Pedagogic Creed (Dewey Thoughts)

"I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race."

"I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself."

"I believe that under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life."

Why are you in the class?

What can you exchange here?

wolfish as gleam

"I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life."

                    not not
                    enigma

    "The law for presenting and treating material is the law within the child's own nature."

"What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it."

googling the wind

"I believe that interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. I believe that they represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost importance."

                oh wow
                the nut deed

                good night wind wag

"The interest is always the sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power."

                vow lad as flash halo

"I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative."

What do you want to write now?

How will what you write now fit the future?

Can the present hold your interest?

        "I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences."

            "I believe that literature is the reflex expression and interpretation of social experience; that hence it must follow upon and not precede such experience. It, therefore, cannot be made the basis, although it may be made the summary of unification."

    "Language is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting individual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end."

        "I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it."

                the image
                is relevance

In these declarations, he = she & he.
Insist on this completion and embrace.

Also: child = student. Transitions
are continual.

What the student sees, the student learns from;
what the student does not see, the student does not learn from.

        "There is an important distinction between verbal, mechanical memory and what older writers called judicious memory. The latter seizes the bearings of what is retained and recalled; it can, therefore, use the material in new situations where verbal memory would be completely at a loss."--Dewey, "Education in Relation to Form"

        "The school system represents not thinking but the domination of thought by the inertia of immemorial customs.—”Education as Engineering"

    Write a sentence, then write another.
See how the sentences meet together,
forming a process of thought.

Note: All quotes from:
John Dewey. The Essential Dewey, Volume One, (Bloomington and Indianapolis). Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, eds. Indiana University Press. 1998.

Uncited quotes are from "My Pedagogic Creed" by John Dewey.

Boldfaced phrases were discovered by Beth Garrison using an algorithmic anagram program.

The Tempest

And in other cultural news...

Just saw a production of The Tempest, outdoors in the great metropolis of Nashua, NH. Two of the homeschoolers we've seen many times—they played Romeo & Juliet together—were in it. Much of the rest of the cast were older.

It was performed on stage in a park. A nice setting, but the acoustics were poor. We sat fairly close and could hear everything except when planes or motorcycles passed by. Midway thru the production some teenage girls collected in front. Some while later, as a scene ended, the three got up giggling, one said “Great job, everyone”, and they skittered off in teenage hilarity.

There was barely any set to speak of, and most of the cast dressed in ordinary modern clothes. Ariel wore a sprite-rated gown, Caliban was properly outré, and Trinculo, played by a female, inexplicably wore a flouncy, parti-coloured tutu. Most of the men wore shirts with ties. And guns were in the pockets of the murderous ones.

The play rollicked along, with no stops for acts. Players came in from the audience quite a bit, and Trinculo lay drunk near me at one point. It was a decent production.

I did not care for the woman who played Caliban, but I do not think I would care for anyone who played Caliban. I think of the Monty Python skit featuring the hospital for overacting. You see all these Richards lamenting excessively about their kingdom for a horse. I fear Caliban may be inextricably linked to that sort of performance, tho to be honest, I have never seen a performance of The Tempest before (not counting that scifi movie with Leslie Nielsen, in which Robbie the Robot played Caliban (and played the role well!)).

One of the players had a thick New England accent that verged on JFK's, tho it must be said that JFK's accent was some sort of concoction merely influenced by the New England tongue. Prospero was Brit, most the rest American, altho the girl who played Ariel, former Juliet, has a British mother and Canadian father, and speaks that way.

A nice touch came at the end when sailors arrived on the island to save everyone. They were dressed as Gilligan and the Skipper. Chortle.

The Tempest is a nifty play, especially reckoning Shakespeare himself as the magister Prospero. Vaunted Shakespeare has become a tiresome conceit. It is fair to reckon him within the sphere of entertainment as well as grand literature. I say this thinking of Prospero begging for applause at the end. I think we must concede his humanity. Winter's Tale (or whatever was) is kind of a crappy ending for his career, you ask me. That was, btw, the first homeschool production that we saw. A decent production, but the play is kind of crackers. To me it is Willie Mays with the Mets, flubbing a basket catch or falling down on his way to first after singling. Anyway, gee, a free performance of Shakespeare.

Watchmen

Erin and I just finished watching Watchmen. His review was succinct: "Well, that sucked." I do not exactly beg to differ, but I will throw more words at the thing.

It is based in the weird conceit of superheroes in a real sort of world. Just try. The chorus is: human all too human, ultra cynical version. Comix deserve this sort of attention and consideration, because so much of the malarkey of comix goes by without criticism. Like, Superboy once split 2 planets in half, because one had half destroyed by fire, so his cure was to merge the good half of another planet with the good half of the one he wanted to save. The scale of that is ridiculous, am I right?

I do not really want to recount the plot of Watchmen, it fetches far without a lot of cred. The story resides in an alternate history in which Nixon remains president for several terms, just imagine. We are offered a lot of squirrelly caricatures of Nixon and others of that era. On the plus side, the soundtrack has some nice artifacts from the 60s to the 80s (movie was set in 1985). This is all secondary to the convolutions of character interplay between the superheroes. In this, the story reminds me of Jonathan Lethem's “Super Goat Man”, except these heroes have clear powers. The recent Batman also comes to mind, too, even to the gruff whisper of Rorschach (a la the Dark Knight himself).

The movie is spectacularly, even lusciously, violent. It turns all that ka-pow of comix to its logical limit. Might as well admit the damage that superheroes could do.

Like Dark Knight, Watchmen revels in the possibilities of superpowers, that superheroes would be no more morally pristine than you or me. And the question of why Superman et al. would bother with bank robbers when the spectre of war, etc. Dr Manhattan, the glowing blue bundle of energy (he looks like a particularly buff (steroidal) Academy Award), ends the Vietnam War by grimly slaughtering everything in his path. Which is a logical endpoint to superpowers.

The movie is three hours long, owing to the tendency of many of the SHs to soliloquize. Dr Manhattan does it just standing there, whereas Rorschach at least is voiceover, with action going on. These speeches are staid exercises in cynical, nihilistic viewpoint, really just flouncy cries for attention. Watchmen wants some seriousness to survive thru the malarkey but chokes it with a reliance on comic book surface.

I never read the comic, tho I think I may have it around here. I like turning superheroes on their end, but this is a rough attempt. There is considerable backstory implied, some of it ridiculous. The central female, whose moniker I forget, turns out, we discover, to be the daughter of The Comedian, who raped her SH mother. The Comedian himself, he never does one clean superhero act, not even in his vaunted youth. He is hard to fit into the story. The others, even Rorschach, who is a psycho, seem to have managed some superheroism.

The result of all this, I feel, is over extended trash. I mean trash in the positive sense, but still. The stultifying speeches soften whatever edge that was possible, so that even the looniness of the characters is dried out. Alas. I suspect the comic would work better. I do not know if The Dark Knight could have been a source for this film, but there are similarities. Instead of the Joker at the center, tho, we have the two drippiest SHs, The Owl and that aforementioned 2nd generation SH.

Another Shadow by Tom Beckett (Precipitous Inklings)

Tom Beckett has a new e-book available called Another Shadow. You would do well to avail yourself.

As it happens, Ron Silliman recently adverted a review of Geoff Young's work by Terrence Winch, which, tangent to this tho it be, is worth a look. Winch writes, "In a universe of very needy and ambitious writers, these brave souls will be seen primarily in their role as servants to the needy." With both Young and Beckett, I knew them first as publishers, excellent ones. It is nice to see some sense of their worth as writers come to the fore. Anyway, the appearance of Tom's book engenders a few general thoughts.

First, his tendency to write in short lines, brief nuggets. Writers come to mind: Niedecker, Corman, Raworth, Zukofsky. The impulse behind each writer is different but there seems to be a coincidence of effect, as one reads these trimmed and salient works. I mean the metre of the short line, for one thing. Energy coalesces in the words hung nakedly in the white space.

As I read thru the works in Another Shadow, I am aware of the meaning in the white space that Tom carefully protects. Much resides in that white space. There is a time signature there, not strictly a matter of beats. Page as stanza, or measure.

The reader has to respect the beats, read carefully and slowly. Even tho there is much nervous energy involved in the writing.

Years ago, Peter Ganick remarked that his own work was philosophy. I take that to mean that not just aesthetic issues are at work (or play) but that a manner of thinking and discovery also occurs. Tom Beckett's work is implacable in its persistence to extend into if not resolve issues of body and mind. This is a constant in Tom's work. We read an involvement, set to a measure. The Internet has allowed Tom Beckett to blossom as a writer, to find a greater audience for his own work. It is about time.

