I'm kind of wondering, did anybody else know? Or was J. Fred a lone wolf?"

"May I?" Stone took the paper and flipped to page five where the story continued. He pursed his lips and made a clicking sound and shook his head. "Hard to see this as a one-man operation. That doesn't mean everybody knew, or even most people. But he probably wasn't going it alone."

"You know this sleazeball?" Kirby read the paper over Stone's shoulder..

Stone said softly, without looking up, "I gather you have an interest."

"Let's just say the bastard's on our radar."

"And I'm betting it would take more than dealing in illicit organs for a guy like him to rate."

Charlotte looked at Kirby, then at Stone, then back at Kirby. They were two poker-faced sons of bitches. She gave them that.

Kirby's cell went off before he could answer. Stone figured he probably wouldn't have answered anyway, or if he did you could believe about half of what he said and it wouldn't much matter which half. Kirby stepped out to the porch to take the call in private.

"Livia, who's that on the damn porch? Who are you?" The second question was addressed to Stone. "Charlotte, who are these people? What's going on?" Percy Deuce looked like he had slept in his car for about three days, unshaven, hair sprung every which way, shirttail out, sport jacket hung by his right thumb and slung over his shoulder.

"You must be the movie guy," said Stone.

"And you would be?"

"That would be Stone the fed. One on the porch would be Kirby the other fed. Cullen's the fed on her cell over by the window. Of the three, Kirby's the asshole." Arms akimbo, Livia confronted Percy eyeball to eyeball. "Where have you been? You don't call. You don't shoot me an email. The only clue I have you're alive is when I check the Visa online and see what kind of bills you're running up. At least I hope it's you running up the damn bills. You're lucky I didn't cancel the card. You do realize that of the two of us, you're not the one generating income."

"But chère."

"Who's the doofus?" said Kirby.

"Movie guy," said Stone.

What may have been a smile flashed across Kirby's face and was gone. "Movie guy, we've got some talking to do."

"Talking about what?"

"You seen Lucas Black Barry around?"

"What's that twit got to do with anything?" Cullen demanded, leaving it open to surmise whether the twit to whom she referred was Percy Deuce or Lucas Black Barry. "We're on Burford, remember."

"We have reason to believe Buttons Barry and Two Fingers Rivera are in this up over their pin heads."

Cullen made a look like she just got hold of some bad sushi. "Christ."

Stone discreetly pulled Charlotte aside and suggested she might want to give Balkrite a call.

previous episodes

Charlotte Reine: One
Charlotte Reine: Two
Charlotte Reine: Three
Charlotte Reine: Four
Charlotte Reine: Five
Charlotte Reine: Six
Charlotte Reine: Seven
Charlotte Reine: Eight
Charlotte Reine: Nine
Charlotte Reine: Ten
Charlotte Reine: Eleven
Charlotte Reine: Twelve
Charlotte Reine: Thirteen
Charlotte Reine: Fourteen
Charlotte Reine: Fifteen
Charlotte Reine: Sixteen
Charlotte Reine: Seventeen
Charlotte Reine: Eighteen
Charlotte Reine: Nineteen
Charlotte Reine: Twenty
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-one
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-two
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-three
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-four
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-five
Charlotte: Twenty-six

mini memo

2009-05-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

I would like to thank W in PDX and Barbara in Atlanta for their perceptive comments in response to The Good Writer, which appeared in this space two weeks ago. Their remarks are worth reading if you have not yet caught them.

the pulse of the times

Posed to race-car driver Danica Patrick in a recent interview in Sports Illustrated (June 1, 2009; Vol. 110; No. 22): "If you could take a performance-enhancing drug and not get caught, would you do it if it allowed you to win Indy?"

Patrick: "Well, then it's not cheating, is it? If nobody finds out?

Interviewer: "So you would do it?"

Patrick: "Yeah, it would be like finding a gray area. In motorsports we work in the gray areas a lot. You're trying to find where the holes are in the rule book."

The interviewer then moved on to another subject as if Patrick's morally bankrupt response were perfectly acceptable.

Matthews Bros Do Western Oregon

2009-05-28T06:51:00.000-07:00

Today's entry is geared to family and friends, although I will of course be delighted if others enjoy it.

Trani's plane touched down about 10 p.m. Friday night. We picked up a rental car and drove home to sip a cold adult beverage or several and visit a bit, not having seen one another since I was in Tulsa for Christmas 2007.

We kicked off the Memorial Day weekend with a Saturday morning run from my apartment on SE Washington at 36th down to Hawthorne, up the Eastbank Esplanade to the Steel Bridge, past the Rose Garden and east to 28th Avenue before wending our way back home to conclude with a loop through Laurelhurst Park.

The remainder of the day took us to breakfast at Utopia Cafe on Belmont and a brief tour of Hawthorne Boulevard with the obligatory visit to Powell's in the morning, then an afternoon trek via bus and MAX to the zoo for a hike down to the Japanese Garden and the Rose Gardens, over to fashionable, trendy NW 23rd Avenue, down Glisan with a stop at World Cup Coffee on 18th for the afternoon latte followed by a bit of the Pearl District and Powell's downtown.

Jamison Park was a pleasant place to pause and take in the kids and dogs frolicking in the fountain before we rendezvoused with Sylvia for a glass of wine and to meet Pete and the girls, Williston and Sadie, then on to a fine dinner at Besaw's, one of my favorite Portland dining establishments. A good day.

Sunday we made straight for the Tillamook Creamery to indulge in some ice cream, cone for Big T, milk shake for me, then Highway 101 up the coast, stopping at Oswald West State Park to hike down to Short Sands Beach and take in the kids, dogs, and surfers frolicking in the Pacific, and on to scenic Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River in the northwest corner of Oregon, where we happened on the Astoria Sunday Market downtown. An engaging barista in a coffee joint called the Rusty Cup served up the afternoon latte. As we strolled through the market, we came on a couple manning an NRA booth and considered taking a photo for T-Bone. In the end we thought better of it, discretion being the better part of valor and all, fearing they might take us for feds if we started snapping away.

Middle of the afternoon, yes, that early, for all the ground we covered that day, found us tootling along Highway 30 following the Columbia River back to Portland and dinner at the Blue Monk, compliments of the $50 gift certificate Big T gave me for Christmas. When I picked it up back in January, Kendra the bartender suggested I use it to treat some young woman to dinner. It was a fine suggestion, but this is your oft humbled scribe we're talking about. Come Memorial Day weekend the gift certificate remained intact. What better use for it than another pleasant dinner to close out another excellent day?

We did the Mt. Tabor run Monday morning and enjoyed the scenic view from the top of Hawthorne running down to the river and downtown Portland in the background and the West Hills rising up behind it. Then it was on to Multnomah Falls to give Trani a taste of the Columbia River Gorge. The falls was zoo-ish on the holiday weekend but well worth battle with the teeming hordes.

After hiking to the top of the falls, which turned out to be a bit anticlimactic, we reversed track and tore back through Portland and southwest down the Willamette Valley to the Dundee Hills in the Oregon wine country, where we hit a couple of small wineries and did a little tasting at Torii Mor and Lange Estate Winery and Vineyards. The day closed with dinner at Arabian Breeze, a Lebanese restaurant on Broadway between 32nd and 33rd and a glass of wine on the deck back home. It does not get much better.

Click here for a wee taste of the weekend in photos.

* * * * *

Memorial Day weekend marks the anniversary of Memo, which debuted 30 May 2005 with On Bashing Intellectuals. In the words of the late Townes Van Zandt, time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like bananas. Years ago Big T and I caught Townes in performance at a little Atlanta bar called Aunt Charley's, and we listened to a little Townes over the weekend, from the album Live and Obscure.

Oh Loretta she’s a barroom girl
Wears them sevens on her sleeve
Dances like a diamond shines
Tell me lies I love to believe
Her age is always 22
Her laughing eyes a hazel hue
Spends my money like water falls
Loves me like I want her to

Ciao.

The Good Writer

2009-05-16T16:40:00.000-07:00

This piece is presented not as finished but more rough draft and, your oft humbled scribe hopes, food for some thoughts.

Interviewer: How does a writer become a serious novelist?
WF: Ninety-nine percent talent...ninety-nine percent discipline...ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It is never as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
Interviewer: Do you mean the writer should be completely ruthless?
WF: The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

Charles Bukowski came to mind when I read this bit of tough guy claptrap, which it turns out is not from Bukowski at all, but William Faulkner, in an interview that appeared in Paris Review in 1956.

I do not know Faulkner well enough to have a clue whether he is altogether serious here, deliberately provocative, or perhaps even pulling the interviewer's leg a bit. He does say at the beginning that he does not like interviews because "I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different."

An artist "is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done."

"If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the '"Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."

This is not sufficeintly profound to be even all that provocative. Surely we can accept that the good writer cleaves to the vision and is fanatically committed to it, and conversely, fanatically in its grasp, without buying into these Raskolnikovian precepts. Which is not to suggest that it is not amiss to consider how does the character of an artist figure into our aesthetic judgment of the work.

If we agree with Faulkner that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies, what about Harry Potter? Kiss Me Deadly? The 120 Days of Sodom? Who decides? The writer? The critic? The twittering mob?

I read the first Harry Potter novel and found nothing there to lead me to pursue the series further; however, I know people whose intelligence and judgment I hold in high regard who differ with my dismissal of Harry. I do not recall if I ever read Mickey Spillane, but I have devoured more mystery and science fiction than I care to consider, some of it of reasonable quality, much of it not. The best of that stuff was not worth even one old lady.

What if for the sake of argument we accept that Faulkner, or Flaubert or Tolstoy or Beckett, would have been justified in a Raskolnikovian act were it necessary to get Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or Waiting for Godot written? How about Philip K. Dick and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Or Elmore Leonard and Get Shorty?

The good writer is flawed as any human, some more flawed than others, and some seriously twisted. There is something troubling, or at least unsettling, about being deeply moved by the handiwork of individuals with whom we would not wish to have anything to do apart from their astounding creations, but as my old friend Judy from Brooklyn used to say, sometimes things just be that way. We might like to think that beauty and goodness, the sublime and the honorable, go hand in hand, but 'tis not so.

that stress test; the opium of the people; and, Malcolm Gladwell's "slinky intellectual lamé"

2009-05-10T09:42:00.000-07:00

memo from the editorial desk

Matthews missed the deadline for "The Good Writer," which remains in progress. In lieu of the essay, we offer this sample from articles and books your oft humbled scribe has found of interest of late.

Krugman on that stress test:

I won’t weigh in on the debate over the quality of the stress tests themselves,except to repeat what many observers have noted: the regulators didn’t have the resources to make a really careful assessment of the banks’ assets, and in any case they allowed the banks to bargain over what the results would say. A rigorous audit it wasn’t.But focusing on the process can distract from the larger picture. What we’re really seeing here is a decision on the part of President Obama and his officials to muddle through the financial crisis, hoping that the banks can earn their way back to health." — Paul Krugman, Stressing the Positive, NY Times, 7 May 2009

Friedrich Heer, Europe, Mother of Revolutions, an intellectual history of 19th century Europe:

Art is the opium of the people, although Marx said that it was religion. Everyone, but particularly those members of the lower classes whose life is mere drudgery, need art for their entertainment, to fill their daydreams. In the nineteenth century art became the successful rival of religion as an opium for the people and, as producer of Kitsch, emotional rubbish and sentimentality, its associate. There was a fundamental link between Kitsch, the 'sensitive' long short story and the deluge of 'devotional' trinkets and cheap religious literature that flooded the popular market in the nineteenth century.
* * * * *
"Misery leads the people into revolutions and revolutions lead the people back into misery." — Victor Hugo
* * * * *
"Let mankind last as long as it will, there will be no lack of obstacles to inspire its creativity or troubles of every sort to help develop its faculties. Men will become more intelligent and discerning, but neither better nor happier, nor more effectual; or if they do, simply for limited periods." — Goethe

Sue Halpern, Making It, The New York Review of Books, 28 May 2009:

[Malcolm Gladwell] is the clever master of the anecdote who owns the franchise on high-concept books with pithy titles— The Tipping Point, Blink, and now Outliers—that repurpose scraps of academic research into slinky intellectual lamé. These books have made him a fixture on the best-seller list and the envy of his peers—if he has any. In his own somewhat ill-defined terms, Gladwell is an outlier, a statistical anomaly, one who "is markedly different in value from the others of the sample" and doesn't "fit into our normal understanding of achievement." In addition to him, the Beatles, Robert Oppenheimer, and Asian math students, for instance, all make the cut. Still, it is not clear, when talking about human endeavors, which variables or combination of variables needs to be outside the norm to achieve outlier status: If it's money in the bank, how much? If it's books sold, how many? It's as if success is a corollary of obscenity: you know it when you see it. And "seeing" may be the most crucial variable of all. Is it the quality of the literary work, for example, that makes someone an outlier—"men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary"—or is it the size of the advance? Consider the case of Susan Boyle, the unemployed, forty-seven-year-old spinster from Scotland who became a global sensation recently after her remarkable audition for the reality show Britain's Got Talent. Boyle's singing voice was no less extraordinary the day before she appeared on TV, yet until that happened, no one would have thought her anything but ordinary, including herself. When Gladwell says, in his subtitle, that Outliers is "The Story of Success," he assumes that recognition is a necessary, and maybe sufficient, condition.

Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine: Twenty-Six

2009-04-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

Sunlight burned morning fog away from the White Stag Made in Oregon sign and cherry blossoms in delicate bloom along the west bank of the Willamette as they loped down from Broadway to the pedestrian walkway along the lower level of the Steel Bridge. Well, Charlotte Reine loped. Stone was more of a pounder.

"Kind of takes your breath away, n'est-ce pas?"

"Vraiment," Stone agreed, thinking about what it make take to take her breath away. She ran effortlessly as they moved along at a pretty good clip. "A wonder. The run's worth it for this alone."

"The run is worth it for the run's sake alone."

"Ah, a purist."

"Surely that does not take you by surprise."

"Pas du tout."

They set out to do an easy five. Charlotte said it would be an easy five, at any rate, and Stone, while he did not doubt her veracity, took it that she spoke loosely. Across the river they headed south through Waterfront Park to the Hawthorne Bridge, where they picked up Livia Saturday on the back end of her longer run down Springwater Corridor to Sellwood.

"What?" Livia asked, mistaking Stone's bemused expression for a smirk.

"Just contemplating the pleasure of running on a beautiful day with two lovely young women who could both kick my ass without breaking a sweat."

"We like you too, Stone. Right, Livia?"

"Stone's okay." Livia glanced down at Stone's feet. "Those Mizunos you're running in?"

"Yeah. The Alchemy. I've been wearing this model for a couple of years now."

"I've run in that. Good shoe, but a little flat for me."

"What do you wear?"

"These are the Asics Gel-1130."

"You like 'em?"

"Yeah. Gives me a little better feel around my arch than the Mizuno."

"I've got a pair of Kayanos."

Livia smiled. "High end."

"For when I have delusions of running grandeur."

"We can take care of that," Livia said and easily pulled away. Stone figured Charlotte could have gone with her for a ways, but she hung back. Just being considerate, he supposed.

Back at Livia's house they found a grim Cullen waiting at the door. With her stood a lantern-jawed, stiff-necked fellow wearing a gray, Men's Warehouse suit, heavily starched dress shirt, and tightly knotted red-and-black striped necktie. His eyes passed quickly over Charlotte, her presence registering but of no interest. He addressed Stone. "So how was the run?"

"Morning, Kirby. It was a good run. Down along the waterfront. You in town for a while? Maybe you could lace 'em up with us tomorrow. Worth it just for those cherry blossoms in bloom."

"Let's hope I'm not here that long."

"Good, we're on the same page. So what's up?"

Cullen said, "They've got Burford."

"Crap. What do we know?"

Not much, as it turned out. Cullen was concerned when Burford did not check in the night before but sometimes it went that way. When morning came with still no word, she called a contact at the agency. "Nobody anybody in this room needs to know," she added quickly. The contact said he'd make some calls. Half an hour later Kirby was at the motel, rapping at her door.

"Quelle coincidence," said Stone. "Just happened to be in the neighborhood, huh?"

"Look, Stone, I'm on your side, believe it or not."

Livia, stretching out after the run, looked up from her downward dog pose. "You boys want to stop bickering and cut to the damn chase?"

Stone acknowledged Livia's contribution with a nod. "Who's got Burford?"

Kirby stared down at his polished loafers as if checking his reflection there to see that every hair was in place. "It's a fringe group."

"They're all damn fringe groups," Stone broke in. "Who's behind them? Iran? Syria? Hamas? Hezbollah? Al-Qaida?"

"Uh, you're not going to like this. Certain, ah, indicators, which I am of course not at liberty to disclose, point to Israel."

"Why am I not surprised?" Stone accepted the Gatorade Charlotte handed him and took a hearty swig. "Israel. Good grief."

"Well, not Israel per se. Not the government, strictly speaking. It's more hardliners we believe are in cahoots with rogue elements in this country."

"Rogue elements in this country." Stone shook his head. He pulled on a sweatshirt he got from the gym bag left on the couch when he and Charlotte headed out for their run and stepped over to stand in front of the fire.

"Batshit neocons," said Cullen, dismissing Kirby's cold stare. "Operating out of the vice president's office."

"Batshit neocons?" Livia spoke up again. "Isn't that redundant?"

Kirby rolled his eyes and muttered something about being spared the lectures of second-rate professors at third-rate colleges before adding, "They might be operating out of the vice president's office," an elucidation that brought Cullen's glare that spit daggers but was nothing next to what he got from Livia.

Under other circumstances Stone might have found it amusing to observe how deep a hole that smug careerist Kirby could dig for himself, but they had Burford. Whoever "they" was. Somebody. Crap.

next episode

Charlotte Reine: Twenty-seven

previous episodes

Charlotte Reine: One
Charlotte Reine: Two
Charlotte Reine: Three
Charlotte Reine: Four
Charlotte Reine: Five
Charlotte Reine: Six
Charlotte Reine: Seven
Charlotte Reine: Eight
Charlotte Reine: Nine
Charlotte Reine: Ten
Charlotte Reine: Eleven
Charlotte Reine: Twelve
Charlotte Reine: Thirteen
Charlotte Reine: Fourteen
Charlotte Reine: Fifteen
Charlotte Reine: Sixteen
Charlotte Reine: Seventeen
Charlotte Reine: Eighteen
Charlotte Reine: Nineteen
Charlotte Reine: Twenty
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-one
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-two
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-three
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-four
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-five

to sit and be quiet for a little while

2009-04-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

Barbara in Atlanta, who sometimes comments on entries that appear in this space, referred me to the essay Soul Priority at Alias Bruce with this note: "just sending this because I think it's beautiful."

It is beautiful. Moreover, it speaks eloquently to themes that I touch on from time to time in this space. Here are the concluding paragraphs, by way of a taste:

We are a nation in search of some kind of equilibrium with the larger world. This will not come with proud ambition or strutted prowess or studied expertise. It will come only with an honest reckoning of what is right and how to act in accordance with how we ourselves would want to be treated. It's the kind of thing that comes only when you are not trying to prevail: when you have caught your trout and you are headed upstream toward home, having let go of any demand for more.

It's enough to make you want to sit and be quiet for a little while.

Check it out. I believe you will find yourself rewarded.

ah, socialism...; and, when a country loses its hippies...

2009-04-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

From Ralph Z. Hallow, Steele urged to label Obama a socialist, The Washington Times, 23 April 2009:

We don't see this president so much as a socialist as we see him as a collectivist. When you strip away this idea that the individual matters, for this concept of the collective – all of us pulling together and working towards some governmental goal – that's what I'm more concerned about. – Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, speaking to Fox News

Democrats are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism, and I will continue to criticize their dangerous policies in that regard – but I believe these proposed resolutions will accomplish little [sic — more?] than to give the media and our opponents the opportunities to mischaracterize Republicans. — Steele, in a memo to RNC members

In just a few months, the goal of the Obama administration has become clear and obvious – to restructure American society along socialist ideals. — Indiana RNC member James Bopp, Jr.

We must refocus the public's attention to the Democrat Party's stampede to socialism and we must make our socialist president's every legislative victory so costly that he will lose the war in 2010 and 2012. — Oregon RNC member Solomon Yue

Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte":

During the June [1848] days all classes and parties had united in the Party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had "saved" society from "the enemies of society." They had given out the watchwords of the old society, "property, family, religion, order," to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counter-revolutionary crusaders: "In this sign you will conquer!" From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which had gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interests it goes down before the cry: "Property, family, religion, order." Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most insipid democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an "attempt on society" and stigmatised as "socialism." [emphasis in last sentence mine]

I do not know that history repeats itself, as farce or anything else, but sometimes there is an echo.

* * * * *

What is so shocking about Israel is that these days it doesn't even have a protest movement. In the old days, there were peaceniks in the streets and long-haired students. Now they have almost no peace movement at all. What can you say? A country which loses its hippies is in deep trouble. — Palestinian playwright Salman Tamer, in David Hare, Wall: A Monologue, The New York Review of Books, 30 April 2009

what holds up

2009-04-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

These days I find myself to some degree paralyzed by the neurotic anxiety that each poem must be among the best that I can compose, when not every poem will be the best, and a poem rather less than the best may yet be of value. At first thought it seems self-evident that the critical sense that enable us to recognize a poem that does not measure up would be a valuable quality, which I think that it is, and to be valued and nourished, until it incapcitates. Maybe one must first just write and write and write. Return to it all later and employ the critical sense then to assess what measures up.

At the Rodin sculpture garden at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center in January (Rodin, the University, Ways of Life), Sue remarked that she found the vines growing along the wall on one side of the garden every bit as beautiful as those sculptures. She got no argument from me. I find no hierarchy of beauty here. The beauty found in nature is in no way diminished by our acknowledgment and appreciation of Rodin, nor Rodin diminished by comparison with what is found in nature, leaving for another time consideration of the implication that we humans and our creations are not every bit as much part of nature as ants and their anthills, bees and their hives, mountains and rivers and wisps of cloud in a starry sky.

There are plenty of poets, painters, and other artists and thinkers for whom nature is both subject and source. Wordsworth and Gary Snyder come at once to mind. Hazy Havey, a philosophy grad student I knew back in my undergraduate days, supplemented the modest stipend that came with his teaching assistantship by working as a yard man. He waxed eloquent about contemplating Meister Eckhart and being while down on his hands and knees digging around in the dark earth.

For me nature is a source but only one of many. I draw more heavily on film, paintings, and other poems. A poem that speaks to me births an urge to make a poem of my own, not in imitation of the other, though often when I look back on poems written even decades back I can have a pretty good notion of who I was reading at the time, but borne of my own vision and voice, with recognition that everything I have experienced, done, read, encountered, plays a part in cultivation of the vision and voice.

How long has it been since I waxed enthusiastic about a writer newly come to, as with Gregory Corso in 1971 and Emily Dickinson three decades later, as with Dostoevsky in 1971 and Thomas Pynchon in 1974 and Samuel Beckett in more recent years?

When in my twenties I devoured everything by Jack Kerouac I could get my hands on, at least half a dozen readings of On the Road, almost as many of Dharma Bums and Subterraneans, and more than once Desolation Angels, Big Sur, Vanity of Duluoz, Dr. Sax, and even the Wolfean first novel The Town and the City. Years later I returned to some of them, On the Road, Dharma Bums, Subterraneans, and found not much there. Certain themes still resonate, as in this passage from the beginning of On the Road:

...they [Dean Moriarty-Neal Cassady and Carlo Marx-Allen Ginsberg] danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?

I am not of a mind to make the hackneyed observation that this kind of thing is most apt to hold appeal when one comes to it in youth. At all ages and all times we share some thread, maybe no more than an iota, a scintilla, a smidgen, of humanity along with all else that goes into that individual each of us is, male, female; old, young, approaching advanced middle age; European, African, Asian; Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian, atheist; poet, machinist, socialist, hooligan in a Brooks Brothers suit; and so on. Biography, history, age, chance, the society and culture into which we are born, the world into which we are thrown, all play a part in individual sensibility, but that we hold in common, or put another way, that common which holds us, is always there too.

Is it possible to retain that sense of wonder and excitement that once gripped us when we move beyond an infatuation with the hip demimonde that drew Kerouac to it, where grad school dropouts and aspiring artists mingle with petty hoodlums, borderline psychotics, deadbeats, and con men who now seem more tedious than intriguing? After all, it is not as if I have put aside everything that spoke to me when I was twenty or twenty-five or forty. I regularly return to Dostoevsky and am rewarded for it, acknowledge the achievement of Pynchon, find that the films of Bergman and Fellini have lost nothing. Bob Dylan's astounding mid sixties albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde and Blonde are undimmed by time. Not long ago, for the first time in quite a while, I listened to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, where songs like "Blowin' in the Wind," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" hold up right nicely.

We like to think that we grow and mature as the passing years give us a greater breadth and depth of experience and thought on which to draw. Maybe sometimes we do. Whether we remain open and enthusiastic for new ideas and perceptions or close in on ourselves with the conviction that we have come to grasp how things are is the real key.

Perhaps we do best when we remain grateful for what holds up, and as for what has not, we recall that it once meant something to us, and may yet again if we remain open to new encounters with the old along with the new discoveries we trust to renew us along the way.

some bad attitude; Brooks out of his depth, again; and, other musings

2009-04-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

My knee has some bad attitude. Last weekend when Portland temperatures soared into the 70s, I was tempted to road test it even if I had to drag the bad leg behind me. Uncommon good sense won out as I rehabilitated the miscreant with rest, ice, and exercises for the quads, all quite tedious but necessary.

Meantime, Big T was in Charleston, South Carolina, hanging out at the majestic compound of his childhood pal the Admiral and cranking out a sizzling 39:22 10k (chip time 39:18) in the 2009 Cooper River Bridge Run to finish 203 out of 31,489, not too shabby for a young fella.

Meantime encore, back in real life, things are not as I want them to be, and not just the knee. They will change or not.

The only poems I might compose at this time would be wholly negative. Any suggestion of hope or possibility would be in bad faith. I am not of a mind to write such poems. Perhaps the poems will return when hope and possibility return — aha, a glimmer of hope not yet pounded out of me!

When I began the current round of wage-work in January 2008, I took to rising at 5:30 to have thirty minutes or so at my desk each morning before heading in to the office. I pushed myself hard, maybe too hard, to utilize precious free moments for the writing projects and study, student for the duration that I am. In the darkness of winter it all fell apart as the wage-work took a turn that perhaps I could have anticipated but did not.

Of late I have taken to rising at 5:00–5:15, of my own accord, the alarm still set at 6:00. Shower, sit on the cushion, breakfast of bran muffin, grapefruit, and coffee while reading Sunday NY Times or New York Review of Books and icing the knee.

Then to my desk. The writing is like my reading these days. Scattershot. There is so much I wish to do. Make poems, pursue the Charlotte Reine fiction, compose essays of substance on a variety of topics. Study French, return to Hegel, Heidegger, Plato, Aristotle, thinkers who once meant something to me or from whom I never really got much beyond a sense there was something I did not get, finish the Conor Cruise O'Brien on Edmund Burke, the abridged version — I do not pretend to sufficient ambition to take up The Great Melody in its entirety. All that fiction, literature and poetry, to read and reread.

Soon I will put Rushdie's Midnight's Children to rest. A fine novel of modern India narrated by a man born at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, the moment of India's independence, in telepathic contact with other children born at that same moment all over the subcontinent, Midnight's Children is a virtuosic performance that enthralls the reader for hundreds of pages only to flag a bit, for this reader at any rate, as it runs on for more hundreds of pages. The extended hallucinatory-dream sequence where the narrator and his youthful army companions are lost in the jungle during the India-Pakistan war of 1971, lost me. That sort of thing is not much to my taste these days.

I must find a way to devote more of myself to what is important and less to mere survival.

memo from the editorial desk

Matthews thinks he will attract readers with this journal drivel? This is supposed to be interesting? To whom? His headshrinker? The depths to which the blogosphere enables one to sink for all the world to see, if of a mind to, are as mindboggling as they are lamentable.

One supposes he thinks he goes on in the spirit of Beckett. Oh, he goes on, all right.

Beckett; a swipe at Eliot; Brooks and the end of philosophy; and, back to my desk

Joseph O'Neill, writing in the NY Times, deems the recent publication of the first volume of Samuel Beckett's letters "an elating cultural moment,"

...also a slightly surprising moment. Beckett, in his published output and authorial persona, was rigorously spare and self-effacing. Who knew that in his private writing he would be so humanly forthcoming? We always knew he was brilliant — but this brilliant? Just as the otherworldliness of tennis pros is most starkly revealed in their casual warm-up drills, so these letters, in which intellectual and linguistic winners are struck at will, offer a humbling, thrilling revelation of the difference between Beckett’s game and the one played by the rest of us. (Beckett played tennis, incidentally.)

Weighing in at 782 pages and going for $50, this is not a volume I must rush to purchase, nor read at any but a leisurely pace; yet I know I will pick it up, more likely sooner than later. For the nonce I take pleasure in O'Neill's note that Beckett, "exuberantly ill disposed to established writers," writes that T.S. Eliot is a "nice man" but a “bad poet,” and his book on Dante is “insufferably condescending.” I do not know about a "nice man" and would not go so far as to call Eliot a bad poet, but I think it fair to extend the description condescending to Eliot as literary and cultural critic.

David Brooks stepped out of his depth in a recent column titled The End of Philosophy, where end refers not to teleology but to the assertion that philosophy is over, you can stick fork in it, it's done. To give Brooks the benefit of the doubt, we should note that the phrase "end of philosophy" does not appear in the column. That may be no more than a snappy title the brainchild of some editor better suited to the marketing department.

As he often does, Brooks touches here and there on issues and themes that cry out for deeper examination, but he settles for mention of them, token gestures toward balance that would not pass muster on a freshman-level paper back in the days before grade inflation. The thrust of the argument is that moral judgments are more a matter of intuition, instincts, or emotion than reason, the latter term employed in an antiquated sense of abstract or pure reason, perhaps with Kant in mind, and he ploughs ahead as if the likes of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Rorty, to name but a few, never lived or thought.

For those who are interested, John Althouse Cohen, David Brooks on moral reasoning vs. moral instincts, and Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, Philosophy: Not Dead Yet!, provide cogent analysis of the Brooks column. Writes Hilsoy:

I've been off reading John Rawls' undergraduate thesis, and so I only just realized that David Brooks has announced "The End Of Philosophy". (Parenthetical note: what is it with these conservatives and their desire to kill off the humanities? Fukuyama and the End of History, now Brooks ... can the Death of Inner Asian and Altaic Studies be far behind?) Brooks' column sounded pretty scary, and it got even scarier once I realized that he wasn't talking about philosophy in general, but about ethics in particular.

That's my field! I don't want it to die!

Luckily, the reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Back to the desk and mornings alone with the page, staring at the blankness of it, no poem, not a single memorable phrase graces it. Out the window? Rumor of spring, with a few plants in bloom, though many trees remain bare.

I recall a time in Vancouver, scribbling in the journal over breakfast at the Sylvia Hotel restaurant, looking out onto English Bay. The journal entries were mundane, prosaic stuff, writing just to be writing something and not nothing, in faith, or maybe desperate hope, that one day it will come again.

I was then and remain adamant that poetry is not mere therapy. To present poetry, and art more generally, in that light, as a nonprescription psychotropic drug, alternative or supplement to Prozac®, Zoloft®, and suchlike, devalues the enterprise, stripping it of meaning and worth. If that is all I am up to, might as well get a good piece of rope and find a treee with a sturdy limb and take care of things.