Consider the Library

I always anticipate going to the bookstore, the pleasure of acquiring new books: that whole adventure. It is especially great going with Beth, because she looks at everything, whereas I tend to have a limited focus, whatever bee or two happens to inhabit my bonnet at the time, and too impatient to look further. She found what is considered a classic work on memory by Frances Yates. It is unlikely that I would have stumbled on that. Fascinating book about how the Greeks imagined a house, and placed memories within rooms in that house, as a way to organize their memory

Anyway, I notice that I get a similar buzz going to the library. Last week I was wandering thru the local library, which is new to me (just moved). We moved only a few miles but we're in a new library network. New vista. Recently, I made a quick reconnaissance pass and grabbed without planning to grab anything, a scifi novel by Ben Bova, Orion Among the Stars. I liked it, despite it being part of a series, which I have learned to hate.

That attitude of cranking out another one deflates the genre (and fantasy, as well) terribly. All these trilogies that are simply outsized novels, or sequels and prequels that serve to attenuate and destroy whatever was developed early on.

Looking thru the stacks and seeing ugh how many Dune novels, sad. Frank Herbert wrote a classic, the original Dune, and successive excursions have proven less inspiring, at least among the 5 (ugh!) that I read. I can see going back to characters and settings that work, but eventually the thing that tickled the author to make this novel gets lost.

And then there is this obnoxious deal of someone joining the original author to exploit the franchise further. This happened with Herbert, his son took over, maybe after Frank's death. Arthur C Clarke had another writer come in. It may be that the 2nd writer approached Clark, wanting to wring the thing dry, which Clarke ok'd, or maybe Clarke needed a collaborator. Whatever.

I adventured around in the library a little more the other evening. Got essays by David Foster Wallace. Soon I will try Infinite Jest. I remember vaguely when it came out, probably read reviews in The New Yorker or the Times Book Review. Wallace's death brought it to mind again.

The Ben Bova worked for me because it was the right length, a crisp 300 pages or so. Few novels are too short but many are too long, tho I love the successful long ones (Proust, Joyce, etc). I once read 11 Stephen King novels one summer. I will not deny King's skill but found a lot of of the books were plain overlong. Not bad writing but a paid-by-the-word feeling. A lack of concentration. Facile.

So, the last trip to the library, along with the Wallace (which, so far, is entertaining, but, you know, Edward Dorn's occasional pieces, which these by Wallace resemble, are more zesty to me). Got a collection by John Dewey, a plain and sensible man. Also got a scifi by someone. David Brin blurbed "Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton." That was enough for me to dip in, tho Brin is a dullish writer from my experience, but on the off chance. I once got the buzz to collect books from the used bookstore that adverted hilarity. However many of these treasures that I bought I found next to none that satisfied my sense of hilarity, as in laugh out loud. Usually these so called comic novels are just situational comedies, with the situations overplayed. Terry Ptatchett, Douglas Adams: they are certifiably funny. And Laurence Sterne for a different taste. One of Hemingway's' posthumously-published novels was supposed to be Benchleyesque, so I read it. Nothing of the kind. Selah.

I was impressed at the lengthy shelf of sci (which comprises fantasy, as well) offered by the library. There were a goodly slumload of Part 7 of the Excessiad stuff but still, I could be entertained by this and that. In high school, I know that I read a lot. I remember using those spare moments, like the 3 minutes from getting to class and when the bell rings, to get back to my reading. I cannot read like that anymore. I read little poetry then. Read a lot of whatnot that I got because of the covers, breathtaking space vistas being one thing that might grab me.

I have not even found the poetry shelf yet at this library. Not that it will impress me when I do. That musty smell of books that do not get enough airing. I once made a smart remark here, concerning a David Shapiro book I saw at B&N. From a big time publisher, with over many blank pages and that kind of denatured thingness that poetry books are contorted to. I could imagine finding a copy all musty from sitting in a library and decided not to buy it. This was not a criticism of Shapiro's work, but of the attitude that encases poetry in dust. The poetry shelf is where few deign to tread.

Poetry: A Semi-Demi-Hemi-Annual Statement

Last weekend, Tom Beckett and Geof Huth gave a reading in Buffalo, to read and celebrate their collaborative joint interview, a project of at least a year. According to one of their accounts, 11 people attended. Buffalo is too far off for this camper to shuffle off to, and the school year at Buffalo was over, but still, that 11 seems not enough. For any reading, that is, let alone for one that really promised a pay off. What's up with poetry?

Poetry is not some camp we go to, either as vacation or as a neglect of more serious stuff. Poetry is the language itself, yours, mine, and that of those people over there by the daylilies. It is the language of Margaret Fuller drowning and of Thoreau on the seashore looking for her remains. It is the language of that and more. You know this.

We as poets, writers of poems, need not be defensive about poetry. It has a function that we can describe and honour. WCW was right (once again) that you cannot get the news from a poem. Poetry is not for the survival of facts, but for the lifting of facts and concerns to places of importance. Poetry is language at the essence of communication. Granted, this communication is not at the simple delivery level of thing for thing. Heidegger (which see) grants us distinctions by going at the idea of thingness, which sounds at first (and at second, and at third) like a convolution until one relaxes into the ride of that query and realizes the barest minimum. Emerson notes that every word was, initially, a poem. Exaltation, exultation, excitation.

We need something to get thru the screening process, thru our lack of attention, thru our mundane distraction. Poetry is a capability that we discover and develop. As a writer, I came to poetry as an alternative to the bounded possibilities that I saw (novels, essays, whatever: they were (at least I thought they were) fully defined. Poetry, once freed in my mind from metre and rhyme, which overwhelmed any other aspect of poetry for me, looked likely to give me space. I was ignorant, no question, but I did not see myself writing like someone else.

As I have written before, my first palpable influence as a writer was probably Robert Benchley. I liked his humour, of course, but also, I liked the sense of his stance. I saw him as being able to writer 'like that' about anything. Sure, I mimicked him some, and others as well, out of envy as well as within a process of learning. I knew all along that I could not capture the thing of most interest, but learning that was a step in my own slow growth as a writer. Eventually, I allowed myself to teem with my own necessity, not that of the already integrated.

I and others have written of the reading that Tom Beckett gave in Cambridge in '07. It was wonderful to witness his nerves, his insistence, his involvement. Geof Huth was not on the docket that day but his presence was felt (the intimate dynamics of the reading space allowed audience involvement, and even just Geof's furious notetaking was a contribution). Later, at the pub, the conversation roiled, with Tom and Geof, fellow reader Charles Shively, Jack Kimball, and others. To which, alas, I was unable to enter by virtue of where I sat and that I had to leave early. The point of this remembrance is just to note the intensity of the combination: that Poetry. That some heavy shit, man.

I have always felt slightly icky about poetry and about calling myself a poet. Poetry is grand spaces, for sure, but its intensity is often read as merely rarification, only those born in high places with lungs that can breathe the thin air there. Partly, that is true, but only in the sense that you need strong lungs, just to stretch the metaphor awkwardly. Poetry is learned, not bequeathed. Really, the learning is the interesting part, once you get used to the effort. Like running, where you learn to resist the boundaries, go further, harder, until the occasional moment of ease that makes a lot of trudging worthwhile.

Poetry is so damn useful, because it directed me to learn words, and how words work together, and what words could mean in contexts that they, the words, did not expect. And so forth. I acknowledge the great debt I owe to Charles Olson, for the interesting paths he suggested to me. I will shoo idolatry aside (it has its uses for the youthful writer) and remain with the fact of the interesting venues I saw in Olson's attempts. Science and history and philology and politics and aesthetics. You might find the same elsewhere. Gather it up, it is Poetry.

It was an event in Buffalo, I have no doubt. It was an event when Jack Kimball, in his excitement over the evolving work, showed and read to Beth and me the ms for Post-Twyla. It will be an event when Jeff Harrison and I read either of our two endless collaborations in public (halfway between Arkansas and Massachusetts, I wot). Poetry is an event. It is language poised for any possibility. Your language, my language, the world's language. We do not need to be defensive about our interest in such a thing. It is worthy of the best spaces on our cave walls.

Antic View

Antic View continues apace. Jeff Harrison is a thoughtful and idiosyncratic thinker, and I am usefully reactive. You know what? I prepared myself for writing. I put myself in front of the texts, tho I did not know what I was supposed to find (and yet I found 'it'). Jeff is a scholar, as evidenced by his command (see Antic View, intallments 1-141). Do I have to sell this? Welladay.

On a similar road, Tom Beckett and Geof Huth gave a reading of (a selection of) their own 1-year dual interview in a reading at Buffalo yestreen (sat nite live). Geof is a terrific critical thinker, Tom is a gentle provocateur, and both are exceptional poets. Look for the publication of this work. Read the generating incisions that Jeff and I bring. I think we are On To Something.

Michael Jackson, Selah

I was surprised to hear of Michael Jackson's death and, perhaps stupidly, surprised at the reaction to it. I know he has been popular, and his incipient comeback generated a lot of interest, but that did not add up to relevancy in my eyes. I thought it was all about the hype machine, but I guess that I was wrong.

Jackson was an original. I do not need to haul out WCW's still accurate description of America's pure products (which, of course, I have just deftly done), but Jackson was certainly troubled. His talent was enormous, as singer, as dancer, and as entertainer, but the curtain never seemed to be drawn across the stage of his life.