We hold hope for a lightness of spirit that comes from and leads to accomplishments of spirit, thirst for wisdom, contemplative thought, the examined life that may be a source of anguish but no other is worth living, a way at once the fertile ground and the flower that springs from it.

memo from the editorial desk

That's a little better.

where did it go?

2009-03-30T20:13:00.001-07:00

memo from the editorial desk

The decision yesterday to post episode 26 of Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine has been reconsidered and the episode deleted for the nonce because it failed to measure up even to the modest standards of this space. Your oft humbled scribe hopes to do better in the future.

some great beast with ivory and fish breath

2009-03-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

Good grief. Sunday already. Out on the deck the peacocks are screeching with lust. T-Bone is making noise about heading north for a walrus hunt. Just him and the pack ice and some great beast with ivory and fish breath.

And I've got nothing. Nothing. Somebody's caught all my perches and dried up the pond. My pen lies cold and useless on the desk. The muse has gone south on me.

Which leaves me to fall back on current events. Good grief, indeed.

Any but the most hardened cynic might confess surprise at the depths of shamelessness the lords of Wall Street routinely plumb and the heights of demogoguery the people's representatives scale in response. Even by the low standards of public discourse to which we have become accustomed, last week was a doozy.

I do not believe that everyone who works at AIG or elsewhere in the financial and investment sectors is a scoundrel or a hooligan in Brooks Brothers suit, but there is something gone wrong when people are incapable of recognizing that the accumulation of wealth, even if arguably honestly got and earned, at some point becomes obscene. The old saw that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely holds for wealth as well, and of the course the two go hand in glove anyway.

Charles Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowa, cut to the heart of the matter:

"It would make me feel a lot better if our corporate structure would adopt that culture from Japan for the reason that I have not heard anybody apologize for running the corporation ... into the ground, and AIG's just one example of it."

"From my standpoint, it's irresponsible for corporations to give bonuses at this time when they're sucking the tit of the taxpayer."

And finally, the almost infamous by now, "I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say 'I'm sorry,' and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide." That this one gets a lot of play reflects the same kind of thinking, or not thinking, that gives rise to criticism of Barack Obama for disparaging his bowling skills by means of a reference to Special Olympics. There is likely nothing I could say to anyone who believes Grassley is calling for people to actually commit suicide or who fails to recognize that Obama is poking fun only at himself, much as I poke fun at myself when I cite Samuel Johnson's observation that no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Pundit Tom Friedman wagers that President Obama could induce most of those AIGers and others to return their bonuses by exhorting them to do it for the good of the country. That under the exceptional circumstances of the day, with all that has gone down, the country and their companies in the toilet, the president might be called on to exhort the return of these unwarranted bonuses, the simple fact that the money was accepted in the first place, is sufficient to render Friedman's judgment suspect, were we not already disposed to cast a dubious eye on any proposition coming from this unabashed cheerleader for globalization and the Bush project to promote democracy in the Middle East by invading Iraq.

It seems to me on the whole a positive development that the people's representatives and the people themselves now direct their righteous anger and indignation at flesh-and-blood shysters who got filthy rich selling overpriced houses to people who could not afford them (a description I've borrowed from someone but cannot recall who, perhaps NY Times columnist Gail Collins) instead of those mythical welfare mothers driving Cadillacs that we recall from the Reagan era.

Any tax supported by almost half of the House Republicans should be suspect on those grounds alone. There exist legitimate avenues to address the issue of unwarranted bonuses and executive compensation more generally. The bill that came out of the House last week is not among them.

Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. ... The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community. — James Madison, Federalist Number 44, 1788.

As is often the case, I find that Pat Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis has observations of interest to offer:

Chris Wallace, the ringmaster for this circus [Fox Sunday News], went on and on and on today about his "concern" that because the Congress is taxing away the bonuses of failed but still rapacious AIG executives, private money will not be committed by other rapacious executives (some of whom are with AIG counterparties in the CDS racket) to a scheme in which they have a good chance of making a lot of money in a partnership with the government in which most of the money will be government money, i.e., buying the trash paper from the banks. Having been a "visitor" to the world of international business for ten years I find that amusing. Businessmen are about making money, and that is all. They are no more "concerned" for the fate or public humiliation of other businessmen than sharks are "concerned" over the blood of other sharks in the water. If there is a reasonable chance of personal profit, businessmen will swim toward the money. Is the bonus tax unconstitutional? Probably. The courts will settle that and the business sharks all know it.

a cheering light

2009-03-15T18:26:00.000-07:00

T-Bone is a machinist who works the night shift. He is also a man of fierce integrity and decency, a passionate outdoorsman, a talented writer, and a student of Chinese. I take hope when someone like T-Bone considers me a friend. Maybe I am doing something right after all.

Sometimes T-Bone will come by my place on the way home from work to drop a piece of writing, a poem, an essay, a story, through the mail slot for me to read and provide whatever feedback I might have to offer. The day brightens when I come down the stairs in the morning and find sheaf of paper waiting there.

One morning last week, as I headed out for the office, I found a rectangular chunk of metal on the floor beneath the mail slot. I picked it up, wondering what the heck it was until I read the inscription. Then I noticed the folded piece of thin paper with Chinese characters at the top and the note that said, "David, Here is your dog tag. Happy hunting."

On one side of the piece of metal were these words:

David Matthews
Poet
Free Man

on the other, an image from a poem: "chained to the wings of the sky"; and on the bottom: "from his good old buddy."

I can think of nothing that could have made me happier at that moment, one of those moments of grace and beauty that, to borrow from Keats, "become a cheering light / Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast, / That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast / They alway must be with us, or we die."

sketch for an essay on education

2009-03-08T11:15:00.000-07:00

When John Milton returned to England after an absence of a year and three months, passed mostly in Paris and various cities in Italy, having hastened home on hearing of differences between the King and Parliament, he found employment as a schoolteacher, at which Samuel Johnson, a royalist by persuasion and so over on the other wing of the political bird from Milton, pounced on the opportunity to get in a dig:

Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens home, because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school. (Johnson, Life of Milton)

It seems that Milton proposed to teach "something more solid than the common literature of schools, by reading those authors that treat of physical subjects; such as the Georgick, and astronomical treatises of the ancients," note of which provided Johnson the occasion to lay out his own notions of what education should consist:

...the knowledge of external nature, and of the sciences, which that knowledge requires or includes, is not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues, and excellencies, of all times, and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure. Physical knowledge is of such rare emergence, that one man may know another half his life without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostaticks or astronomy; but his moral and prudential character immediately appears.

Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians.

Let me not be censured for this digression as pedantick or paradoxical; for if I have Milton against me, I have Socrates on my side. It was his labour to turn philosophy from the study of nature to speculations upon life, but the innovators whom I oppose are turning off attention from life to nature. They seem to think, that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of stars. Socrates was rather of opinion, that what we had to learn was, how to do good, and avoid evil.

That the business of education should have to do above all with learning how to do good and avoid evil seems downright quaint when so much talk about education focuses on career training to provide skills workers need to survive, much less triumph, in the global marketplace, and it should be not be forgot, the skilled workforce the wealthy among us need to profit from their enterprises.

I do not wish to give short shrift to study of nature, math, science, and technology, of which Americans generally, myself not least, are woefully ignorant, and not just the facts, the latest of the wildly proliferating theories and discoveries in neuroscience, physics, biochemistry, and so many other fields of inquiry, with which none but the specialist could hope to keep up, but a deep ignorance of basic principles that constitute scientific method and what it is to be scientific.

It would be wonderful to know today half, a quarter, of the science and math I knew at seventeen, fascinating worlds of which even after much study I would have only faintest glimmer of understanding. What has not been forgotten is the pleasure that comes with study and learning.

"I am a man. I believe that nothing human is foreign to me." — Terence

What is more human than the endless fascination with the world and ourselves? Who are we? What is out there? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What do we do with ourselves while we are here? These are questions that defy definitive answer, whether from science or through study of the best which has been thought and said, to borrow Matthew Arnold's formulation. Yet they lie at the heart of what it is to be human.

As a practical matter we must learn the skills we need to survive in a world into which we are thrown, a world not of our making or choosing. We miss out, however, as individuals and as a society and a culture, when education is reduced to career training, even when that training is in higher realms of science and mathematics, at the expense of the best which has been thought and said, always allowing that just what constitutes the best which has been thought and said is subject to critique and the consensus as to its makeup evolves over time.

I am convinced that there is more to us than is to be found in the doctrine of homo economicus, the common wisdom of the day that the essence of being human is to be found in consuming and acquiring, business and commerce. Cultural and humanistic studies are where we learn, as best we ever can, how to do good and to avoid evil, even if that comes down at best to cultivating a sense that doing good and avoiding evil is always problematic, that even our best intentions are liable to yield undesired consequences.

From here we might move on to a consideration of just what it means to live a good life, a kind of life I believe must be about more than merely acquiring and consuming wealth and possessions and the fruitless chase after an illusory security.

notes for an essay yet to come together

2009-03-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

I am still all over the place on Barack Obama.

By way of example, Paul Krugman is convincing when he criticizes the stimulus package for not going far enough, when he argues that Obama and his economic team have yet to get their heads around the magnitude of the problem.

On the other appendage, Obama was elected president, not maximum supreme leader. He needed the votes of the Honorable Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe to get even a watered-down bill out of the Senate. The alternative was to play chicken with the Republicans, an approach there is no reason to think would have yielded a better outcome.

The problem is not just Wall Street and the bankers, hedge funds and derivatives, Washington and the politicians. We the people are part of the problem.

I think Obama is trying to turn the culture of the country when he speaks about things such as the need to face up to reality, to acknowledge the scope of the problems before us, to accept responsibility. I do not believe I am reading too much into his message when I find there the heretical notion that the measure of a good life is not how much money one makes and how many toys one owns. This is borne out in the temper and substance of his remarks on a variety of matters. How that will translate into policy remains to be seen, as does whether it will amount to anything more than whizzing into the wind. Nonetheless, he has opened a conversation worth having.

Republican bad faith is nowhere more evident than in the response to Obama's proposal to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest among us to expire. The expiration was part of the original package because even the Bush White House was unable to disguise the hole the tax cuts would blow in the budget a decade out. Those paragons of fiscal virtue went along with the expiration date knowing full well they would squeal like stuck pigs if a future administraion proposed allowing those tax cuts to expire on schedule. Budget Director Peter Orszag is spot on when he says

I think we have to come back to the basic question here. I just reject the theory that the only thing that drives economic performance is the marginal tax rate on wealthy Americans and the only way of being pro-market is to funnel billions and billions of dollars of subsidies to corporations.

That is the heart of this argument. And I think it's — I think we've already — we've seen what the effects are over the last eight years. (This Week with George Stephanopoulos, 1 March 2009)

My response to just about anything from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is to wonder if this is the best the Democrats can do. Tuesday night Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal made Pelosi and Reid look like the twin second coming of Solon of Athens. One would be hard-pressed to choose which was more woeful: the substance of Jindal's speech or the delivery. Frank Rich offers an perceptive note in today's column in The New York Times:

What such G.O.P. "stars" as Sanford [Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, which happens to be where I was born and raised] and Jindal have in common, besides their callous neo-Hoover ideology, are their phony efforts to portray themselves as populist heroes.... Listening to Jindal talk Tuesday night about his immigrant father's inability to pay for an obstetrician, you'd never guess that at the time his father was an engineer and his mother an L.S.U. doctoral candidate in nuclear physics. Sanford's first political ad in 2002 told of how growing up on his "family's farm" taught him about hard work and responsbility. That "farm," the Charlotte Observer reported, was a historic plantation appraised at $1.5 million in the early 1980s. From that hardscrabble background, he struggled on to an internship at Goldman Sachs.

The emergence of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geitner as the president's chief economic advisers is not reassuring. Is it a reach to suggest that Geitner could be the Robert McNamara of the economic crisis? I'll quote Frank Rich again:

Everyone testifies to Geitner's brilliance, but Jindal, a Rhodes scholar, was similarly hyped. Like the Louisiana governor, the Treasury secretary is a weak public speaker not because he lacks brains or vocal training but because his message doesn't fly.

memo from the editorial desk

My modest intent to produce one substantial essay a week founders on the shoals of my own inadequacy, as today's offering bears witness. The demands and responsibilities of the wage-work are with me constantly, eating away my spirit. I cannot banish them from my thoughts. I am unable to focus or concentrate. My projects are at a standstill. I cannot say what the future holds for the poems, the ficiton in progress, Memo, any of it. For the first time in my life, I feel old. Defeated. I return to the mantra from the close of The Unnameable: "I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." Another from Beckett I recently came on: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. "

More Dispatches from the Frontline: Film Festival 2009

2009-02-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

The 32nd annual Portland International Film Festival closed out yesterday, and with that came the bittersweet feeling I know so well from the Saturday morning runs. Gosh, that was fun, a real high mark, which means it's downhill from here on out.

My attendance at the festival was modest, as always, five films in the course of the sixteen-day run. The three I wrote about last week (Dispatches from the Frontline: Film Festival 2009) and yesterday's offering, Der Freund (The Friend), are nice little films, each a small triumph, enchanting in its own way. The fifth, Home of Dark Butterflies by the young Finnish director Dome Karukoski, is genuinely exceptional.

The film, Karukoski's second feature, is based on a highly regarded 1991 novel by Leena Lander. Fourteen-year-old Juhani Johansson (Niilo Syväoja) is haunted by the death of his infant brother eight years earlier, for which his father, brutal, cynical, manipulative, convinced his attractive wife is unfaithful, and his submissive, ineffectual mother, abused psychically and probably physically, let Juhani take the rap. Tactiturn, uncommunicative, unwilling to submit to authority, Juhani has passed through a series of foster homes before being sent to The Island, a home for troubled boys, where the story opens.

The boys are troubled and troublesome, abused, abandoned, cast off, typified by Salmi (Eero Milonoff), known as the machine for his physical strength and stamina as well as his masturbatory prowess, who killed the stepfather who beat and raped him, from which he still bears all the scars.

The superintendent, Olavi Harjula (Tommi Korpela), is at first shot much the stereotypical headmaster as drill sergeant who identifies caring for his charges with being tough in the name of discipline. What tenderness he is capable of showing comes out only after an oblique fashion. A boot-camp kind of bond is forged between Harjula and the boys and among the boys themselves. When social administration cuts off funding because the superintendant's methods are thought to be too strict, Harjula hatches a cockamamie scheme to raise funds by harvesting silkworms, which has never been done so far north, and the boys opt to remain on the island and try to make it work.

Harjula has two daughters, and of course the older must be Juhani's age and out of control. The boys surreptitiously watch her sunbathing on the rocks in a scene wonderfully reminiscent of the scene in Fellini's Amarcord where the parked car rocks up and down and the headlights flash on and off as those boys in Mussolini's Italy fantasize about Jean Harlow. Vanamo (Marjut Maristo) finds Juhani intriguing, in contrast to the others, "those wankers," as she refers to them derisively. Her attempts to engage the monosyllabic Juhani in conversation do not get far, though he is clearly attracted to her. Later, feeling betrayed by what he mistakenly believes to be her tryst with Salmi, Juhani treats Vanamo cruelly, leaving her wounded and confused, her own vulnerability exposed.

Harjula preaches to Juhani that he must free himself of his past, which he does only after he remembers through a series of nightmares and flashbacks what really happened on the night of his brother's death. Harjula does not save everyone. The silkworm scheme fails. There is a killing and two suicides. Does the superintendent save himself? Now there's a question.

The concluding scene has the ferry taking everyone but Harjula away from the island. Juhani tears up without reading it the letter written by his father, manipulative to the end, before the car accident, likely not an accident, that killed his parents, and throws the bits of the paper into the water. Vanamo steps up to the rail where he is standing. He says, "Hi." She says, "Hi." He says, "Sorry." A moment passes. Then she gives off that little smile, the kind of smile that makes you feel better than you did, a rare kind of smile to which I have long been susceptible. At that moment, Juhani is too.

memo from the editorial desk

More edits Monday evening post the original post on Sunday morning in the hope that we might create the impression this was written by someone with a modicum of intelligence and some sense of style, in other words, that the essay is worthy of its subject, for Home of Dark Butterflies really is a first-rate film

Dispatches from the Frontline: Film Festival 2009

2009-02-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

Short takes from the 32nd Portland International Film Festival

Revanche (Revenge)
dir. Götz Spielman

Alex (Johannes Krisch), an ex-con, robs a bank in a small village so he and his immigrant prostitute girlfriend, Tamara (Irina Potapenko), can escape the brothel where they work. It's not exactly armed robbery, the gun Alex waves about at the bank employees is unloaded, and Alex is not exactly the Itzhak Perlman of bank thieves, but it almost comes out okay as an anxious Tamara waits in the car with her hands clasped in prayer. A single, boneheaded move results in an encounter with a young policeman, Robert (Andreas Lust), that shatters the lives of both men.

Their paths cross again when Alex seeks refuge with his cranky grandfather, Hausner (Hannes Thanheiser), who lives on a farm in the country, where Robert and his wife, Susanne (Ursula Strauss), live an idyllic life in a house they built on a neighboring piece of land. Susanne befriends the elderly Hausner, driving him to church on Sunday, engaging him in conversation, coaxing him to play the accordion for her. Meantime, Alex contemplates revenge when he learns that Robert is the policeman from the robbery.

What begins as a crime film turns into a vivid emotional drama. Whatever flaws this film might have are redeemed by the closing scenes, when Robert tells Alex that if he ever met the bank robber, he would ask him what the woman was doing in the car, she was not driving, she played no part in the robbery, none of this mess would happened if she had not been in the car, and when Susanne comes to tell Alex they must stop seeing one another, only to discover he is the bank robber and the woman he loved is the woman Robert killed. She asks Alex not to ever tell Robert about the two of them, and Alex says no, he won't. Susanne walks to the door, opens it, pauses in the slit of the opened doorway, just for a moment. Alex almost turns to look at her. Either of them might say something more. Neither does. Cut to Alex gathering apples in the orchard. The screen darkens. Perfect.

Séraphine
un film de Martin Provost

On the eve of World War I, Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Takur), an art collector and dealer who was an early buyer of paintings by Picasso and Braque and the discover of Henri Rousseau, rents an apartment in Senlis, a small town north of Paris, where he is astounded by the paintings of his housekeeper, Séraphine Louis (Yolande Moreau), later known as Séraphine de Senlis, who taught herself to paint when instructed to do so by her guardian angel.

Provost never rushes a scene. We come to know Séraphine through the patient depiction of moments in her life, as when she scavenges for materials to mix her pigments, securing a vial of blood while working in a butcher shop and stealing into the church at night, kneeling before the Virgin, and pouring wax from the candles into her little container. She paints on wood, using her fingers instead of a brush, drinks her "energy wine," and in the tradition of Blake converses with angels and trees.

Taking whatever work she can find, housecleaning, laundry, the butcher shop, she carefully counts each coin she receives in payment, purchases whatever art supplies she can afford, and retreats to her little room to paint and sing through the night. When Uhde offers her money, she tells him what she needs is time.

The cumulative effect is searing.

Le Silence de Lorna
written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

The Coen bros. are not the only sibling duo streaking across the firmament of cinema these days. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have twice been awarded the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or (Rosetta, 1999, and The Child, 2005), and last year's Le Silence de Lorna took the Best Screenplay prize at the festival.

Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), a lowlife and small-time hoodlum, arranges for Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), a tough as nails young Albanian immigrant, to marry drug addict Claudy Moreau (Jérémie Renier) so she can gain Belgian citizenship. Fabio picks a drug addict for the scheme on the premise that he will soon overdose without arousing suspicion, either in the due course of addiction or with assistance, freeing Lorna to marry a Russian mobster who will pay a tidy sum to acquire legal status. Lorna will add her share of the take to the savings from her job at a dry cleaner and what her boyfriend, Sokol (Alban Ukaj), earns working dirty jobs all over Europe, and they will use the money to open a snack bar.

Claudy throws a monkey wrench into the works when he decides to kick his habit, the decision in part a consequence of Lorna's unintended influence, the introduction into his life of this single human connection, the single relationship with someone who is not a dealer or an addict. Lorna is tough but not hard-hearted. She goes along with the plan in beginning, when Claudy's death is more hypothetical, something that will happen at some vague future time, because she is determined not to go back to Albania. She is touched by his so earnest efforts to go straight and his sad dependence on her to help him. When the prospect of Claudy's death, murder if need be, becomes imminent because the Russian insists on holding to the wedding date agreed upon, Lorna hatches a scheme to save him.

This is a grim film. A single moment of light comes toward the end when Claudy buys a bicycle, thinking that riding around all day will give him something to do other than taking drugs. Lorna smiles and runs along beside him for a few strides as he takes off down the street, almost carefree, like the kid she really is.

It is not giving away too much to reveal that Lorna's scheme does not work. Claudy is not saved. The Russian calls off the marriage. Fabio and Sokol are not pleased. As in Revanche, nothing is sugarcoated. We do not know how it will turn out for Lorna. Her story remains open-ended, and in this I find once again the themes to which I am always drawn, hope and possibility.

These films grow richer as I carry them with me after leaving the theater. They call up recollection of the enchantment I knew when I first discovered film almost four decades ago as a student at University of South Carolina, all that Bergman and Fellini, Children of Paradise, Closely Watched Trains, Roshomon, Woman in the Dunes, Jules et Jim, Un Chien andalou. Those films and that enchantment are with me still.

memo from the editorial desk

Once again your oft humbled scribe composed in haste at the expense of wit. This piece has undergone slight revision since it was first posted in hope of remedying the most blatant of the earlier version's defects.

Rodin, the university, ways of life

2009-02-07T17:58:00.000-08:00

I escaped to San Francisco for a Friday-Monday weekend. Perhaps because I have not traveled much in recent years, perhaps because I am growing older and flakier, I found myself quite anxious in the days leading up to the trip. Were my arrangements for flight and hotel in order? Would I be hassled (as we used to say in the sixties, man) at the security checkpoint because I'd inadvertently packed some forbidden article in my carry-on bag? I wanted to check out the Rodin collection at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center, which I learned about only a week before my departure. Could I find my way? Sure, I printed the Caltrain schedule and Mapquest directions, and it appeared easy enough, but...silly stuff, and it is not as if I agonized over it, well, not a lot, just that it was on my mind.

So what happened? The anxiousness washed away the instant I closed the door behind me and set out for the airport on Friday morning. Some people dislike airports and prefer not to arrive for a flight an instant earlier than they must. For my part, I see no point diddling about the house just to delay getting to the airport. Perhaps in part because I flew only once before my late twenties, airports retain an air of the exotic. That is where the adventure begins.

When flying out of Portland, it is my custom to check in, check bags, breach the security perimeter, purchase a New York Times, and make for the Coffee People kiosk for coffee and a croissant. I settle in at a table looking out over the runway and read the paper, scribble in the journal, and when fortunate, as on Friday morning, enjoy the performance of classical music by a lovely young woman seated at a baby grand piano. An airport employee seated at a nearby table, clearly acquainted with the young pianist, gently chided her for wearing tennis shoes, saying, "They just don't look right with the baby grand." She laughed with him and said, "Yes, I know. I thought about that," and continued playing. After all, it's the music that matters.

* * * * *

Sue and I were to meet for dinner Saturday evening at a Burmese restaurant she liked, "not the one we went to last time," she said firmly during our exchange of email before I left Portland. She had been disappointed in that one. To my surprise, she wrote that she and Lexa might accompany me to Stanford to see the Rodin, unless it was pouring rain. I assured her a downpour would change my plans for the day as well.

Saturday morning the sky appeared ready to spit rain but threaten was all it did. I took the #1 California bus to New Chinatown, where I rendezvoused with Sue and Lexa at Grain D'Or on Clement. We took Lexa to the park to do her business, then headed out on a drive south that took us past hills shrouded in fog, calling to mind Chinese landscape watercolors, easy to imagine an old man coaxing an ox-drawn cart along a craggy path.

My last visit to San Francisco was two years ago, while I was just beginning to recover from a disastrous stint of gainful employment. I filled Sue in on my present circumstances. When I mentioned in passing how difficult it is to be creative while working forty hours a week, rising at 5:30 each morning to spend a few moments at my desk before heading in to the office, too many days that effort little more than futile gesture, she expressed surprise, perhaps astonishment is not too strong a word, that I still have the drive to write things.

Coincidentally, a couple of days ago I came upon this observation by Mary Kinzie, citing Iris Murdoch, in The Judge Is Fury:

"We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities [social, national, religious], which transcend him." Instead of a "rich, receding background," ever seductively incomplete, says Murdoch, the world has been flattened by the ease and convenience of comprehending it empirically. Social and political complexity has been flattened, too. "What we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons." Murdoch's call for eloquence is paradoxically one that demands of the artist truth-telling and acceptance of incompleteness rather than closure in the work of art, along with a renewed dubiety and complication in the moral and spiritual realms imaged there.

The opacity of persons. We like to think that we can understand ourselves, one another, and the world in which we find ourselves. It is a matter or reclaiming one's true nature, which has been twisted and warped by the conventions of society, as with Rousseau, or being honest, brutally so if need be, totally open and up-front, baring everything, in the manner of Allen Ginsberg, or psychoanalysis or other therapy that takes us to some fundamental root of things, so the light bulb goes on, aha! this is who I am and why. Neuroscience is the latest darling of the sciences to which we turn for explanation, why he is this kind of person, why she is that kind of person. Oedipal complexes, penis envy, chemical imbalance in the brain, social convention, class struggle, there is always explanation.

We miss the mark not in seeking to understand but in failing to recognize that our understanding is always partial, when we forget, or choose to ignore, Emerson's insight expressed in the essay "Circles":

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

We never get to the bottom of things; their unveiling is never complete. The opening in which we stand is always bounded by horizon.

My thoughts ran along these lines, my astonishment that Sue would be astonished to hear that I still go to my desk each morning, that I still have this drive to write, the urge to create, to forge something out of our little lives, until I mentioned it to Sylvia at dinner Wednesday evening. She said it is unusual. I thought, well, okay, it's just who I am.

The sculpture garden has a European flavor, a well-manicured, geometrical design, and is, as those French would put it, magnifique. Familiar works, the Gates of Hell and the Burghers of Calais, in the company of those with which I am less familiar, such as Jules Bastien Lepage, who stands before us wondrously alive — alas, I can do no better than the stock phrases and artsy clichés by way of describing these marvels.

What is it in these shapes that the experience of them transports us? This is the question we ask of all art, Monet's water lilies, Chagall's lovers, Bach's harpsichord, Keats' "Hyperion," and it is the question we ask, too, of the vines growing along the wall that bounds one side of the Rodin sculpture garden, of which Sue said, "I find this every bit as beautiful as these sculptures." Why am I inclined to reflect upon it and try to give shape and lucidity to these thoughts? If these questions could be answered in a word or a phrase or a paragraph, maybe we would have no need of the poems, the paintings, the music, or the waterfalls and mountains and little creeping vines.

The Stanford campus is lovely, marked by Mission style architecture and palm trees, considerable open green space, parks and gardens. The campus was quiet. Perhaps the university was between terms and students away for the break. We walked past a beach volleyball court just down from the chemistry building, up to the Old Union, and came on a courtyard where a wedding party was taking photographs.

I enjoy wandering around universities and feel in place there. Some years ago while exploring Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harvard University, I was asked directions by a couple seated at a nearby table in a cafe where I'd stopped for coffee. I apologized for being unable to help them, explaining that I was tourist myself. "Oh," the lady said, "you look like you belong here." I cherish the compliment.

Regret serves us nothing. Yet I could not help but think with regret of the foolish decisions made by a callow youth that led me away from the university and academic life. I am under no illusion that the university is the hallowed place of learning and pursuit of wisdom that we might wish it to be, nor that it is little changed from the world I knew as an undergraduate in the early 1970s.
There may be no place where one such as I belongs without reservation, and without question universities are as filled with careerists and hacks, and with decent people trying to do the right thing, as any other workplace. I do not know how, if I were a teacher, I would relate to young people who see the university as just another step along the career path, or to those who see the university as little more than a glorified technical school. Probably not all that well. To live daily among books and ideas and people who care passionately about them may be a dream as foolish and futile and impractical at any...well, it's something I think about from time to time.

How my life might have turned had I pursued life within the academy cannot be known. Might I feel the weight of loss, waste, and regret that is too much a part of me as things have turned out? Perhaps. I have made some little of my gifts with poems, friendships, and values I have tried to embrace, but I have squandered much. Maybe this conviction is some of what drives me to my desk each morning, to my pen and paper, to books and paintings, mountains and waterfalls, to friendships I may not deserve but treasure beyond bound, to quest for some bit of light in the darkness.

laying down some asphalt

2009-02-01T17:41:00.001-08:00

Another road to hell paved with good intentions. I refer to my previously announced intent to produce a blog post each Sunday. I'm working on an essay, but it's not ready yet. Your oft humbled scribe will endeavor to do better in the future.

thought for the day

"I just don't want to end up writing a blog or something." — Cldye, conservative black politician on Doonesbury, who finds himself on the outside looking in on Obama-world

Old Burke; and a memo from the editorial desk

2009-01-27T06:23:00.000-08:00

I thought of the widespread criticism of Obama policy, e.g., on the eononomy and health care, for not going far enough when I came across this passage by Edmund Burke, then a member of Parliament, in a letter to a constituent written 23 April 1778:

You tell me, sir, that you prefer an union with Ireland to the little regulations which are proposed in Parliament. This union is a great question of state, to which, when it comes properly before me in my parliamentary capacity, I shall give an honest and unprejudiced consideration. However, it is a settled rule with me to make the most of my actual situation, and not to refuse to do a proper thing because there is something else more proper, which I am not able to do [italics mine]. This union is a business of difficulty, and, on the principles of your letter, a business impracticable. Until it can be matured into a feasible and desirable scheme, I wish to have as close an union of interest and affection with Ireand as I can have; and that, I am sure, is a far better thing than any nominal union of governement.

This is not to argue that Obama should be given a blank check, as on the economic front where he takes advice from the unholy triumverate of Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geitner, and Robert Rubin. Summers and Geitner are reportedly fond of pointing out that the Japanese experience in the 1990s shows that governments make lousy bank managers. The obvious rejoinder is that recent events shows that professional bank managers sometimes make lousy bank managers too. Nationalization is a complex matter and certainly not a panacea, but Obama should expect better of his people than the drivel noted here.

memo from the editorial desk

I am just returned to Portland after a delightful Friday-Monday weekend in San Francisco where I took in the Rodin sculpture collection at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the opening of Chinese New Year festivities in Chinatown, and
revisited favorite old haunts in North Beach.

With the fresh perspective that has given me, I have decided to take a slightly different tack at Memo. New posts will appear weekly (I hope), most likely on Sunday. I intend to focus on more substantive essays such as Manifestations of Surrealism, which appeared earlier this month and steer clear of the filler that comes with trying to post more frequently. I also hope to devote more of my resources to my real work as a poet.

Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine will likely not appear again for a while. I have further episodes in mind but am far from getting them down.