What gets me is that the 1st thing that occurs to me when thinking of Jackson is his weirdness. I am tolerant of difference, and do not excoriate him for his look, or his hobby horses. The cloud of pedophilia that hangs over him, however, is disturbing, and he never seemed intent on mitigating that.

As entertainer, he was not to my taste, but I could appreciate what he did. Some of his songs were downright silly. I mean "Billie Jean" is not convincing at all, nor "Beat It". He was more convincing in that song with Paul McCartney, the video of which shows him joining Linda and Paul as travelling scam artists. Jackson was still fresh-faced then. I think he could have gone in the way of McCartney, as an entertainer, I mean, but his weird relation to the world scotched that. He was more publicly weird than Elvis but it seems like they were similar in their urge to live in a make believe world or something. I do not know, nor do I really want to tramp these grounds.

It would seem that the rumours and accusaations of his pedophilia would be a deal breaker. Instead, they simply kept the people who would not have liked him anyway in a state of boil. His fans stayed with him. I do not ignore Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism, I live with it. My interest in his work cannot let me ignore that critical aspect of the man. And Pound paid for that anti-Semitism, if that is any consolation, which it is not.

MJ paid for his interest in children, in more than one way. It is dynamically creepy that parents allowed him to use their children as playmates. MJ was clearly out of touch concerning boundaries but how did the parents figure it? They were enablers.

RIP is especially appropriate with Jackson. His was an agitated soul, for which he seemingly found no relief. The pure products of America thing seems terribly apt. The weirder he was, the more interest he received from the world. The snowball just kept getting bigger.

Richard Brautigan

Peter Ciccarriello proves to be my prime source for interesting links, via Twitter. Here is one he recently tweeted, a small publication by Richard Brautigan, brought to online life. Nice to be reminded of Brautigan.

I 1st read him in the earliest days of Rolling Stone. This was before that esteemed piece of crap became an esteemed piece of crap. Brautigan contributed tiny prose pieces as column filler. These pieces were quirky and under-inflected and fit oddly well with the distinctions of the burgeoning rag and the teeming new music scene being documented.

I am sure Brautigan's work inspired a slew of pointedly wishy washy dabblings, but his own work stood and stands with an innocent sort of genuineness. A quick, scholarly study of Wikipedia reveals that Brautigan suffered paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression. I do not know what that assertion is worth (including the possibility of multiple jolts of electroconvulsive therapy), but it all rings as plausible, at least. But why go there? Okay, such intelligence does seem to help make sense of the man and his work.

Brautigan's work reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's except Vonnegut was much more canny, which I do not think Brautigan could ever be accused of. Vonnegut's flaky mythos in his earlier books beheld an honest sort of scope but I found later books (Breakfast of Champions comes to mind) tiresome in their effort to be underinflected.

Brautigan's work seems to hold no scope whatsoever. His work resides in a depressed yet lovely stasis. The pictures I've seen of him all show a classic (so to speak) California hippie type. I mean that phrase generously. Brautigan had long hair, full droopy mustache, brimmed hat, wholly iconic in my eye. According to the undaunted expertise at Wikipedia, Brautigan died by his own hand in 1984. I was thinking he died more recently. Sad and wistful story. His work seems an attempt to find a quiet place of chance, an opening into sunlight. The translation of the hard copy into an online experience is by Andrew Stafford. Isn't it a sweet, wispy pleasure?

Richard & Mimi Farina

Peter Ciccariello uses Twitter to send nifty url's (@ciccariello). The other day he posted er tweeted a link to a Youtube video (not that Youtube created the video) of Richard and Mimi Farina. I have not listened to them in years, alas, but please check out this and this. Folk Scene, 1966. "Pack Up Your Sorrows" is a classic sort of song, a lovely icon of the early 60s. "Joy Round My Brain" is that moment of wide-eyed hippie purity, palpably sincere. Mimi's utterly crystalline voice, like that of her sister Joan Baez, and Richard's straightforward genuineness create a wonderful experience. And didn't they look like J Crew models? Gee, Richard died on Mimi's 21st birthday. Selah, but the sweetness lasts. And take a few hats off to Pete Seeger. Okay, he did not take kindly to Dylan backed by the Paul Butterfield Band, but the guy made thunder with a stalwart political edge. Friends, please take this stuff all as resource.

Web Two Point Woe

The instigation of this ramble was my having watched that awful morning show on Fox, id est one host of reasonable obsequity and 2 certifiably stupid, as in stupid, co-hosts. The good Senator Grassle from somewhere Twittered about Obama, specifically that the president hadn't ought to be gallivaunting around Paris when the country needs leadership. It was a ridiculous criticism because clearly Obama has been busy in his first months in the White House, and are your hands so work-dirtied Senator Grassle? Not, let me say, a big story.

The real story was that the senator used Twitter to broadcast his exasperation. Because, you know, Oprah said Hey, Peeps! I'm on Twitter!!!!!!!!, and that effort at product placement made Twitter worth talking about on television, thus a substantial commodity. And that is Web 2.0, a new sense of online community.

I have not gotten into Twitter a whole lot. I follow a number of funny/interesting people, Jesse Thorn of the podcast Jordan Jesse Go!, the three members of You Look Nice Today (who met thru Twitter), Rob Corddry, and a few others I just sort of fell to. I do not contribute often, just do not have the handle on that. I am not ragging on Twitter, it could be quite useful. I think the communities built upon it could become quickly lapsed, but that is just a guess.

Peter Ciccariello is the only poet type that I follow who makes a vigourous usage of Twitter. He posts links to articles and works online, including his own fine visual work (@ciccariello). That is a community effort, and not simply performance of the public directive. I do not want to say that there is no interest for writers and poets, my study and usage of Twitter, as I have indicated, is limited. Presumably the potential is there for a poetic Twitter community...

Ten years ago, listservs were immeasurably useful to me, as a way to connect to other writers. Beth and I met thru a listserv, and the Poetics list, at that time, was a way to read some zesty (at times) thinking re contemporary poetry, also to connect via backchannel to writers from afar. Having fallen into isolation, I found this to be a great opportunity, truly invigourating.

Alas, the Poetics list got old and wary. Stephen Vincent for one admirably continues to press the idea of community, the connection we hold as writers and poets, as well as citizens of a wider consideration. I think the machine is broken, now. That is okay, the world changes and new tools arise.

Other community tools...

Blogs started to become common 5 years ago, which is when I began using them. Oddly, there arose the sense that blog writing was somehow different from other writing. Many people use blogs as journals, which is to say public performances of their world view. This happens currently with some Twitter users. The medium does not require this usage. Those who look askance at blogs are not recognizing the basic tool. Blogs are websites, simple to use. In the early days, they developed communities, in which like-minded bloggers would refer back and forth. That self-reference got rather boggy, frankly, in a way similar to how some Twitterers get. A public Twitter replying to another reads, to the outsider, as a mere puzzle, just as blogs did. Community does not hold up in that way, too restrictive.

I believe in the possibility of the Internet. I think, however, that the pressure on the various tools is over-emphasized. By my augury, we will see a decline in Facebook because it is so consuming. It is fascinating that ex-classmates or co-workers, or whoever, can find you after so many years, and that you can work the network into a wide intimacy. Some of this network development is just counting coup but still. I do not feel all that attached to the writers with whom I am connected, not in the sense of a Facebook community. I have not given the effort needed, I admit. The vastness and busyness of the interface is too distracting. The promotional interest of Facebook itself, and of some of the denizens of the surface, amount to clutter. Would that that clutter could be delivered elsewhere, so that one could receive just content qua content.

How, the question occurs, can these tools deliver more of their communal possibly?

Recent Deaths

Robin Blaser and David Bromige both died recently, as well as David Carradine. Bromige and Blaser are writers I should read more of, tho I have taken lessons from both. Carradine is something different to me, but his death is affecting.

My real intro to Blaser was his excellent essay on Spicer, "The Practice of Outside", included in Black Swallow's edition of Collected Books. It is a great introduction to Spicer, perceptive and comprehensive. His poetry, which I finally delved into by way of Holy Forest, conspires to open into an excitement of language, from the vantage of a quiet perspective. Duncan and Spicer were louder compadres, so to speak, but Blaser's more minimalist style had character and strength.

Bromige was an odd one, with a good sine qua non factor. I think I first met Bromige by way of This 3, in which I was published, and it is my memory that Bromige was as well. So, someone Grenier knew, so I looked further in Bromige's direction. Tom Beckett, of course, dedicated an issue of The Difficulties to Bromige, etc. Bromige's Englishy humour and sliding skew of language is tough yet involving. He, and Blaser too, should be regarded more highly by the experts out there. That is, the landscape is wickedly varied, and interest should not rest in the first call manifestations of poetic assertion. The Poetics list flunked out for me by how limited and lame the readership seemed to be. Too may writers deserve better than that crack.