I note these things so that those of you who come regularly to this space will not waste your time checking back only to find nothing new. Thanks for your support. Ciao.

the inaugural address

2009-01-21T06:21:00.000-08:00

Several commentators on last night's edition of The Newshour on PBS downplayed Barack Obama's address to the nation at the inauguration, generally characterizing it as okay but not a great speech, certainly not up to the lofty standards he has set for himself. I found Col. Pat Lang's remarks at Sic Semper Tyrannis more insightful:

I had not expected this speech. This was a workman's speech, the speech of a man impatient to get on with the serious business of the Republic. It was bony, filled with policy statements and demands for sacrifice and seriousness of purpose.... It would have been oh so easy for someone of his literary skill to have crafted a speech that would have sung to the ages.... [Instead Obama] insisted that the United States must redeem and save itself through hard work and a rededication to "our founding documents."

Hope and Possibility 2009

2009-01-20T06:33:00.000-08:00

In August 2005 I wrote a piece titled Hope and Possibility. The essay takes up the theme of hope and possibility in Eric Rohmer's film Conte d'automne (Autumn Tale), a theme that runs through some of the best of my poems, particularly those of more recent vintage, the past decade or so, and one that is at the heart of Barack Obama's presidency.

Obama's rhetoric tempers hope with realism and a call to shared sacrifice for the common good, grounded in recognition that individual freedom and common purpose are intertwined, not antithetical. His straight talk is a departure from feel-good patriotism of Ronald Reagan's morning in America and George Bush-style missions accomplished. And it is an outright repudiation of the theme that to get rich is glorious, a Republican article of faith enthusiastically embraced by Clintonian Democrats during the last decade of the previous century.

Hope and possibility are just that, hope, possibility, by no means certain. As John Maynard Keynes noted, in the long run, we are all dead...

memo from the editorial desk

Your oft humbled scribe composed this little number in great haste this morning before heading out the door to the wage slavery. I set about making minor revisions in the evening but am unsure how to conclude. For now, it stands as it stands. As do we.

self-defense

2009-01-18T20:51:00.000-08:00

From B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Terriroties:

18 Jan.: Casualty update
Gaza: at least 1,205 killed, of them at least 410 children and 100 women. Over 3,520 injured, of them over 350 severely injured (Palestinian Ministry of Health figures). Israel: 3 civilians and 10 soldiers killed. Over 84 civilians injured, of them 4 severely injured, not including those treated for shock, and 113 soldiers injured, of them one in critical condition and 20 Moderately or severely injured.
Israeli organizations: Stop disproportionate harm to civilians
In a press conference held today [14 January 2009] in Jerusalem, 9 Israeli human rights organizations called on the government and army to respect the laws of war and stop disproportionate harm to civilians. According to media reports and testimonies of Gazans, military forces are wantonly using lethal force, thus far killing hundreds of civilians and wreaking damage to infrastructure.

I saw a film today

2009-01-17T20:16:00.000-08:00

T-Bone enjoys tweaking my pseudo-intellectual pretensions by saying things like, "Frost/Nixon is a good movie, uh, I mean, film." All done in good spirit, of course, and most likely a healthy thing for my twisted psyche.

Well, Philippe Claudel's Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long) is a fine film, and Kristen Scott Thomas's performance is about as good as it gets.

Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian 26 September 2008 is spot-on, telling enough to give the reader a sense of the film without revealing anything best found out in the theater. I will add only that I like this one as much I've liked anything in a long, long time.

This is self-defense?

2009-01-16T06:41:00.000-08:00

From B'Teselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories:

Update for 15 January '09, morning (GMT+2)
Gaza: at least 1,033 killed, of them at least 335 children and 98 women. More than half those killed since the ground incursion began (580) are women and children. Over 4,850 injured, of them over 250 severely so.
Israel: 13 killed, of them 1 woman and 10 soldiers. Over 82 civilians injured, of them 4 severely injured, not including those treated for shock , and 77 soldiers injured, of them one in critical condition and 6 suffer moderate or severe injuries.

On Wednesday the BBC reported claims that Israeli soldiers have fired on Gaza residents trying to escape the conflict area (Israelis 'shot at fleeing Gazans'). BBC reports that B'Tselem has been unable to corroborate the testimony it has received but believes it should be made public. It is difficult, perhaps not possible, to verify the accounts because Israel denies access to Gaza for international journalists and human rights monitors.

Leaders of both major political parties in the United States offer the standard American response to the Israeli incursion into Gaza: Israel has a right to defend itself.

Manifestations of Surrealism

2009-01-11T11:40:00.000-08:00

T-Bone asked what I thought of W.H. Auden's advice to Frank O'Hara on the arbitrary, surrealistic shifts of tone and subject in the poems that he and John Ashbery were writing in the 1950s:

I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any "surrealistic" style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue. (Edward Mendelson, reviewing O'Hara in The New York
Review of Books, September 29, 2008)

What interests me is why some writing in the manner fashionably deemed surrealist, employing what Auden called "surrealist" style, arouses wonder while other writing in this vein does not. Why does one image or passage convey a sense of the marvelous, while another fails to rise above the pedestrian? Why does "L'amoureuse" by Paul Éluard move me while "The New Higher" by John Ashbery does not?

Mendelson contends that Auden did not grasp what O'Hara and Ashbery were up to:

Auden had not detected the almost opposite motivations behind the "non-logical relations" in O'Hara's and Ashbery's poetry. Ashbery's work, O'Hara said, "is full of dreams and a kind of moral excellence and kind sentiments," while his own "is full of objects for their own sake" that he treats with "ironically intimate observation." But Ashbery's dreamlike sentiments link together whatever happens to be in his mind while he is writing a poem, while O'Hara's "objects for their own sake" are linked together by his sense that, as in Dante's Paradise, everything that has profound value in itself is obscurely but profoundly connected to everything that has similar value.

I distinguish between use of "surrealist" to refer to a certain type of image and style, dreamlike, nonrational, nonlinear, employed in writing, painting, film, and theater, and the Surrealist Movement that grew out of dadaism in post-World War I France, which represented not just an aesthetic stance but an approach to life, perhaps even a way of life. A sense of what I mean can be gleaned from André Breton's "Preface for a Reprint of the Manifesto [of Surrealism] (1929)":

I do not understand why, or how, how I am still living, or, for all the more reason, what I am living. If, from a system in which I believe, to which I slowly adapt myself, like Surrealism, there remains, if there will always remain, enough for me to immerse myself in, there will nonetheless never be enough to make me what I would like to be, no matter how indulgent I am about myself. A relative indulgence compared to that others have shown me (or non-me, I don't know). And yet I am living, I have even discovered that I care about life. The more I have sometimes found reasons for putting an end to it the more I have caught myself admiring some random square of parquet floor: it was really like silk, like the silk that would have been as beautiful as water. I liked this lucid pain, as though the entire universal drama of it had then passed through me and I was suddenly worth the trouble. But I liked it in the light of, how shall I say, of new things that I had never seen glow before. It was from this that I understood that, in spite of everything, life was given, that a force independent of that of expressing and making oneself heard spiritually presided—insofar as a living man is concerned—over reactions of invaluable interest, the secret of which will disappear with him. This secret has not been revealed to me, and as far as I am concerned its recognition in no way invalidates my confessed inaptitude for religious meditation. I simply believe that between my thought, such as it appears in what material people have been able to read that has my signature affixed to it, and me, which the true nature of my thought involves in something but precisely what I do not yet know, there is a world, an imperfect world of phantasms, of hypothetical realizations, of wagers lost, and of lies, a cursory examination of which convinces me not to correct this work in the slightest.

Breton defined surrealism "once and for all":

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. The following have performed acts of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac. (Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press 1972, p. 26)

It is with the surrealism of Breton that my sympathies lie. My relationship is one of affinity, not adherence, as I employ certain aspects of Surrealism to my own ends while respecting the integrity and honoring the spirit of the Surrealists, whose stance is moral as well as aesthetic, political as well as cultural, a repudiation of the accepted verities and the old order (what in the 1960s came to be known derisively as the establishment).

The Surrealist Movement grew out of Dada among a group of young artists in Paris in the 1920s, who were shaped in no small way by their experience of the carnage of the first World War, where young men marched off to slaughter under the banners of honor, glory, patriotism, and adventure. This is context of Surrealism's contempt for the old bourgeois shibboleths order, security, and reason.

The surrealism that mattters to me is never just another technique in the poet's bag trotted out for the crowd's entertainment like a trick pony or a scantily clad dancer with unusually large breasts. Rather, surrealism nourishes a capacity for wonder at the objects of an everyday world whose essential strangeness lies hidden behind a superficial familiarity. This capacity is lost when surrealism is equated with the merely fantastic or when we indulge in the fiction that a clear boundary demarcates the rational and the nonrational. Poetry is never wholly a rational enterprise, a matter of calculation and strategy, nor the pure psychic automatism of which Breton sometimes speaks. Anna Balakian, whose Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, served as one of my early introductions to the subject, puts it nicely:

Poetry is a most lucid activity, a spreading of a fan of meanings, the vivid perception of the vituperations of the word strategically placed, or the image fortuitously achieved. The surrealist Breton aptly called this situation "magnetic fields," which attract reception and provide vistas leading to the extension of the capacities and variations of language not only for the reader but also for the creator of the work, who beholds with wonder what has been created. Thus receiving one's own image leads to an extension, for the image is no longer considered merely a reflection, of either the conscious state or the subconscious. (Balakian, The Fiction of the Poet, Princeton University Press 1992, p. 16)

Surrealist poetry when it matters, when it strikes an emotional or intellectual chord, is animated by the same things that animate all poetry that moves us, aptly expressed by Kenneth Rexroth, writing of the American surrealist poet Philip Lamantia's poetry:

[It] has a great drive and excitement that only comes with the conviction that what one has to say is of great importance and people ought to listen. Although some of it uses the language, or at least the symbolic patterns of the unconscious, it is not that deadliest of all dull "made up" things: "unconscious writing." The force that associates the ideas is a conscious Eros and a vision of a world that is founded and ruled by Eros as ultimate power.

The writings of Breton, the poems of Éluard, the paintings of Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, Giorgio de Chirico, among others, open a door on the marvelous, a state akin to what in other contexts is called the sublime, a vale where authenticity may be possible and life worth living.

2009 already

2009-01-04T11:14:00.000-08:00

The program called for kicking off the new year with a good run. Alas, dawn brought conditions that were less than optimal: cold and spitting rain. Bagging the run altogether was out of the question. I took the middle course and put it off until later in the day on the premise that the conditions were not likely to be worse and perhaps the weather gods would smile in the afternoon and grace me with a window when the rain let up.

Well, conditions did not worsen. Neither did they get much better. When it was still raining steadily at 1:30, I sucked it up and headed out to run three miles and change. Running on days like Thursday is a down payment on the enjoyment that comes with running on those spring, summer, and fall days when to run is glorious. I would not claim that it was fun. The worst moment came at the intersection of SE Burnside and 60th Avenue, waiting for the light to change, cold and soggy, the rain pelting down.

Some days, though, for no reason I can determine, fate smiles on us, and we find exhilaration running even in these miserable conditions, pounding along at a fair clip, bounding over puddles and sometimes slopping right throught them, water dripping from the bill of the Tulsa Runner cap, the knit Runner Dude gloves so soaked they would still be damp on Saturday. Two women runners came down the hill on the east end of Laurelhurst Park just after I turned into the park on 39th. I gave a little wave of acknowledgement, and one of them broke into a big smile and called out, "Happy new year!" That was a good moment.

I've never been much for new year's resolutions. My thinking runs more in terms of projects for the coming year. For whatever worth it may be, here are a few items that come to mind:

Find a way to love life — or at least not be so beaten down by gainful employment and despair as I was for too much of 2008.

Cultivate an openness to poetry, viz., to the sensibility apart from which the poems do not come, a sensibility that is, moreover, at the heart of what is best in who I am. To this end I begin with a return to my surrealist roots, picking up on New Year's Day Tau by the American surrealist poet Philip Lamantia and David Gascoyne's A Short Survey of Surrealism.

Film and art. The film part is easy. From the NW Film Center alone comes next month's 32nd Portland International Film Festival, a March retrospective of the films of Andrzej Wajda, including Ashes and Diamonds and Danton, and 1970s classics The Last Picture Show, A Woman Under the Influence, and Five Easy Pieces, among others.

As for art:

The upcoming La volupté du goût: French Painting in the Age of Madame de Pompadour at the Portland Art Museum, where it's also fun to pop in from time to time just to wander around and look on old favorites such as Monet's River at Lavacourt and Courbet's The Violoncellist;
First Thursday in the Pearl;
Last Thursday on Alberta; and
Show and Tell Gallery Productions, which I was fortunate to discover toward the end of 2008.

Study French and Italian.

Travel.

Run at the level to which I had returned August and September of last year.

We shall see what the morrow will bring.

Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine: Twenty-five

2008-12-27T09:17:00.000-08:00

Meantime, Two Fingers Rivera tapped one of those fingers against the steering wheel of a gray Camry parked across SE 60th Avenue from D.T. Benjamin's house. From time to time some derelict soul would venture outside to puke in the shrubbery or piss against the side of the house. Slouched down in the passenger seat, Buttons Barry poured another cup of Starbucks from the thermos. He would have preferred Dunkin' Donuts, but out here on the Left Coast, nothing but liberals, tree huggers, pansies, what you gonna do, Jackson. "You want some coffee?" Two Fingers shook his head. What he thirsted for was a cup of tea, a habit he picked up while at Oxford, where as a callow lad he read classics and made it with Brit hippie chicks before returning to his native land to save it from the bloody commies.

"You really think they'll show, jefe?" Two Fingers.

"Dunno."

"So we wait here?"

"You got a better plan?"

"I ain't got no stinking plan."

"Me too."

Unbeknownst to Buttons Barry and Two Fingers Rivera, the VW van parked down at the corner on Clinton was occupied. Burford kept himself awake and alert chewing tobacco and spitting the juice into a Bush's baked beans can. Cullen figured Buttons and Two Fingers were waiting for Mahmoud to show, maybe with that twit Maurice in tow. Burford could buy that's what the pair of rogues were doing, but that didn't mean Mahmoud and Maurice were even in town.

They lost track of the young Egyptian when he bolted from the safe house where Binky Balkrite had him stashed. Then Maurice and the nihilist girl gave Cullen the slip earlier that evening, ducking out the back door of Lucas Black Barry's place while Dewey and Bad Buster kept the volume cranked up on a Screeching Weasel CD, would have sounded like a party going on to anybody. Even Cullen, Burford conceded, though he found it surprising. Cullen was the best. Maybe they were all getting a little old for this kind of thing, losing their edge.

Around about midnight partygoers began to drift away in twos and threes. Amelia Kelly walked with Lucas to the door, where she hugged him fiercely before allowing him to break away. Lucas mumbled, "Take care of yourself, baby," and followed Nan Wysteria to her car."

"You, too, dear," Amelia said, mostly to herself.

Two Fingers whistled when Lucas stepped away from Amelia to leave with Nan. "Now there's one lucky dude."

"Better to be lucky than good," said Buttons. "I could do with some luck right about now, because I don't see 'em." Referring to Mahmoud and Maurice. Buttons did not know about Charmin the nihilist girl.

While Buttons and Two Fingers eyeballed D.T.'s house, Burford eyeballed the car where Buttons and Two Fingers lurked. Shivering, he zipped his jacket and thought about Stone and the Reine woman and shook his head. You try, you give it your best, professional shot, but you can't plan for everything. There's always going to be some damn contingency you did not take into account. Stone turned cold to women after l'affaire Marie. The Reine woman came completely out of left field. Even Cullen was blindsided by it.

Whoa, there! What's with the dude in the Burberry trench coat and Stetson rain hat, slinking up Clinton past Burford and on toward Buttons and Two Fingers? The profile was familiar, even in passing and hard to make out in the dark and shadow, maybe from a photo Burford had seen but could not place. Damn.

"It's quiet," said Two Fingers.

"Too quiet," said Buttons. He didn't like it. He didn't know why he didn't like it. He just didn't like it. "Let's get out of here, amigo."