Carradine, well. Perfectly brewed Hollywood oddball, for sure. His father, I estimate, appeared in every movie ever made. I saw some upliftingly screwy horror movie in which Carradine makes an appearance. The director played along, and inserted a picture of John Carradine into the film, so that even after his death he was appearing in movies. Without filling in blanks or assumptions, the idea of hanging oneself in Bangkok just sounds too sad and horrible. And so I have writ my piece on recent deaths...

Only in Whispers (review)

Only in Whispers is the comic that I bought last Sunday at Anime Boston (Issue 1, 2007). It is a product of Free Lunch Comics, a small independent entity, I infer. Nothing wrong with independent. Matt Ryan, the person who I spoke with, is the president of this entity.

I did not dip deeply into the world of underground comix in the day but certainly liked them. R Crumb and his ferocious world view, S Clay Wilson and his odd fascination with bikers and pirates, the intensely psychedelic Rick Griffin, etc. I no longer have whatever collection I made of these things, alas. They were anodyne to the the weary paths much of Marvel and DC comix were on at the time. So now there is a more wide open market for comix, not underground but not Marvel either.

Only in Whispers reminds me of Charlton Comics. Charlton ran a distant um 5th or 6th behind DC, Marvel, Harvey, and whatever. Without consulting Wikipedia, I will say that Charlton dealt largely with horror stories, which is where the comparison with Whispers begins. The Charlton visual style was rough, if I remember rightly. Whispers boasts several different artists but I think the style would be considered manga-like: images expressively stretched across panels and pages.

The cover shows a desperate looking fellow in what appears to be a Grande Armee uniform, tho the hat (shako?) bears a skull emblem, with sword draw (well, the whole picture is drawn). At his feet is a horde of rats, presumably at his command. The background suggests a fiery, hellish scene. So, what is the takeaway?

It is an image of horror. This scene does not relate to anything inside the book. It is just a visceral, powerful image. That is the pull of the horror genre, the inexplicable and disturbing.

Think of Frankenstein's monster. By Shelley's presentation he is basically someone with an unfortunate upbringing who murders a few people. Karloff's monster exceeds those distinctions and presents an unexplainable phenomenon, to iconic levels of intensity. What I am doing here is relating the virtues of the horror genre.

The inside cover introduces a creepy fellow from whose library the ensuing stories come. The Crypt Keeper without the kitsch, and a way to tie the disparate stories together.

The first story is set in Coventry, MA, which gets me right away. I do not believe a Coventry exists in Massachusetts (one does in Rhode Island), but the localization makes me think of Lovecraft. One of Lovecraft's books was published in Athol, Massachusetts, in the mysterious realm beyond Worcester. In stopping there once, and knowing that one Lovecraft fact, I felt the impinging strangeness of HPL. I guess I am drifting in tangents here...

The plot of the story is simple and odd: a writer finds/steals a manuscript written in blood, the Devil's book. The woman from whom it was obtained, a witch, invokes revenge. The End. In the gap between the period and the capital T one sees the writer being caught by numerous spider webs, culminating in the final page spread of the writer grossly ensnared and covered with spiders. The artwork is manga-like and graphic, meaning that the panels stand well on their own.

Next is a short story by Steve Kanarus, who is publisher of Free Lunch Comics (Ryan is president). It is about a magic-involved couple. I think you could say that they teeter on the edge of black arts but finally choose a less nihilistic, more redemptive view. Horror stories are nothing if not moralistic, by which I mean there is always that sense of balance: good/evil, right/wrong.

The next story is familiar enough, a man makes what turns out to be a Faustian deal, and we witness the ensuing decline in his life. It seems to me the inking is too heavy, the lines too thick, for the more delicate style of the artist (Stephanie O'Donnell; story again by Kanarus). The style is more linear than what I call manga-like, and to me less interesting. To each his own, of course. The Faust theme is powerful, and always leaves you wanting to yell, Don't do it!.

"The Conscript" (Kanarus/Anthony Summey) features a black arts fellow in 18th Century Germany. He insinuates himself darkly into some lives there then is banished to America. The story features some very Lovecraftian rats, maybe the cover does relate to this story, and an implication that the story will continue. The idea of this bad influence coming to the New World is a powerful idea. I mean Keats' brother came to the States a little later to join a Utopian community (I think Coleridge almost joined the same one). The belief that America welcomes all receives an early challenge. I think the story should continue, as it does not wholly satisfy as it stands. It ends, I should say, with rats scritching in the walls of the home of the person who had the magician sent away.

The final story, by Andrew Pollock seulement, is "The Wailing". In smaller letters in the title square is the word WitchHound: is that part of the title or the name of a continuing character or series?. Je ne sais pas.

The plot concerns a curst family. Every generation, a male of the family hears the banshee's cry. then dies. A Mr. Delacroix is consulted. I am shakily guessing that he turns into this creature who confronts the banshee. A violent fight ensues, until the dread words to be continued appear.

Well, as I turn the page and look at the ad there, it is for WitchHound, the adventures of which/whom I can see unfold at Wickedsmash.com. Pictured on the page is Mr. Delacroix, the creature who fought the banshee, and another creature, a hulking fellow who is built like Thing of Fantastic Four. Anyway, Pollock's style is flattened expanses of white and black, at times suggestive of Beardsley, leastwise if Beardsley were rattled from his opiate bliss. Er, I do not know if Beardsley experienced opiate bliss, just my impression from his work.

I had fun reading this and would like to read more. Comix are pretty powerful in possibility. If you look at the old Donald Ducks from the 50s and 60s, they had some pretty savvy satire going. The early superhero stuff is rife with goodies to deconstruct, and later day superheroes effort towards serious themes dealt seriously, and now the further array of possibilities. I am not expert in the genre, tho I spent my time and money in the day on these creations, so I maybe I got it 'all wrong'. My own poetics says comix are worth inclusion, or more exactly that inclusion is within the nature of my poetics. For that reason, I hope you have read this far.

Note:According to several googled sources, including the book Opium by Martin Booth, Aubrey Beardsley is indeed believed to have partaken of opium. Good guess on my part.

Whispers

Please forgive the dreadful gap problem that I have yet to solve. More posts are below.

Whispers
Originally uploaded by Simple Theory

Eiffel Tower, now more convenient

Peter Ciccariello tweeted this link, a 360 degree view from the Eiffel Tower. Hold down crtl then mouse around to change the view. I find that this thing replicates the experience of Kirk and Sulu falling from space to the evil Romulan drill thing, which brings to mind a U2 song: Vertigo...

Anime Boston

A scant few photos of Anime Boston, here. Erin was in for the whole weekend event, Beth and I managed to squeeze in just the Sunday fest. It is great fun, and I am not a rabid fan of either anime or manga. I would be happy to go to any sort of convention, because the energy of the participants is fascinating. Edward Dorn has a number of essays that recount his reactions to various events, a fashion show, a tennis or golf competition on tv, etc. You need not be ironic, as I consider Hunter S. Thompson to be, to get a ripple. So I believe...

The side of a building bordering the Mass Pike near Fenway adverted a gun show. No I.D. required. Interesting.

We got in early and did not need wait long in line to get our pass. Erin had pre-ordered a 2nd one, or that occurred in error, so we needed just the one. It seemed like there were fewer attendees but that may be due to a different use of the convention centre since Erin says that there were 4000 more than the 11,000 of a year ago. Also, Sunday is getaway day, even tho plenty happens all day.

That sense of diminished crowd was belied by the line awaiting Anime Chess. It extended the width of the convention centre. Beth and I said no thanks to that, but when we came back they were letting folks in, so we walked in and sat down. In Anime Chess, anime characters act as chess pieces, and move around the board onstage. I am unsure how the characters were chosen. One of the emcees made it sound like some would be pulled from the audience, which elicited wild screaming, and all the eager hopefuls standing on their chairs. No one was at that time selected, however.

The various characters were introduced slowly. Every one of them drew wild cheering once the introductory description made it clear who was coming. The subtleties were lost on us so we left before the actual game got far.

The Artist's Alley was larger than ever. This is where crafts people sell their wares. Lots of drawings, some jewelry and such. A lot of people offering chibi drawings, which is, if I understand, a translation of adults into children. Erin got one a couple of years ago. It did not really resemble him, just put big eyes and spiky hair on a figure that only vaguely looked like him. There is some nice work there tho.

I had my camera but once again I am pretty poor with taking pictures of people. I would prefer not to take posed pictures but that is considered bad form except in crowd scenes. I did approach a few people, as noted in the above web album. The guy in white with the sword was approached by someone, but gestured the photographer to wait until after the swordsman had finished his phone call. After he posed for that person, I asked. It is not enough to have the costume, you have to know how to present yourself in it. The woman in the Asian-looking gown hit several poses for me and a few others. The storm trooper outfit just struck me as a lot of work. In the movies, those outfits are of course ridiculous. They seem to give no extra protection, and clearly are more awkward than no amour. The family that animes together was irresistible, with the toddler out cold. The mother tried to adjust the child's hat, and almost woke him.