"Amigo, my ass," muttered Two Fingers, shaking his head as he started the car and pulled slowly away from the curb.

Any other time Burford would have followed Two Fingers and Buttons, but this time some twisted instinct possessed him to get out of the car and follow the guy in the trench coat. Any other time he would have called Cullen and told her he was abandoning Buttons and Two Fingers, but the man in the trench coat was already almost up to 61st. Burford shoved the cell back in his pocket, turned the baked beans can upside down to dump the tobacco juice in the street, and pulled the hood of his jacket up over his head.

The man in the trench coat turned right on 62nd and headed south toward Powell Boulevard. Burford let him stay a block ahead, just keeping him in sight, cursing under his breath as the rain fell harder, discreetly slipping behind a tree growing near the curb as the man paused in front of Alpine Glass Service. Did he suspect he was being followed? Was he to meet someone? He approached the mailbox at the corner, still to all appearances wary, looking first left, then right, before dropping something into the box. Then he stepped away and strode briskly east on Powell.

Burford followed him past ABC Hair Salon on 65th. Damn. Burford blinked, and Trench Coat Man disappeared in the shadows. He sang softly to himself, "Irene, good night / Irene, good night / good night, Irene / good night, Irene / I'll see you in my dreams," as he deposited the wad of tobacco in a dumpster outside an apartment building and pondered where to go from here. That's when the sap came down over his left ear and the lights went out on Burford.

next episode

Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine: Twenty-four

2008-12-21T10:17:00.000-08:00

All the usual suspects found their way to D.T.'s house over on the south side of Mt. Tabor. There was even a rumor that Duncan Rose was in town and would make a cameo appearance, a rumor Lucas quickly discounted, as he had it on good authority, a letter with a Prague postmark received only the previous week, that Duncan was out of the country and intended to remain that way.

Word was that the host called in to say he and the guest of honor would be arriving fashionably late for their own party. It seemed that D.T. and Amelia met Mona Desdemona and Franzie at Café Insomnia for dinner. Mona, who had a few drinks before dinner and wine with dinner, had something of a row, first with the Arturo the server, then with Fred the chef, over preparation of her mahi mahi, which was not exactly as she wished, though it appeared okay to Amelia and D.T. Mona removed her shoe and angrily waved it in Fred's face when he declined her offer to go in his kitchen and show him how to prepare the dish. At that Fred threatened to eighty-six Mona, whereupon Franzie rose to defend her honor, such as it was, and nearly got himself skewered by Arturo. Amelia's cooler head prevailed, that and she used to work there and Fred liked her, so cut Mona some slack and allowed her to stay even after she suggested he just open up a can of baked beans and heat them in the microwave, maybe he could serve that without screwing it up. Fred rolled his eyes and sent Arturo up the street to Fred Meyer for the baked beans.

Back at the party, Nan engaged Jersey Kürtiz, the blind painter whose abstract expressionist canvasses on exhibit at Gallerie Sophiste created such a stir last First Thursday, leaving Lucas to wander through the house, helping himself to a handful of peanuts set out with the chips and dip, pausing at one of D.T.'s bookcases when a biography of Paul Celan caught his eye, then leaping across the room to bear-hug Deanna Strange, who held a still smoldering cigar she'd put out before entering the house and sported a Green Party Cynthia McKinney for President button. Deanna playfully boxed the young poet's ears and deadpanned, "Try copping a feel and you'll be singing soprano for a week."

Lucas assumed a pose as if grievously wounded by the insinuation. "Would I do that? Don't answer."

"Would you do that?" Deanna Strange smirked. "I know you all too well, Lucas."

"Maybe not nearly well enough," Lucas muttered cryptically and stepped into the kitchen, where Double-Deuce and T-Bone were smooth-talking a pair of Reed College girls, Double-Deuce to Sophie, a willowy blonde with magenta streaks in her hair, "Why don't we blow this popcorn stand, go back to my place, I'll read you some of my pentameters," while T-Bone pulled up his shirt to show the girl in the chartreuse tights, Gigi, the tattoo of Apollinaire that decorated his left scapula.

Those girls were, to their credit, dubious. Then Gigi's face lit up. "The Lucas!"

"The Lucas!" Sophie echoed.

Double-Deuce posed the obvious question. "You know Lucas?"

"Everybody knows Lucas," said Gigi, and sometimes it did, indeed, seem that way, somewhat to Lucas's chagrin. Having once rather reveled in being famous at open mics all over town, he now found that notoriety grows old and sometimes right tedious.

"Where are you reading poetry these days?" asked Sophie.

Lucas shook his head. "Not reading so much..."

"You are still writing?" Gigi inquired.

"Is Lucas still writing?" T-Bone piped up as he opened the fridge, which was filled with 16-ounce cans of PBR. "Is Springsteen still the Boss? Is Obama still the One? Is Rove still Turd Blossom?"

T-Bone would have gone on in this vein for a while, but Lucas broke in, "Mostly I'm working with a guy on a revision for a screenplay for this movie he'll make if he can find funding. You wouldn't know anybody with a spare million or two they're looking to invest, could be a fine tax write-off?"

"Sorry, no," said Gigi, turning to Sophie, who also shook her head, no.

That was about when D.T. and Amelia at last made it to the party, D.T. adding to the dueling political buttons by flashing Obama when he removed his jacket, while Nan Wysteria's fashion accessory proclaimed her allegiance to the Hill, and here and there among other guests could be found the odd Naderite, the even odder Bob Barr Libertarian, and the stray anarchist, the latter identified not by a campaign button but the black ski mask.

"Awch, frck, grgl," Mona squawked in greeting and reached for her flask.

"She's still ticked off at Café Insomnia," Amelia translated. "She's never eating there again."

"That a threat or a promise?" some wiseacre cracked from the safe haven of anonymity somewhere behind Lucas, who sighed wearily, took a can of PBR someone thrust at him and retreated out to the backyard, struck that it was almost warm, the sky a deep blue marked only by wisps of cloud. Sophie and Gigi, who'd ditched Double-Deuce and T-Bone, joined him.

Sophie yawned and suggested they check out the Sapphire Hotel for a drink. Gigi was ready to leave too but thinking more along the lines of heading home to read Lévi-Strauss for a paper due end of next week.

"I better stick around," said Lucas. "I'm kind of with someone."

"With with someone?" This from Sophie, who had not appeared all that disappointed that Gigi might be abandoning them to their own devices. "We would be, like, so disappointed." Gigi arched her eyebrows, gave her friend a look, like, we, dude?

"It's complicated," Lucas said, thinking, it's always complicated. He went back inside and secured a fresh PBR and someone handed him a stiff shot of vodka. Lucas had not looked vodka in the eye since his birthday. Aw, what the heck? He threw back the shot and accepted an encore.

The party degenerated into a run of political arguments whose quality tended to run in inverse proportion to the volume at which they were advanced. Libertarians squared off against Obamites they were convinced were closet, and some not so closet, socialists, at which the leftists scoffed, socialist, my proletarian ass, he's nothing but a damn DNC centrist in progressive clothing, while indignant Clintonistas railed against sexist affronts real, imagined, and hallucinated, and D.T. the Obamite, brandishing a flagon of sangria wine, wondered why the Hill would not just bow out gracefully, for the good of the party and the country, not to mention his candidate, a question posed strictly rhetorically, to which he straightaway supplied the obvious, to him, response, "She's a damn Clinton, that's why."

At one point Lucas found himself restraining a Clintonista who had removed one of her Birkenstocks and threatened to pummel a barrell-chested, baby-faced Chomskyist into submission with it. After that Lucas sought refuge under the dining table...and found Amelia Kelly there, sitting cross-legged with a book of poems by Yeats and a bottle of pinot grigio, looking glamorous. "Hey, Lucas," she said and offered him the bottle, which he accepted and drank and passed it back to her.

"Hiding out at your own party?"

Amelia's smile had that sardonic quality Lucas loved in her. "Sad state of affairs, n'est-ce pas?"

"Ain't it though." Lucas accepted the bottle when she offered it back to him. "There was a time, I'd be breaking furniture by now, and probably over somebody's head, a party like this."

"But not now?" Lucas shook his head, and Amelia reached out and touched his cheek with her fingertips. "Ah, Lucas, you've mellowed."

"Well, maybe some, a little," he admitted.

Amelia told him about her life in San Francisco, which it turned out was not all that different from her previous life in Portland, just another city was all. She shared a studio apartment in the Tenderloin with two other actors, made the rent waiting tables at an Italian joint in Sausalito, spent a lot of her free time lining up auditions, preparing for auditions, going to auditions, and, that smile again, maybe hanging out and drinking more than was strictly speaking advisable.

"You'll make it," Lucas said earnestly. "I know you will."

"You used to hate it when I said that to you."

"Well, uh, you know..." There was no telling where the encounter with Amelia might have gone if Lucas had not just then felt someone brush against his leg.

"I wondered where you kids were hiding." Nan, who Lucas surmised from her bright demeanor had been enjoying some of that sangria wine. As best he remembered from before Amelia left town, the two women had been friendly enough after a fashion but by no means close. Nan rested her head on Lucas's shoulder, what he took to be the equivalent of urinating to mark her territory, and said, "Hi, Amelia."

Amelia looked at Lucas and shrugged. "Hi, Nan. D.T. tells me you've got a new chapbook out. He says it's really good."

Nan brightened. "D.T. said that."

"Well," Amelia explained, "he said it over dinner, and I'm sure he meant it, but..."

Nan laughed. "He knew that would get a rise out of Mona." Nan and Mona were not exactly friends since the night Nan, filling in as host for the open mic at Café Insomnia, pulled the plug on Mona fifteen minutes into a scatological rant that took off with the Bush presidency and segued scattershot fashion on to Hillary Clinton, Paris Hilton, and anyone and everyone who failed to appreciate Mona's poetic genius and sexual talents. Amelia could relate to this because she'd had to eighty-six Mona a time or several herself back in the day, for which Mona bore a grudge she would take to her grave.

Next thing Lucas knew, Nan and Amelia were bonding, what he supposed was a good thing, as he crawled out from under the table and went off to see if there was any PBR left.

next episode

Charlotte Reine: Twenty-Five

previous episodes

Charlotte Reine: One
Charlotte Reine: Two
Charlotte Reine: Three
Charlotte Reine: Four
Charlotte Reine: Five
Charlotte Reine: Six
Charlotte Reine: Seven
Charlotte Reine: Eight
Charlotte Reine: Nine
Charlotte Reine: Ten
Charlotte Reine: Eleven
Charlotte Reine: Twelve
Charlotte Reine: Thirteen
Charlotte Reine: Fourteen
Charlotte Reine: Fifteen
Charlotte Reine: Sixteen
Charlotte Reine: Seventeen
Charlotte Reine: Eighteen
Charlotte Reine: Nineteen
Charlotte Reine: Twenty
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-one
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-two
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-three

Scribbles from the Journal

2008-12-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

The solution to a minor work problem came to me yesterday morning while shaving. Better than to be lying awake middle of the night with it, which happens frequently enough, but not much better. It is distressing enough that so many waking hours are eaten away at the office. To have precious time that should be my own similarly devoured, minutes and hours when I would dwell on literature, art, ideas, culture, issues of the day, even basketball, or the goofing off and wasting time that is an integral part of the poet's calling — 'tis an awful thing.

That no new poem has made its way to my notebooks since late summer is another awful thing. A number of factors enter into this, most of them too dreary to go into. Not least, however, is that I am at something of an impasse as to where to go with the poems. Images that draw on a surrealist sensibility employed, honed and fashioned, over a lifetime have become almost cliché — to my ear at any rate, and while I write with readers in mind, it is my ear, which is to say intellect and instinct cultivated through a life of reading, thinking, writing, that has the last word.

I do not know that it is so much a fresh vision I seek as a fresh way to express the vision that endures — the romantic theme of the restorative and redemptive capacity of art, a sense of the sublime, the surrealist trinity of love, freedom, and the marvelous, determination to remain open to hope and possibility.

I recall a time in Vancouver, BC, about a decade ago, give or take a year or two, a similar season of doubt. Is "crisis" too strong a word? Perhaps, but not by much. I was capable then as now, for the most part, of little more than scribbles in the journal — at breakfast at the Sylvia Hotel restaurant that looked out onto English Bay, in coffee joints on Denman Street, in my thoughts as I strolled along the Stanley Park seawall, wondering if I had said what little I have to say, if nothing remained. I suspect that I will always wonder this — and never know — yet somehow, as we used to say in the sixties, keep the faith, baby.

Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine: Twenty-three

2008-12-13T11:53:00.000-08:00

Meantime, Lucas Black Barry boomeranged between high spirits, walking on air, rolling in the tall clover, and desolation, wallowing in the muck and mire, mud in his hair, grass in his teeth, screeching at the moon. Nan Wysteria's private tutoring in advanced techniques of condom usage was only part of the story. Lucas waited for her to drop the b word — boyfriend. But wouldn't she have done that before tutoring him in techniques of condom usage? Wouldn't "I've got a boyfriend" have been a prelude to "sorry, dude, you know I really like you as a friend and all"?

Lucas knew he was acting nuts. How could it be anything like that when Nan would come pounding on his door at three in the morning, dressed in a tight red dress, scuffed bomber jacket, dark stockings the blur of a fleur-de-lis tattoo on the back of her left calf visible through them, the Doc Martens de rigueur, "I just can't make it through the night without you, baby," pushing him back through the living room, past Dewey and Bad Buster, Maurice and Charmin the nihilist girl, slurping sodas and digging into the popcorn while digging Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep, so entranced they hardly noticed Nan and Lucas, or maybe they were just grown used to the program, those two stumbling in full-throttle grope back to Lucas's room, Nan throwing herself atop him on the futon, not that Lucas was complaining, mind you, but sometimes it did seem, well, kind of a bit much. Like, how many face cards were missing from her deck? A man without illusion, Lucas pretty much knew he was not all that much of a catch.

There was no one in whom to confide. There was only Percy Deuce, who chuckled, "And your problem, dude, would be, what, exactly?" — which made Lucas want to fall to hands and knees, pound his skull against the sidewalk until it was a bloody mess, right there in front of Powell's, where they'd rendezvoused for a cup of coffee and talk about the script. Lucas hated it when people did not take him seriously, and it was clear Percy didn't, really how could you, this thing with Nan, Lucas understood that, of course, he wouldn't have taken himself seriously either.

Besides, Percy was focused on the movie, walking around town, laying out scenes and shots in his head, muttering into his digital tape recorder outside Voodoo Doughnuts on SW 3rd, the door to the shop closed with a hand-scrawled sign taped to it reading, "Wedding in Progress Buy Doughnuts @ Window →". There was still no funding. "I don't think the economy's doing so great," he said.

Even Lucas had to laugh. "You picked up on that, huh."

"You know, and this is just a long shot here, a wild thought, a stab in the dark," Percy muttered, leaning forward conspiratorially, looking over each shoulder, first left, then right, the other patrons in the coffee room at Powell's perusing stacks of books, hunched over their journals, jabbering to one another or in some instances to themselves, staring off into space, your typical scene there. "You wouldn't know anybody in the meth trade might be interested in making an investment in an artistic venture?"

Lucas was flummoxed. Now why would Percy think he might know someone in the meth trade? Okay, sure, there were some unsavory characters in his acquaintance, not least his housemates, who in fact might... "I could ask Dewey and Bad Buster."

There was a demented gleam in Percy's eye as he clapped Lucas on the back and his voice tremored, "Thanks, dude. Gotta run, check ya later, ciao, babe."

On a whim Lucas purchased Robert Bolaño's The Savage Detectives when it caught his eye on the way out of the store. Outside it was a fine early spring morning in the People's Republic of Portland. The clouds made way for the sun to shine through, and the weather soothsayers predicted the afternoon would bring temperatures in the mid sixties. For now, late morning, it remained chilly, and Lucas zipped his jacket as he mumbled a somewhat guilty "no, thanks, sorry," to the homeless fellow peddling Street Roots there at the corner of Burnside and 10th.