We ate lunch in the outdoor courtyard in the shadow of the Prudential Building. This grassy area attracted a lot of cosplayers. A group of them were doing a mock fight with their weapons, and they were spazzy. They ought to practice that stuff too. Some loud heavy metal types were shouting at people to join their group, which was attempting to start a spontaneous dance. The coolest ones joined but left soonestly, and the whole thing fizzled, just as a quick thumper started to shower.

I spoke with a guy who produces comix. I got one, my only purchase. I will write about it anon. I like comix and I like manga. I dislike, however, how many manga are 10-volume sets, id est: $100 for the full read. The comic that I got has several stories, by different writers and artists, plus several short stories with no visuals. I told him that I am not a comix writer or artist but he still talked up a comix group in Boston as well as the one in Connecticut that he belongs to. Anyway, I am terribly weary, as the dullness of this report suggests, so I will quit now. There was a rainbow as we left.

Star Trek...

... or maybe we can call it Stare Trek...

Yes, we saw the Star Trek movie. We saw the 4:30 show because Erin had to go register for Anime Boston directly afterwards, which is a lot of muy importante for one guy. Next week he goes to NJ to stay with his grandmother and work on the boardwalk, so this was our one available time. Thus we saw this movie in a theatre containing maybe 10 people.

First, the trailers.

1. Ben Stiller is at the museum again. I saw the 1st, on the small screen, I believe, funny enough tho laboured. I doubt that this one will have much mojo but snap snap snap in the trailer and it seemed rather funny.
2. Yet another Will Ferrell movie, this time with special effects and dinosaurs, which looked funny, and a different track from the stream of films that he has been in recently.
3. Jack Black and somebody else (was he in the Will Ferrell skate movie?) in a history of the world sort of something that looked wry and funny. All of these, spread across a large screen, held some attraction.
4. [downer] GI Joe, which I did not recognize as such until the title hit the screen, looked completely retarded. Must be avoided at all costs.
5. [downer] I saw the original Transformers (saw as in slept thru half of it), and it was really stupid. The special effects just seemed to be a flustered blur, and the plot was lame. So the sequel looks like worse mush. Loud bang. Move on... Oh, for some reason, 2 of the trailers featured songs by The Who. I am ok with that.

Star Trek, however, looked great, and that is the main point here, tho I am happy to help you plan your entire summer of movies. The Onion has a great take on Trekkies. I never got into Trek that much, and the way the franchise helped stifle the sf genre. I have seen plenty of Trek, Beth and Erin are frequent imbibers of Trek, but I never paid attention to the mythos. So such details as may send shivers down Trekkie backs went over my head. The movie works for such as me while I believe giving satisfaction to the trek of heart.

I realize that the sfx will look tawdry and lame in a couple of years but right now one is pulled in completely. A friend of mine declared that he would never see another Hollywood movie after seeing the 1st Trek film. I never saw that but the ones that I have seen never rose very far above the level of the tv shows in terms of cinematic zip. After the opening sequence, in which James T Kirk is born, we see the older Kirk, still a child, racing a car across a desert. It is hard to imagine the Shatner Kirk in this rowdy. I had to close my eyes as the car, but not Kirk, went over a vertiginous cliff.

Next stop is Kirk entering Starfleet. Again, it is hard to think of this guy as the seed of the weirdo in the Priceline ads. The Kirk of the movie is convincingly brash with a smart mouth, which you do not see in the Shatner Kirk much. Anyway, Kirk meets Uhura and Bones. We also get a glimpse of the young Spock's upbringing. Kirk and McCoy have a good rapport here, as they did in the original. Young Spock is stiff compared to Nimoy, but makes dramatic sense since he has yet to grow into himself.

After some preposterous moves Kirk ends up Captain of the ship, and all the familiar crew are in position. And the day is saved. Eric Bana played the Romulan bad guy. I did not recognize him.

An amazing if patently unbelievable sequence was when Kirk and Sulu attempted to thwart the Romulan space drill thingie. They and the certified crew victim freefall from a space scooter wearing extremely hopeful parachutes. They (not counting the throwaway crew member) land on this high altitude drill platform and proceed to battle it out with Romulans while I suffered extreme vertigo. Yikes!!!

The movie slips into time travel and alternate realities, for which I have low tolerance tho I know others enjoy. My brain does not wrap around temporal anomalies, and there are always garage-sized holes in the logic we are supposed to accept. This stuff aint a deal-killer for me, simply makes it fit the Trek system.

At one point, after a spat, Spock as captain maroons Kirk on a snowy planet. Following some unneeded antics with some unlikely fauna of the planet, Kirk meets with old Spock, and the fuzzy plot is fluffed into a sort of sense. The Romulan bad guy kinda turns into Khan, another familiarity, but it all works out well enough. Scottie is brought in for comic relief, and the franchise breathes again. No losers in the cast, awesome visuals, loudness is offered freely, and flashing lights that held my attention. Bring on the next one!

Mark Scroggins points to the Times review of Angels & Demons (the movie) for a thrill of its savagery. Savagery here = snarky. Snarkiness is a self-promulgating event that I know I trade in. Snarkiness is based on a blindspot raised to a virtue, which I do not find convincing. With the Dan Brown Writin' Machine, we have, according to blurb, 11,000,000 copies of A&D sold. Which does not mean the novel is good, it has holes the size of my fat (but handsome) cat, but it has value. I think it is useful to place the book in terms of those 11 million, What lack does the book fulfill? It is lazy merely to speak of the book's faults. Anyone paying attention can see Brown's clumsiness. It is much more useful to elucidate what the use is of the book. Why has this secular crowd gathered around A&D? Snarking is lazy, I am afraid, tho it is fun, meanly, to kick that particular sort of ass. For all its faults, A&D moves along. I persevered, I read Saul Bellow's Dean's December. It shuffled characters into position like soap operas then made them talk like a drag. It was lame, my friends. Didn't this dud win a Nobel prize? Do not throw Dan Brown in my face as the opposite of greatness. How abojut writing your own wonder novel, Mr. Time reviewer, and save us from Brownian influence. I have pages to go before i am thru A&D.

Ballets Russes

Friends invited us, including Erin, to the ballet this evening. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. I should go to bed but I have to find out how I liked it by writing about it. I know I liked it, but getting the impressions down asap is de rigueur. Words make it real.

I lack the vocabulary of dance, and have not seen a lot, but dance is visceral, thus offers an immediacy that does not require expertise to enjoy. Plus there's music, Prokofieff, von Weber, Stravinsky, and Debussy. I see that I am going to be turgid here, tired as I am, so this report will be quick.

I seem never to have heard of The Prodigal Son, neither music or dance. The backdrop was a lovely thick-lined painting. This might be my favourite of the 4 dances, despite overdone dramatics. A gang of dancers, referred to in the notes as Goons and by Erin as Zombies, made terrific visual effect. They came onstage in train, walking in a squatty, apish way. They landed heavily when they leaped, and were antic, vivid, and hilarious. The Siren was exquisitely en pointe. I do not really like seeing dancers do that, it seems so physically harsh, but she did it so blithely and for so long, and I even got a sense of line, postured down to the detail of her ankle. The music was melodic yet bombastic.

the 2nd act began with The Rose Whatsis (I do not have the scorecard handy). The set was stunning, a bedroom with hugely tall windows. The lighting was lovely. The music was pretty and the dance tasteful. It did not resound but pleased. This may be the ballet in which Nijinsky leaped thru a 7' high window, which I read somewhere. Maybe not 7' in reality. Here it was about 3', tho it was a neat maneuver.

Next came L'Apres-Midi d'Un Faun. I translated the poem years ago, heaven help me, tho Mallarme is a very difficult poet for the likes of me. And I like the moody moment that Debussy creates. The piece is sexual, yes, but there's a nympholeptic quality over all that seems to be the real intersection of poem, music, and dance. The audience reacted as if this was a tour de force. I did not catch it quite like that but it was great.

Finally, The Rites of Spring. Years and years ago I wrote a thing that consisted of stupid vignettes involving the Brooklyn Dodgers (I had just read Boys of Summer), written in a blend of English and rudimentary French. Title: The Rites of Spring Training. The vignettes were of the order of: Jackie Robinson said to Clem Labine, "Qui est. l'homme avec les cheveux gris. And Clem Labine replied, "Il s'appelle Duke Snider." Which I mention only because I was reminded. The curtain rises and along the back of the stage is a line of fire (gas jets, of course). Wow, rock on! Yes, this was raucous stuff in the day. My father got season tickets to the Boston Pops because a neighbour was confronted by Bolero and refused to have anything more to do with an orchestra that would play such music, and so gave my father the tickets. Music and dance, Rites was muscular and vivid. I should write more, but I am tired.

Angels and Demons, the book

When I see people reading in public, I want to know what they are reading. Usually it is popular fiction, which, indeed, is what I likely will be carrying. Tho one time on the train someone said to me, Hey, Freire's awesome. Meaning Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I happened to be reading. I think I have actually had Hegel as reading matter, but he is not ideal. Zippy fiction is the thing.

Which is all preface to saying that I am reading Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown. Brown wrote Da Vinci Code. OR DID HE ??? Okay, fake controversy. Altho...

Angels was published in 2000, a few years before Code. I am pretty sure, as I think of the 2 books, that Brown must have performed a global search & replace to 'write' Code. this in itself is not damning. P G Wodehouse only wrote one plot and 4, maybe 5, characters. Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books all have the same plot. Such need be no problem, because it is the intensity of the author that counts. With Brown, the repetition is more that of a hack than of an obsessed. He is fascinated by weird nether worlds but, alas, he voices that interest thru a dullard (Langdon). He distances himself from the crazies, so the crazies just seem overblown.

The parallel features between Code and Angels are pretty exacting: the super focused assassin, the officious police type, the beautiful mystery woman, and the frantic run hither and yon (mostly yawn). Plus the conspiracy angle. I'll give Brown plus points for delving into interesting worlds, however over the top he does so.

When I saw the trailer for Code, I was hooked, it had the look of weird action, tho in fact the movie was largely a run around. Hanks looked uncomfortable but Gandalf is worth watching and I seem to like Jean Reno a lot. I did not hate the movie, but I could see how others might.

As to Angels, wow, Brown keeps asking the reader to nod unthinkingly. The protagonista and her father managed to use the CERN facilities to manufacture a goodly gob of antimatter with no supervision. Oh, ok. And the bad guys stole it. Right. Yup, and the antimatter was deposited in Vatican City, ready to annihilate a vast area. Gotcha.

That is as far as I have gotten. Those loopholes in reasonableness are distracting. Brown insists in making his Harvard expert in symbology (sic) explain everything to us, the dumb readers, so Langdon comes across as none too bright. Both the Illuminati and Agnus Dei are involved in producing cockamamy puzzles. Our hero the symbolist comes across as someone who is good at the Times crossword.

Despite the failings, the book rollicks along, tho I do not care for the mindless run from place to place. In Code the movie, Hanks had to climb out of a bathroom window and I saw there a terminal insistence on daffy plot evolution. Which, it appears, is a hallmark of the Brownian 'style'. I still have 500 pages to go, which I am sure will prove a little wearying. Plots based on peregrination need more than regular application of the author's assurance that the situation is frantic. We shall see.

Brown is Umberto Eco without the erudition or the humour. Still, I want to find out if Vatican City is blown up and if the Illuminati destroys the world as we know it. What do you think?

I notice that I have been writing poems.

Priscilla Queen of the Desert

Watched Priscilla Queen of the Desert yestreen. Beth had seen it years ago and recommended it. I remember when it appeared and so had some sense of it. Three drag queens on a journey into the Australian Outback (i. e. Heart of Darkness), if indeed where they went was so named. It looked like Montana or South Dakota to me (who have been to neither), except more of.

Okay, so the three aforementioned must travel a significant distance to do a show. All three are at crucial points in their lives. I cannot remember the names of the characters so bear with me. The most flamboyant and outrageous of them is who I take to be the youngest. He is the one that got his mother to pay for the bus by which they make their journey. A brash fello

The character who is the dramatic focus is somewhat older. We learn that not only is he married, but he has a son. This is the crux of the movie.

The final character is played by Terrence Stamp. No one else in the movie is familiar to me. Stamp is older. He has just suffered the loss of a lover.

And there we are. They travel into the Outback on their bus, called Priscilla of the Desert, and bicker and have adventures. Stamp is the fulcrum. The other two are wacky and outrageous, while he is stately, which is a nice balance. It is a graceful, warm performance. The humour is at times goofy but the movie is genuinely warm-hearted without excess. Lots of ABBA, 70s disco, and the like.

* * *Spoiler Alert!!!* * *
Gatsby dies!!!

I listened to a presentation of The Psalms that I found on iTunes. It was a recording of an event in NYC in 2007. Forgive that I do not have the names of the participants in my head. It was like this: a new translator of the Psalms, and two people who read these translations and discussed them, plus some musical settings. I am no scholar of The Bible but have read it, as any curious, literate person might. The Psalms are certainly due for a rewrite, since the Elizabethan floridity of the King James version creates an entirely different experience for modern readers than for Jamesian contemporaries. Some of the Psalms were read in the original, and the experience of that--the sound, that is, I do not know Hebrew--certainly differs from the loping of King James. There were several good musical settings but one was embarrassing. It had a jarringly frisky piano accompaniment and the vocalists pushed the words forward with Broadway sincerity. Ouch! The words themselves should serve, they need not be impressed upon the auditor, but that is not how Broadway musicals roll. It was like Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar, a collaboration with bolstered insincerity. There is this muddle that the religious aspect instigates, that you must read the Psalms with appropriate religious respect. I think treated as poetry, with the sanctity of poetry's implication, the Psalms resound more deeply. Appropriated, they sound like whingeing. In other lit news, I put my hand on The Third Policeman this morning and got sucked right in. Flann O'Brien is a wonder. I do not know that any of his novels are perfect, but the buoying intent is marvelous in every one. At Swim Two-Birds is exuberant to the point of pyrotechnic exhaustion (exhaustion, that is, on the reader's part). Dalkey Archives, I remember, had its wonders, ferlies, which I need to revisit. The Third Policeman is cinematic in its clear visual clues. The humour is a red shift, a kind of trail from some ordinary stance to an enveloping verity. O'Brien had a queer career, distracted from the assault in a way that Joyce, for one, was not. I would put O'Brien right alongside Joyce, as maybe Joyce would too. Wonderful.

Super Goat Man by Jonathan Lethem, etc

Barnes & Noble offers 9 free audiobooks here. One of the offerings is Super Goat Man by Jonathan Lethem, which I recently listened to. I've read Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and his essay collection, oh, and some while ago I also read another Lethem novel. Problematic.

There is something alluring about Lethem's work, and something disappointing. In saying disappointing, I mean that he fails to satisfy some expectation that I have. My expectation is not something that an author must fulfill, but I think Lethem gives evidence of what I should expect.

Super Goat Man is probably a novella (I always loved the distinctions: short story, novel, novella, novelette), about 40 minutes long. Lethem reads the story and does so excellently: clear and patient.

Like in FOS, there is a comics undercurrent (or overcurrent). The title character is indeed presented as a comic book hero, albeit one with no evident power or accomplishment. The narrator, as a boy, meets SGM, who lives in a hippie commune near to the narrator in Brooklyn (whence comes Lethem). SGM is a fallen hero, fallen mainly because he just wasn't interesting. He is also presented as an actual comic book character. The narrator's father collects comics and tries to interest the narrator in the genre.

SGM is just a mysterious connection for the narrator. The narrator evinces some dull fascination towards SGM, as likewise the narrator's father. There is intimation that there may have been dalliance between SGM and the narrator's mother. Tempus fugit.

The narrator goes to college and finds that SGM is a professor there. No strong tie occurs but the vague sense of connection and fascination remains. Then occurs the dramatic apex, in which some drunk students climb the clock tower and call out SGM, disgraced superhero, who attempts to save one of them who teetered on the brink, but fails. SGM seems superpowered, tho this remains unclear.

As a lengthy act 5 we are given the facts of the still young narrator's marriage to a student, then meeting SGM in SGM's decrepitude. In this presumably last meeting, it becomes clear that the narrator's wife, before they were married, had had an affair with SGM. And there we are.

I apologize for recounting the narrative, it sounds so plangent. On a sentence level, a level that I think is important, Lethem writes well. His words flow with generative connection. The plot, tho, seems too contrived, loaded.

What gets me, and this came thru when I read FOS, is how the essays reveal Lethem's interests, the seeds of his fiction. The straightforward essays offer a much more compelling sensibility than the contrivance of his novels. SGM raced to a conclusion that was, in iffy fashion, a surprise. The narrator's issues with parents and wife are jarringly turned towards the failed superhero. The end.

I am bothered by how narrative overwhelms the living parts of fiction. One notes that Lethem resides in the narrator, in the interests presented, not to delve into this as autobiographical resource. Okay. Yet reading on, one wants the superheroes to live within the context of the narrative world, instead of being daydreamy adjuncts.

Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann intrigued me simply by the title and whiff of plot. It is about a special world that intersects 'this' one. The story is more mundane than that, finally, tho not fully removed from that initial impression. Lethem's work has that same feeling of reality intersected by fantasy. Lethem's essays, in their straightforward acceptance of the importance of Jack Kirby and comics, etc, betray a greater sense of imaginative marvel than do the novels. Guess what: plot gets in the way.

The novels that I admire are willing to minimize plot. Plot compulsion becomes a muddling agent as the author feels required to stick to the inherited mathematics. I say let the magic begin.

Lenin, Stalin, Whee!

I got an urge to read some of Lenin's work, tho my sense of political expediency resides in the personal more than the united plunge into utility. I mean by that only that I am suspicious of the group effect, tho I recognize a need for teamwork, yo. So I got a few books from the library. One was a collection of Lenin's writing's on, as it was called, the women's issue. Wherein there are a lot of declarations that would fit perfectly in the Constitution. Lenin's self-consciousness and sense of effect, the need for that, deflates the vigour of his assertions for me, but I think he is worth reading, if for no other reason than to let his actual assertions bear the weight, rather than the straw dogs that 2nd hand pundits might have erected. This is a poetics of words speaking for themselves rather than as launchings of interested predicative. Or whatever...