Catty-corner across Burnside, a lanky, wraithlike figure lurked in the shadows, seeming to be perusing a zine shoplifted from Reading Frenzy, nonchalant, several inches over six feet in height, Red Sox baseball cap covering a bald pate, black windbreaker over a black turtleneck, faded jeans, Converse Chuck Taylors, retro white high-tops Only a close observer might have noticed those narrow slits of weasel eyes were focused not on the page but the street, up Burnside and down, up 10th Avenue and down.

He inserted a cigarette into a silver, cocktail length cigarette holder, lighted it, as a bulky man with a swarthy complexion stepped from the eastbound number 20 bus and waited for light signal to cross the street. Neither man acknowledged the other. The man in the baseball cap set off down Burnside toward the river, and the bulky fellow, who a close observer might have noticed was missing the middle two fingers on his right hand, followed two steps behind, as if maybe he had the taller man's back.

Lucas noticed none of this. His beleaguered thoughts were on the damn economy. Percy would have to bring that up. In his head Lucas knew Demolition, Baby would not be immune to the train wreck that looked to be coming down the pike; in his heart, all he wanted was to sit all day in a coffee joint where a recording of Edith Piaf singing "je ne regrette rien" played over and over while he scribbled poems. He remembered when he used to do that and write ten, fifteen, twenty poems a day. Now he was lucky to register that kind of output in a full week.

The cell vibrated in Lucas's pocket. Nan. Amelia Kelly was in town for a few days, staying with D.T. Benjamin, who was having a few people over that evening, mostly old friends of Amelia. Lucas's first thought was D.T. having a few people over was rather like Custer facing a few Indians at Little Big Horn. Then, damn, if Nan had called earlier, he could have told Percy here was an opportunity to meet Amelia, see if she might be interested in the film. He could always call Percy, or text him, but these days it was easier to get Percy's attention when he was physically present where you could grab him by the scruff of the neck. The film's prospects were looking more dubious by the day anyway. Maybe it did not matter if Percy ever met Amelia. That left the social affair chez D.T. No getting around he and Nan would be there.

next episode

Charlotte Reine: Twenty-four

previous

Charlotte Reine: One
Charlotte Reine: Two
Charlotte Reine: Three
Charlotte Reine: Four
Charlotte Reine: Five
Charlotte Reine: Six
Charlotte Reine: Seven
Charlotte Reine: Eight
Charlotte Reine: Nine
Charlotte Reine: Ten
Charlotte Reine: Eleven
Charlotte Reine: Twelve
Charlotte Reine: Thirteen
Charlotte Reine: Fourteen
Charlotte Reine: Fifteen
Charlotte Reine: Sixteen
Charlotte Reine: Seventeen
Charlotte Reine: Eighteen
Charlotte Reine: Nineteen
Charlotte Reine: Twenty
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-one
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-two

why does what matters matter?

2008-12-07T08:58:00.000-08:00

"[Samuel] Beckett was an artist possessed by a vision of life without consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which our only duty — inexplicable and futile of attainment, but a duty nonetheless — is not to lie to ourselves. It was a vision to which he gave expression in language of a virile strength and intellectual subtlety that marks him as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century." — J. M. Coetzee, "Samuel Beckett, the short fiction," (2005), which can be found in Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005.

J. M. Coetzee is on the all too lengthy list of writers I intend to get around to reading one of these days. I have read a few essays that have appeared in The New York Review of Books, from which the bulk of those that compose Inner Workings are taken, but none of the fiction by the 2003 Nobel Prize winner.

I recently picked up this little volume at the library and naturally turned first to Coetzee's essay on Beckett, who has become an important figure for me as I came to him over the past decade. Before that I had read Godot and some other of the plays but with no more than a kind of detached impact. If I took a stab at one of the novels, I never made it far. Precisely what led me to pick him up again I do not recall. Likely it was at least in part the influence of Sylvia Lindman, when we met after she came to Portland in 1999 and began a decade of conversation over dinner in Portland restaurants.

It was only natural that Beckett would come up from time to time in the conversation. His writing has long been important to Sylvia. Her doctoral dissertation concerned him, Nabokov, and Anaïs Nin, and it turns out that Coetzee's doctoral dissertation as grad student at the University of Texas at Austin was on Beckett's early fiction. His remarks quoted at the top of this piece capture what draws me to Beckett, the inexplicable duty not to lie to oneself, a call to intellectual integrity and spiritual honesty so foreign to an American culture rooted in myths of the power of positive thinking, the notion that one can do anything one puts one's mind to, and the typically unspoken corollary that failure to attain one's dreams is evidence of a want of inner resources, a deficiency of character.

The power of positive thinking myths remain blithely oblivious to the role of chance, fate, sheer, dumb, blind luck, for good or ill. Coetzee calls on Heidegger's term Geworfenheit: "being thrown without explanation into an existence governed by obscure rules." Finding ourselves in a world of neither our choice nor our making, we make of ourselves what we are able, knowing that it comes to nothingness at the end. Yet we touch one another, laugh, sing, weep, are touched by beauty, art, ideas, things that matter — but why do things matter?

I think of the question Heidegger famously posed: why should there be anything at all, why not, far rather, nothing? Yet here we are, in our Hawaiian shirts and baggy shorts and flip-flops, throwing back Singapore Slings and strumming our ukuleles. That it should matter is inexplicable. Yet it does.

Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine: Twenty-two

2008-12-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

"Funding." The word crept from Charlotte Reine's lips not quite a whisper and not at all as if she might think it amounted to an expression of any great insight, no, more that it was almost too obvious to bother putting into words. What followed from it, that would be what mattered.

Livia slapped her palm against her forehead. "Well, shit, yeah, what else would it be about? What else is anything about? Why I'm a damn adjunct professor..."

Stone stared out the window. It was that or stare at Charlotte Reine. What was it about her? Across the street an overweight raccoon chowed down out of a cat dish. It didn't take Stone's mind off Charlotte Reine. Nor did the subject at hand, which left him to multitask. "Every agency, office, and directorate within the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention the feebs and the spooks, they’re waging the war for funding, making their case, elucidating a raison d’être." He found himself staring at the bottom of his cup. "Livia, any chance there’s more coffee?"

"Kettle's on the stove. You fill it with water and turn on the gas, clean out the grounds from the French press, add coffee from the jar on the counter, and go from there." Stone chuckled.

"Sounds so simple...a man could do it."

"You'd think," Livia said and headed into the kitchen to make the coffee.

"Binky, you mind drinking the first cup? I got an anxious feeling about how this batch might turn out." They jawjacked like that for a few minutes, and took their turns in the bathroom, until the fresh pot of coffee was ready. Then Stone returned to the story. While the neocons ramped up to invade Iraq and remake the Middle East in some cockamamie image of Middle America, Omaha or Toledo or something, Shine Rutter, who was now acting subdirector of the Agency of Risk Reduction Strategic Enhancement (ARRSE), began lining up assets and looking to inoculate his own alabaster asset from budget cuts and downsizing. It so happened that this all came down just as Buttons Barry and Two Fingers Rivera found themselves staring down the grim barrel of a budget shortfall so dire they had no option but to venture in from the cold, poke their heads up out of their gopher holes, take a chance and take a shot and hope they didn't get shot themselves. Shine Rutter smiled when the two erstwhile agents showed up on his radar. Buttons Barry and Two Fingers Rivera were just what Shine Rutter was looking for.

"And that would be?" This from Livia.

"Elementary, my dear Livia." Binky ducked as she hurled a couch pillow. "Agents provocateurs. Disposable agents provocateurs, at that."

"Eminently disposable," Stone added.

"Which is why they, Buttons anyway, came to your doorstep in Paris," Charlotte picked up on the plotline.

Stone nodded. "It took them awhile to figure out they were in over their heads trying to play both ends against the middle."

"But what's all this got to do with us?"

"Mahmoud."

"And Maurice," Binky added. "Let's not forget Maurice."

"So," Livia asked, "is there a terrorist cell or not? Or just some scam this ARRSE is running?"

"Don't know," Stone said.

"Doesn't matter," Binky added.

"Unless," Stone qualified, "it's an ARRSE front, a scam for funding, that's gotten away from them, out of hand, out of control, morphed into its own weird beast slouching who knows where, gone rogue."

"There is that," said Binky.

next episode

Charlotte Reine: Twenty-three

previous

Charlotte Reine: One
Charlotte Reine: Two
Charlotte Reine: Three
Charlotte Reine: Four
Charlotte Reine: Five
Charlotte Reine: Six
Charlotte Reine: Seven
Charlotte Reine: Eight
Charlotte Reine: Nine
Charlotte Reine: Ten
Charlotte Reine: Eleven
Charlotte Reine: Twelve
Charlotte Reine: Thirteen
Charlotte Reine: Fourteen
Charlotte Reine: Fifteen
Charlotte Reine: Sixteen
Charlotte Reine: Seventeen
Charlotte Reine: Eighteen
Charlotte Reine: Nineteen
Charlotte Reine: Twenty
Charlotte Reine: Twenty-one

those liberal labor unions

2008-12-04T06:34:00.000-08:00

From Garry Wills, "He Interviewed the Nation," The New York Review of Books, December 18, 2008 (Volume LV, Number 20):

Once, when a married couple waiting for the bus complained about "liberal labor unions," Studs [Terkel, who did not drive and regularly took the bus to work] asked the man, "Do you work more than eight hours a day?" and the man said no, he said, "Why do you think that is? The unions, that's why." He asked the women if she voted. When she said yes, he said, "Why do you think that is? The liberals, that's why."

bouncing around the blogosphere

2008-12-02T06:50:00.000-08:00

I had thought I might comment about the poor fellow who was trampled to death at Wal-Mart when they opened the doors day after Thanksgiving, but Chuck Oliveros beat me to it with An American Martyr: "Every faith must have its martyrs. Christianity certainly has more than a few. So, here's one for American consumerism."

Pat Lang, my favorite retired colonel, offers insightful commentary at Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008. He hits the mark with Life is not a campaign...: "Contrary to the opinion of Christopher Matthews [no relation to your oft humbled scribe, for which we are grateful], life is not a campaign."

and "If only the intelligence..." GW Bush: "Blaming the intelligence people is a standard ploy of failed politicians and flag officers. In every country and in every clime...."

"Maybe I can get a run in." — Harry Pfarrer

2008-11-29T14:53:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm a little self-conscious about saying, "Maybe I can get a run in," after seeing Burn After Reading, where Treasury agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) is a guy who really enjoys a good postcoital run, for which he has numerous opportunities, what with being married, engaged in an affair with Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), the ball-busting wife of Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), and hooking up with women through an online dating service, which is how he meets Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand).

The plot is driven by the travails of Osbourne Cox, a deposed intelligence analyst with a short fuse and a fondness for booze who is way out where the buses don't run. After being, in his eyes unjustly, sacked, Cox writes a tell-all memoir that inevitably falls into the wrong hands after the CD on which it is saved is left in the ladies' locker room at Hardbodies by an employee of the attorney his wife consults about divorce proceedings. Cox is clueless about his wife's affair, blindsided when she changes the locks on the house, and consumed by a fury directed at the league of morons he has been fighting his whole life.

The CD thereby comes into the possession of two gym employees, Linda and her pal Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), who may play it a little too cute as the dimmest of all wits, but is still good for laughs. Chad instantly recognizes the contents of the CD as "secret CIA intelligence shit" and is convinced the owner will offer a good Samaritan reward for its return, which Linda can use to pay for the four cosmetic surgeries, not covered by her insurance, she is convinced she needs to snare a man worth snaring.

Burn After Reading is first-rate Coen Brothers fare, spoofing U.S. intelligence with an abundance of black humor — and you can read the reference to intelligence any way you wish. Some characters are innocents, others world-weary and cynical, not one among them particularly bright, and they all get in way over their heads when a seemingly simple attempt at extortion goes horribly awry.

Malkovich gets to chew up some scenery as the outré Cox, Swinton plays the bitch in spades, Clooney and Pitt are clueless doofuses, and McDormand is a woman on a mission to be all the woman she can be, but they fail to engage us sufficiently to evoke the willing suspension of disbelief that would allow us to really care about their fate. Burn After Reading is well executed, often laugh-out-loud funny, and easy to like, a fine minor film, a cut below Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona if I were choosing between the two, without question worth seeing.

going at it rather backwards — how else?

2008-11-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

"You have to copy and copy again the work of the masters, and only after having passed all the tests of a good copyist, can you reasonably dare to paint even a radish from life." — Degas

I did not come along copying the masters. Sometimes I wonder what if I had. With poetry the student would not aim to make exact copies as in painting, but rather to write in the manner or style of the masters, a sonnet by Shakespeare or an ode by Wordsworth, for example, to practice and learn how to make a poem, how to use the rhythms and devices of poetry, to practice and hone skills and master techniques that can then be employed to one's own ends.

Instead I went at it hit or miss, with as is perhaps inevitable in such cases, an awful lot of miss. I have read widely, if not always well, pretty much from the time I first learned to read. It is from that reading I picked up instincts that I think serve me reasonably well for the most part. Still, there is much I would like to have mastered or least have a better acquaintance with it.

I recall being struck by the English Romantics while in high school, at age sixteen or seventeen, and under their influence undertook my first scribbles, but I did not really study or get to know them until much later. For better and worse poetry first got its stranglehold on my spirit through the beats and the European avant-garde, bohemian tradition that began with Baudelaire and ran up through Nerval, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Jarry, Apollinaire, Mayakovsky, and the like, culminating for me in French Surrealism. And there was always Bob Dylan, sui generis.

What I took from these poets was first of all a kind of word madness, a love for the sounds of words and phrases, the unexpected image, the unanticipated juxtaposition, turning the old verities on their collective head, as when Rimbaud writes, "One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter. And I cursed her." That's not how poets are supposed to think of beauty, is it?

I found there, too, that language can have a sense quite apart from the literal meaning of the elements that make it up, as when a phrase or image that is literarily non-sensical has the power to convey meaning, to communicate a sense of beauty, despair, longing, desire, ennui, temporality. The rhythms of the language, the phrases and lines that make up a poem, are integral to this effect, my employment of "rhythm" instead of meter" here being of conscious intent, as I tend to think in terms of rhythm rather than meter strictly speaking.

What does any of this matter? Well, I am convinced that generally it is better to know more than to know less. The more one knows about these things, the more tools one has at one's disposal, to be used or not in any particular writing project. Using rhyme, meter, or form is not just a matter of intellect and conscious, rational decision. They must be more than mere objects for knowing. They must be assimilated, made the writer's own, with vocabulary and learning of history, culture, and literary tradition made every bit as much a part of who the writer is as parents, childhood experiences, travel, work, and so on, until use of them in the writing becomes as much a matter of instinct as of intellect. When this happens, the allusions that flavor the writing are the natural expression of the writer's world, so that images of Alexander Hamilton lying dead in the snow, shoe buckles rusting in the snow, carriages on the highways of the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake, the ghost or electricity howling in the bones of her face, all become concrete as a coffee cup, the touch of a lover, a young mother nursing her infant child.

a few thoughts as a friend steps away from the open mic scene

2008-11-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

Last month my friend Zee wrote of her disenchantment with the open mic poetry scene in “things fall apart, the center cannot hold” and “Scratch a cynic, find a disappointed idealist”...George Carlin, the second a response to my remarks to her, expressed in private correspondence, about the first.

She writes in "'things fall apart...": “For almost five years, the poetry open mic scene in Portland was the core of my social and creative life. Well, Yeats had it right, and inevitably, I'm slouching out toward Bethlehem to be (re-)born”; and in "'Scratch a cynic..." she notes the “onslaught of noisy immaturity and illiterate egocentrism” and concludes that the “once-vibrant community [she] loved and felt so attuned with, is fragmenting itself and falling away.” Zee was an integral part of this community, her contributions extending beyond her writings and reading of her work to hosting open mics and the Church of Poetry gatherings in her home (which I lamely failed to attend, my loss) and editing and producing the anthology Blown Out: Portland’s Indie Poets.

My own stance toward poetry open mics is mixed. I should note at the outset that I have received generous support at several open mics in Portland, most notably Writer’s Right at Mojo’s from 2001 to its end in 2005, the short-lived Meander Knot series, and the Broken Word and Blue Streak readings at Blue Monk from August 2007 to the present, where I encountered a number of good, talented, and interesting people and made genuine friendships that I cherish. Support, whether it come from friends, colleagues, or the odd random stranger, is welcome and something we can all use to shore ourselves up when the vicissitudes of fate, the requirements and obligations of daily life, and the general indifference of the world at large weigh on us.

Along with that kind of support, the open mic community fills to some degree the intellectual void that is an inescapable fact of American life for those who live outside the academic community. I say this without illusion and wish in no wise to idealize the academy, which has its faults and flaws aplenty. The harsh reality remains that there are few places outside the academy where one may readily find others who care deeply about books, art, and the intellectual adventure. Where else might I be approached as I was by Doug Spangle after the host at Broken Word read a poem I wrote with an image of a French poet walking a blue crab on a leash, to say, "It wasn't a crab, it was a lobster, wasn't it?" The light bulb flashed, and I exclaimed, "I think you're right. I think it was a lobster." Then we tried to remember who the poet was, the neurons firing erratically in our gray brains, on the point of giving up until it came to me as I was about to walk away, "Was it Nerval?" and we said in unison, "Gerard de Nerval." I love stuff like that.

There are other reasons to read poems in public. For starters, publishers are not exactly pounding on my door soliciting manuscripts. Readings are a way to get the poems in front of an audience; and while I can truthfully say that I could quite well go the rest of my life without again appearing on stage, I readily acknowledge that being on the receiving end of applause can be exhilarating. Yet I remain wary of getting too carried away by compliments, praise, or the applause of the crowd. None of that in and of itself validates or legitimizes the writing and can lead the writer to the hazardous temptation to play to the audience.

In sum, there is much to draw one to certain open mic venues. Along with this comes, undeniably, some baggage. It does not take the second coming of Sigmund Freud to recognize that artists are not exactly immune to egotism, vanity, narcissism, competitiveness, conceit, self-absorption, etc., ad nauseam. There are strains of these traits in each of us. How could anyone put her or his creations, writing, music, art, before the public without an ego that is in some sense outsized?

Camille Paglia's thinking on literary topics can be as insightful and thought provoking as her views on political and cultural affairs are baffling and downright annoying, witness her enthusiastic cheerleading for Sarah Plain. In a recent essay on the selection process for her anthology Break, Blow, Burn (Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn, Arion, Fall 2008, Vol. 16, No. 2), Paglia touches on the matter of writing for public reading as opposed to writing for the page as she tells of her difficulty finding poems by modern and contemporary poets suitable for an anthology of "poems in English from the last four centuries that [she] could wholeheartedly recommend to general readers, especially those who may not have read a poem since college."

I was shocked and disappointed by what I found. Poem after poem, when approached from the perspective of the general audience rather than that of academic criticism, shrank into inconsequence or pretension. Or poets whom I fondly remembered from my college and graduate school studies turned out to have produced impressive bodies of serious work but no single poem that could stand up as an artifact to the classic poems elsewhere in the book.
...
I had glowing memories of dozens of poets whom I had avidly read (or seen read in person) after my introduction to contemporary poetry in college in the mid-1960s: Denise Everton, Randall Jarrell, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Greeley, John Ashbury, and Galway Kennel, among many others. But when I returned to their work to find material for Break, Blow, Burn, I was mortified by my inability to identify a single important short poem to set before the general reader. Live readings seem to have beguiled and distracted too many writers from the more rigorous demands of the printed page—the medium that lasts and that speaks to posterity. All of the above poets deserve our great respect for their talent, skill, versatility, and commitment, but I would question how long their reputations will last in the absence of strong freestanding poems.

At day's end it is the writing that matters. Going to the desk and cranking out the words is a solitary venture. We are on our own as we cleave to the vision. I do not disregard a potential audience when I write, but I do not write for any particular audience. I write with the leap of faith that the poem will merit an audience that might someday, somewhere, find it.

Because this is how I view things, it may be easier for me to accept the seamier underside of the open mic community than it is for Zee. Perhaps she garnered more riches from that community, and without question contributed to it in ways that I have not, but at greater cost in frustration and disillusion. I do not approach these things with cynicism, exactly, so much as with measured expectation.

I close by noting that Zee continues to write and to purse, as she puts it, the true pull of her heart and soul, photography, for which her talent is abundantly evident at Guttersnipe: Shots from the Curb. Through it all, she cleaves to the vision.

Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine: Twenty-one

2008-11-19T06:48:00.000-08:00

"Stone."

"Buttons."

"You can close the door."

"I was thinking I would," closing the door quietly behind him. Stone was ticked, less at Buttons for having the audacity to break in, though there was that, than at himself for being caught flat-footed. Maybe he had been out of the game too long. Or not nearly long enough. There was that. "I see you made yourself at home."

Buttons shrugged, reached for the bottle, refilled his own glass and poured one for Stone. "How was dinner?"

"Dinner was okay."

"Dinner, wine, good conversation with friends. You know, I've always appreciated your taste for the civilized life." Buttons fingered the cigarette holder, sans cigarette. He knew better than to light up in Stone's apartment. "Maybe even envied that a little."

"The conversation was interesting," Stone acknowledged.

"I bet it was. I didn’t know if you’d be back."

Stone took the drink, sipped, sipped again. "Where else would I go?"

"For all I knew, to the airport with Burford and Cullen." He kicked a chair away from the table. "Have a seat. It’s your place, after all."

"After all, indeed." Stone smiled, a smile that could in no wise be construed as friendly or even borderline neutral, and pushed the chair back where it had been. "Burford and Cullen tell me you’ve been a busy boy. Maybe even got in a little over your head."

Buttons Barry snorted. "Lies, slander, innuendo." That was when the gunshot rang out and the window shattered, or maybe it was the other way around, and both men dove for the floor, nearly cracking skulls as they landed jaw to jaw.

"Son of a bitch," Stone muttered.

"Son of a bitch," Buttons echoed, shaking his stinging fingers. The shot missed him but ripped the cigarette holder from his hand and the mangled ruin of it rebounded off the wall and fell to the floor. "Somebody’s a hell of a shot, or one of us got lucky."

"One of us? You saying they might be after me?"

"I'm just saying."

Stone grunted and crawled over to the desk and opened the bottom file drawer and pulled out the SIG556. Then a bemused expression, considering the circumstances, creased his craggy face as he saw Buttons withdraw a girlie-man pistol from an ankle holster. “Why don’t you just carry a damn purse while you're at it?”

"I can’t exactly walk around Paris with a AK-47."

"I’d feel better right about now if you did."

"You and me both." They crawled to the window, each waiting for the other to raise his head and take a look out. "Shooter’s probably gone," Buttons said.

"One and out."

"Probably."

Stone thought that sounded about right, but he kept his head down.

"Could have been a warning shot. Send a message."

"And that message would be?"

Buttons grimaced. "That’s something you and me need to talk about."

"Oh, good grief," Stone said and held the SIG at the ready as he exposed forehead and eyes up above the windowsill. No gunshot was forthcoming. He cautiously raised up higher. The street was dark, not a sign of motion or activity, not so much as a stray dog or the odd couple out for an evening stroll.

Stone exhaled and got to his feet. For all the rumpledness of his wardrobe, he was inclined to be a tidy housekeeper. He grabbed the broom and dustpan and swept up the glass that had been the window before the bullet came through it, Buttons stepping across the room to kneel over by the bookcase, retrieve the ruined cigarette holder — was that a tear dribbling from the corner of a green eye? What loss did the errant spook feel for this thing, inanimate object, of little particular extrinsic value, in the marketplace and all? That was a tear, hastily brushed away lest Stone spot it, for this was the cigarette holder given Buttons Barry by Agrafina, blind and drop-dead gorgeous younger sister of Two Fingers Rivera, whose lunatic safeguarding of her honor was the stuff of legend. Two Fingers swore to Buttons that he loved him like a brother but would have to cut his nuts off if he so much as had a wet dream that featured Agrafina, which of course only fanned the flames of Buttons Barry’s passion. And Agrafina, Agrafina was a woman who would play with fire, and the things she could do with her cane.... He felt himself becoming aroused, hardly the time or place for it, the other side, some other side, bent on taking him out, and Stone, well, Stone would not give him up, had his own quirky code, but there should be no misunderstanding, Buttons and Stone were allies only on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if Stone did not yet know just who that enemy was, and maybe Buttons none too sure when it got down to details. No, it was not just a cigarette holder.

Buttons got a grip on himself, led himself over to the trash can where he deposited the destroyed token of Agrafina's affection, then helped himself to more of his host’s whiskey, host being not precisely the word for their relationship just then, but to his way of thinking close enough for rock and roll. Stone dumped the pieces of glass into the trash atop the cigarette holder, then put the broom and dustpan away and poured himself a drink and sat across from Buttons and placed the SIG on the table and said in a tone that brooked no nonsense, "So start talking."

Fingers drumming nervously atop the table. "Mind if I smoke?"

"I do."

Buttons nodded, yeah, and told Stone he and Two Fingers should have been set for life with the take from the contras. They figured to get away clean, their tradecraft sound, tracks covered, higher-ups distracted by threats of congressional subpoena, criminal prosecution, frigging jail time. Then the Berlin Wall fell, the Evil Empire crumpled, up and down the food chain everybody was suddenly concerned with job security. A couple of disappeared spooks and a rucksack stuffed with hundred dollar bills were small potatoes at that point. And it was not as if they were living large. They bounced around the Rim for a few years, Lima, Manila, Melbourne, Ho Chi Minh City, ended up in Thailand, set up house in a small compound on the outskirts of Bangkok, the three of them, for Two Fingers was adamant that Agrafina come along so he could look after her, however much she insisted she could take care of herself, which Buttons did not doubt, but Two Fingers would not take no for an answer.

Buttons offered up a wry smile. "But you know how it is, even when you live simply, the money slips through your fingers, it just slips away when it’s all going out, nothing to speak of coming in."

"To speak of?"

"You know Two Fingers. He invested in some minor deals involving illicit pharmaceuticals. One of them went awry. We had to pay off some people."

"That have anything to do with who’s chasing you now?"

Buttons brushed off the question. "Oh, hell no."

"I was afraid of that," Stone said wearily and reached for the bottle.

Even with the payoffs, things got a little hot for them in Bangkok. This was back in ΄01. Summer. It really heated up come fall. Buttons paused, went to the bathroom to relieve himself, leaving Stone to pour another drink and mutter, “Well, that makes one of us who’s being relieved.”

next episode:

Charlotte Reine: Twenty-two

previous

Charlotte Reine: One
Charlotte Reine: Two
Charlotte Reine: Three
Charlotte Reine: Four
Charlotte Reine: Five
Charlotte Reine: Six
Charlotte Reine: Seven
Charlotte Reine: Eight
Charlotte Reine: Nine
Charlotte Reine: Ten
Charlotte Reine: Eleven
Charlotte Reine: Twelve
Charlotte Reine: Thirteen
Charlotte Reine: Fourteen
Charlotte Reine: Fifteen
Charlotte Reine: Sixteen
Charlotte Reine: Seventeen
Charlotte Reine: Eighteen
Charlotte Reine: Nineteen
Charlotte Reine: Twenty

What's wrong with poetry?

2008-11-16T10:04:00.000-08:00

Poets are given to weeping, moaning, and gnashing of teeth over the sorry state of the poetry of the day, much as pundits whose philosophy of government was repudiated in the last election and politicos who have passed from power lament the sorry state of the nation.

Why, it’s not poetry at all, just prose with ragged line breaks, and often not terribly engaging prose at that. Or it’s formal, with meter you can count out the beats, calculated repetitions, complex patterns, and variable rhyme schemes, polished and crafted with care, but nothing much to say, a pretty trinket, no more. And what's with those slam poets and others who compose for performance, disdainful of the page and the written word. And for all that, does anyone who's not a poet or a poet-enabler care anyway?

This kind of thing has probably been going on for about as long as people have been making poems. You can go back to old Wordsworth and Coleridge in the the preface to Lyrical Ballads, the young Ezra Pound, Breton's various manifestos of Surrealism, the Beats, all sounding the clarion to save poetry from the narcissistic versifiers, tin-earred rhymesters, hacks hammering it out by the ream, poetasters of myriad stripes churning out the drivel of the day.

Much poetry of the day, whatever the day, is lightweight stuff or worse, at best amusing or entertaining, and for that best there is something to be said. Not every poem must touch us deeply as Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of light” touches us deeply, a good thing, otherwise the making of poems would be a prospect too daunting to take on. There is a place for lesser poems, for pretty trinkets and minor entertainments, but these are not what we really care about.

Old Hegel summed it up nicely enough:

Yet it is no doubt the case that art can be employed as a fleeting pastime, to serve the ends of pleasure and entertainment, to decorate our surroundings, to impart pleasantness to the external conditions of our life, and to emphasize other objects by means of ornament. In this mode of employment art is indeed not independent, not free, but servile. But what we mean to consider, is the art which is free in its end as in its means.

Entertainments matter. Even frivolity has its place in being human. Yet it is the art that is free in its end as in its means, as the Dickinson poem weighed over against and above the pretty trinket, that gives art its place as something more than just another entertainment, that elevates poetry in its best sense to matter in a way that, say, basketball does not and cannot.

The 10 November poetry reading at 3 Friends Coffee House drew a standing room only crowd. Okay, it’s a coffee house, doesn't take all that many to make a crowd. (I am minded of Harry Crews’s maxim that a good bar is never crowded because not enough people know the difference between a good bar and a bad bar to make a crowd, but that’s fodder for another day.) Show and Tell Gallery Productions put the attendance at 43 in the gallery email update later in the week, not exactly Bruce Springsteen at the Rose Garden, but not too shabby for poetry. More to the point, I believe it safe to say those present found some entertainment, in the broadest and best sense of that term, and some nurture for the spirit.

Of these themes, more anon. Yes, I know, those who come regularly to this space have heard that before, only to be disappointed, or perhaps relieved, as the case may be, to have seen no more on the subject. I have of late paved several roads to hell with my good intentions, but I really do intend to come back to this one.

today's thought

2008-11-13T06:43:00.001-08:00

When asked the difference between art and eroticism, Picasso replied, "But there is no difference."

a portable bohemia at 3 Friends Mondays: Caffeinated Art

2008-11-11T18:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday evening your oft humbled scribe took his portable bohemia to 3 Friends Mondays: Caffeinated Art, where he had the pleasure of appearing with poet of radical amazement Judith Fay Pulman and Heather Browne, conjurer of ocean bones and moon poofs, congealed jazz lights and pillowed wicker tumbleweeds.

A podcast of the reading can be found at Broken Hours: Three Friends Mondays: Caffeinated Series.

3 Friends Mondays: Caffeinated Art is produced by Show and Tell Gallery Productions.

memo from the marketing desk

The new chapbook a portable bohemia, poems by David Matthews with illustration by Kelsey Mosley, is now sort of available. Writes Curtis Whitecarroll, author of drowning of thirst and psalms and suicide notes: "The poetry of David Matthews is haunting and calming, surreal and direct, like being hit by a freight train covered in pillows."

Heather Browne's new zine, Heartbreak City, and Judith Pulman's markbody, published May 2008, featuring illustration by Kelsey Mosley, are also out.