Anyway, I also got a book by Stalin, a collection of his writings. It was edited by Bruce Franklin, in 1972. Franklin, who I do not know, adverts a familiar shrillness as a declared Communist. You know, university professor cum anti-war protester, cum professor without tenure. His assertions necessarily are tinged by the need to propagandize, which is unfortunate. Many years ago, my friend and I were wandering in Cambridge, aka the People's Republic. We noticed a Communist bookstore, and my friend had to investigate. It proved to be a rather spacious store front. Books and tracts were available, as I recall, but there really was much more room in the place than the offerings required. A copy of London calling by The Clash was available. The proprietor said that he took it in trade, but was dismissive of such commodity. I think my friend entered into discussion with the proprietor of the place, that would be like my friend. I kept quiet, being less schooled in historical matters as I should have been. On the wall were portraits of Communist heroes: Marx, Engels, Mao, Lenin, and, surprisingly to me, Stalin. I did not feel well prepared for debate then but I was able to speak one word to the proprietor: pogrom. The guy admitted that there were errors made by Stalin. Errors just does not seem to cover what Stalin did, does it? And not only that, Stalin was not even a comrade, he was an overlord. And irony just does not exist. I have not read Stalin's words yet, but Franklin clearly is in the same camp as the store proprietor, more intent on making a safe house for his theories than examining the actions of his hero. The drawing on the book cover (published by Doubleday, not some commie publishing inflection) shows Stalin in declarative action. He is at a podium. Left hand rests on some papers. His right hand reaches out to the audience. He has a benign expression. Despite the brown uniform that he wears, he looks like he is selling produce, Ey, try my fresh-picked apples. I think he owned many dachas, certainly wrested mucho power, ice ax to the head a-many opponents and otherwise scoffed the words he efforted to define. We do that in Americay, too. It is not just about inflection, but extension of words into action, and how action is the root of words. As in, how does one's words act. Poetry wants words in their naked selfhood. Not pleadings but stances in the mire, fought for. NotRobert's rules of order, but ambiance of meaning.

Great Gatsby, OMG!

I have been listening to a recording of The Great Gatsby. ever hear of the book??? well yeah, it is a warhorse. I 1st read it in high school, 9th grade. and I liked it, I think. that it is as ubiquitous a cultural item as, say, Vivaldi's Four Seasons should not take away from the pleasure of the book. Fitzgerald had a magnificent ease with his writing. edit that, his best writing was honey smooth. I dutifully read Tender is the Night and it was pretty much of a botch. too much effort following thought out strictures rather than allowing the story to find itself. the plot of Gatsby is meticulous to the point of being burdensome. it is wonderful to see the intricate play of elements but that ends up seeming like gimcrack. the interwoven relationships work, but they derive from that basic novelistic falsity that does not draw me in much. I am taken with how Scott's satiric edge merges with his fascination. he belongs to the world of which he writes yet also stands aside. the tension of those 2 viewpoints holds the story together. I saw the movies after having read Gatsby at least a couple of times, and the look of the movie (I mean the version with Robert Redford) informs how I imagine the characters and look of the book. Redford's crisp woodenness seems perfect for Gatsby, and just seeing all that white flannel and those airy mansions evokes a milieu and an era. Scott's description of the social interactions between people is Proustian in its presence. certainly Scott was not attempting the depth charge that Proust committed to, but the prickling light bouncing off the social surfaces in Gatsby are pretty vivid. the scene in which Tom Buchanan dismally honks about the need for racial purity, and the women prattle about his great intellect, is clustered unknowing fatuousness. and there's the library of uncut books, and that ridiculous drunken car crash at the first Gatsby party that Nick attends. oh, and I love the litany of attendees to Gatsby's party, with the goofy names and desperate invocation of importance as in the society page of the newspaper. about which I wonder, whither goest? as newspapers conk out, will there be a venue for those pictures of Dr and Mrs Whosis at the charity ball? I mean, would a website serve so lusciously? a brave new world is nigh. anyway, Scott's short stories, which Gatsby extends from, are flush with a humoured embrace of present giddy particulars. Tender represents the artist's attempt to create weight. the result is something that cannot bear its own weight. I think of Truman Capote's Answered Prayers, which is his attempt to find value in the tacky social network he teased himself into. Capote had Proust and probably Fitzgerald clanking in his head as he tattled about his friends and acquaintances. he missed the boat entirely. everyone had the clef to his roman, probably because he had gossiped it all right along. and these elite are not so fascinating, of themselves, as he believes. Lee Radziwill? Babe Paley? Fitzgerald was not just fascinated by the milieu of America's rich explosion. Gatsby ends, almost jarringly, with a reminder that the main players in the drama were Midwesterners. the implication of the American turbine may not be drawn out enough but it is a node of interest and relevancy in the book. I do not entirely trust Fitzgerald or, in fact, many of the most interesting 20th Century American novelists. Hemingway interests me almost not at all, but Wolfe and Dos Passos have their moments, and I really like immersing in Faulkner, but there is something that I do not trust about them, all of them. it is something about these United States that scars or misshapens the work. dare I say that the pure products of America go crazy? there is something to that, tho I recognize that a curveball exists in the word pure.

watched Pineapple Express last night. I now have 2 Apatow/Rogen movies under the belt. it had its moments, and some limitations. Seth Rogen is a likeable presence, everyman lug and wise ass. in this movie he is a process server, which is only relevant for the first few minutes, during which he serves subpoenas and smokes dope. this is Rogen at his most comfortable, and he is funny to watch. the plot shifts to his girlfriend, who is still in high school. which is played for laughs but we are still supposed to take the relationship seriously. it is just awkward, and is largely left behind for the rest of the film. the plot begins in earnest when Rogen goes to buy more pot. his source is James Franco, total stoner. I know Franco only from Spiderman, where he has to be overwrought, but goodlooking. he and Rogen are great together, even to the uncomfortable point of you thinking you knew these guys in college. after Rogen leaves he witnesses a murder by a drug lord. in his distress Rogen leaves a joint at the scene, which the drug lord easily identifies (it is the rare weed pineapple express), so Rogen and Franco go on the run. here things get stupid, and a little tone deaf. there is a Tarrentino mix of murder and mirth that does not settle well with stoner contentment. the humour is slapstick but, well, I must bring up the Three Stooges. the slapstick of the Stooges was stylized in a way that detached the mayhem from gross consequence. in this movie, the violence looks painful, and characters die. so the humour gets quashed. our stoner heroes are joined by another stoner, who is hilarious. the cast is solid, tho Ed begley and Nora dunn are wasted as the girlfriend's parents. when they appeared, it seemed like the movie might be perched on absurdity, but they ended up just fulminating. ApaRogen movies seem improvisational. I imagine that the story is whipped up over a weekend, the script over the following week, then they take a week or so to film, and it is all fun and games. that is how it seems. it works because the cast is solid but I think this sort of production eventually wears thin. I find that I do not want to see another trailer for a Will Ferrell movies, because they are blurring together, and I suspect that Rogen and Apatow may be doing the same thing.

Jack Kimball writes well of the current temperature of the poetry world and its subsistence blogs, here. the zest seems to have passed, drained elsewhere. as in Facebook, Twitter, I don't know. the Poetics list, and others, too, were lively, in their day. lo 10 years ago or so, I came on board this internet, greeted by a network of forces that I had been abstracted from. there was contact with other poets, that is, and it grew my own work immeasurably. I was vitalized by the Poetics list then, and Subpoetics, and some few other lists. they were places of energy. the old neighbourhoods have changed and right now, it feels like nothing has replaced what there was. I guess there's a whiff of nostalgia here. I do not think that blogs have lost their utility, as singular fronts and as community nodes. my own usage has skidded some recently. I always consider this blog a Poetry blog, even tho my posts are often 'off topic'. I associate everything that I write here with poetics, and if you have a moment (make that a few moments), I could explain. not right now, tho. my reading has not been poetry overmuch of late, tho I have just brought down John Milton from the shelf (Paradise Lost, perhaps), having read a Cromwell bio. and I am reading Carl Sauer's 17th Century North America, and been listening to Olson lectures, namely the Vancouver reading (remember when poetry could be exciting???). if we really are a community, then we need to kick out the jams. we are drifting, right now.

saw two more movies over the weekend, Signs and Contact. both of which we own, and have seen before. Signs simply hits me. its atmosphere is claustrophobic and scary. visually it is gratifying. it is not a flashy exercise, it just feels well filmed. Mel Gibson is pretty well tainted at this point, it is hard to forget all the weirdness attached to him now. I am, that is to say, leery of him, even films that appeared before he weirded out. despite this prejudice in which I find myself, he comes across well. the cast is really good. a pall hangs over Gibson and family. Gibson's wife died before the action of the movie. the older child is a morose boy, the younger a quirky girl. and there is Gibson's brother, played by Joachim Phoenix. the relationship of these 4 is funny, human, and convincing. so I have named many of the positives in the film. Gibson's denial of God because his wife died, and his ultimate renovation, is too pat. art is interesting when it doesn't explain. the movie is basically Childhood's End meets Dawn of the Dead meets War of the World's. the freshness of the humour, the compelling atmosphere, and the realness of the relationship of the 4 of them, as family members and as actors, is what distinguishes this movie. I have seen it 3 times and still enter it wide eyed. Contact has a similar underlying wistfulness as Signs. Jodie Foster is ambitious researcher who lost her father at a young age. like in Twister, as it happens. that loss informs her actions thru out. the SETI project is a big I don't know for me. collateral discoveries and advancements aside, I wonder if it is getting very far. it is in the movie but... well anyway, Jodie has a 2001 moment, which is upbeat in that odd heroic way of Carl Sagan. Tom Skerritt and James Woods are nefarious in a pat way, but that doesn't matter. the focus is on Foster's trip, if I can please use that word. which brings me to Foster herself. she is a good actor, very intelligent yet lively, but even when she is giddy, there is a coolness about her. we're not used to smart actors, I mean really smart ones. Hollywood is full of knuckleheads so it must be hard for her. anyway, Foster brings forth that preternatural faith in science that Sagan brought.

the reading fare at the supermarket has presented what I believe is an inordinate amount of material concerning Jennifer Aniston. I have nothing against her, and admit to having watched Friends for a time. sure, she had the one hit on tv, and smartly did not hustle another one (so far as I know). she did a few modest movies that look to be extensions of Rachel, tho I have not seen them. and there you are, tho I should not forget Leprechaun. the drama with Brad and Angelina, woohoo! plenty acridity there. and I thought she had already broke from John Mayer (loved him with the Bluesbreakers) when I learn that Jen dumped him just now because Mayer claimed he was unavailable to her but was publicly tweeting (probably to Eric Clapton and Peter Green). so look, here's an FAQ (my 1st!) to give you some sense of the real Jennifer Aniston.

1. Does Jennifer have the power of flight? of course she does. sadly, she just doesn't have the time to indulge this passion of hers. she is a sight to behold as she flaps her arms and glides thru the tepid Southern California sky.
2. so what's up with that expensive hairstylist that she used for the Academy Awards? yes, a lot of money was paid so that Jen and her stylist could work together to make her hair the most beautiful on the planet (Earth) on that magical night. her stylist removes each hair from the follicle, cleans, dries, and perms it separately, and reattaches. such expertise and care does not come cheaply.


3. was Jennifer shining shoes at train stations when she met Brad? yes.
4. what is the longest that she has stood outside the Branjolina residence, staring grimly? 17 days. it ruined the gown she was wearing.

watched 40 Year Old Virgin yestreen. and it is indeed what the title indicates. this may be my 1st and only Judd Apatow movie. he seems to be the John Hughes of this generation. at least so I infer, judging by the murmur that I hear. and is Seth Rogen the new Molly Ringwald? the movie opens with a very familiar set up, with Steve Carel as 40YOV, and all these risible details of said character acted out as the opening credits roll. Get Smart began the same way. Carel is quite likeable, being nerdy yet with a modest loopy aggression that sparks the humour. he and Colbert bear similarities, tho obviously they took different routes away from The Daily Show. the idea is that Carel's putative friends help him to get, as they say, laid. it is the sort of plot that so many teen comedies of the 80s wore down, tho it is cast with older tho no less puerile characters. the ensemble is good, with Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, and I do not know the other guy's name tho he looks familiar. the situations are stupid but the throwaway lines are great. yes, it is so much like a John Hughes movie, before he really crapped out. there's an improvisational feel to all the actors, which makes one wish that the press of narrative could have been detoured more. it ends with Carel singing Aquarius and everyone dancing Hair-style, which went off really well. I think I could bear watching 2 more Apatow movies, then I know they'd just bear on me as the limited entertainments they aimed to be.

I have pretty much failed Twitter, and am not overly sad about that, because it is just one more thing, but still, it is a gooey mass of (self) interest, if you will. for instance, Christopher Walken tosses off flakes of moments that are quite... something something... evidence at this link... the deal is, poetry could be found or made in this context. that I have accomplished little of either is not the point.

saw As You Like It by roughly the same troupe as was involved with the home school coop. the person in charge of the production today was the initial force, and director, behind the previous productions (most of which I wrote about here in Tributary Land). I think we can say that creative differences caused her to leave the aegis of the coop behind. and so...

the venue was the grange building in Groton, MA. grange!!! not a great place for a play, but that difficulty is something of a funky plus. the audience has a different involvement when performances are other than slick.

the largish room on the 1st floor was the dressing room. upstairs was a similarly-sized room, with a small stage at the end. the stage size certainly proved a logistical problem.

probably more than half of the cast had formerly been involved with the homeschool coop. Rosalind was played by the girl who played Juliet a couple of years ago. she did a great job in that. for this production she was music director and composer and was a dance coordinator. she wants to be a classicist (Latin and Greek), and is a member of a sword dancing team. zowie! she handled Ganymede's dazzling wit delightfully. her Romeo from the previous production played Orlando. he has a slapsticky presence (he is almost as tall as Erin) and likes to ham it up, but he is strong in dramatic roles, as well.

I do not want to critique the acting too much because I am impressed by all the actors. they all get their lines capably, and some few, like the above, put dimension in the lines.

there was quite a bit of music in the production, all played live. I was struck that a girl of 4 or 5 was given 2 solos. I would not have asked it of her but she did a good job with those quirky melodies and rhythms (I do not believe that the songs were composed by the Rosalind actress, probably adapted).

there was a stairway from the dressing room to the side of the stage. one can both come on stage or enter the hall. near the end of the play a girl came thru the door into the hall and marched in front of the stage and sat down in the front row. it seemed at first that she had just used the bathroom but did come up the other staircase, as we were told to do. the adult she sat next to tried to hold her in the seat but she got up and moved. then she stood at the front of the stage. then she went on stage. by this time it was clear that she was autistic. and as it happens, a member of the cast, tho not of this specific production (two full productions are run). I do not remember which character it was took the girl (9 years old) by the hand and kept her out of the way. nobody panicked or got upset, which is nice. perhaps the girl should've been dressed in her costume even tho she was not in the day's production. when the characters danced and sang together, the girl joined in.

autism and Alzheimer's are 2 shocking human revelations. engaged in the idea of normalcy, we see people who are tuned to some key that we cannot hear. and how difficult it is for us to accept that difference. we lodge in the difficulties that we see, very real difficulties. we labour with these differences. we stand stunned in front of these differences. we expect people to understand the world in the way we understand it. I think that we can take from Shakespeare the idea that we do not know what other people's role is, nor even our own, on this stage.

my reading of Shakespeare is not exhaustive, perhaps half of the plays. it is a lovely thing to see productions, e'en such amateur ones as this. his work has life, still. this life may muchly owe to his rep, the cultural ok that he has. imagine the Mermaid Tavern, and Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, plus whoever else (no scholarship talking here), talking brilliant whatnot. they were not gods. and remember the Monty Python skit in which Whistler and Wilde exchange bon mots, which devolves to mere vitriol. maybe the brilliance of Shakespeare is the same as is evinced in Lost, or whatever other hot tv show that I have not seen. Shakespeare seems supercharged now but there were cheap seats then as now. I cannnot answer any of that, but these plays are mighty instigations, for sure.

love this little story about Clayton Eshleman that Jack Kimball found. Jack demurs on the suggestion that Eshleman may be the next John Keats with this perfect encapsulation: "Yes, if Keats had worked out more on the poetry-is-applied-dabbling-raised-to-revelation side of things." I like Eshleman for Sulfur, which delivered an exhaustive amount of work (I have more than 40 issues of the journal), as well as his own weird historical modernism. Jack has posted several times perceptivesly on Eshleman readings, if you would like to peek in the pantaloons.

reading at Furtherance by J H Prynne (The Figures). I say reading at because I have not read thru, which I do not usually do anyway with poetry books. it is a collection of 4 tiny publications (the whole is slightly more than 100pp). well, I just want to say that it is quite lovely. Prynne tickled my interest because of an Olsonian connection, I think (hazily) that Olson bespoke Prynne. what ev, Allen: what of the POETRY? ok, given the critical standards of the day, I might asseverate that Prynne totally rocks, using ESPECIALLY emphatic italics there. there is something post-Olson about Prynne, where the methodological study of Olson has been transformed into a capable and common usage. by which I mean Olson's self-conscious quest has been transformed into a general tool. reading these poems, I think of the 3rd Maximus volume, where Olson returns to a more straightforward narrative and even a lyrical integer. there is a LANGUAGEy sort of intuition in Prynne, but free of the self-referential inscape of academic promulgation. I mean, isn't there a touch of conscious academic outreach in the LANGUAGE parlance? as I entered the LANGUAGE realm, in discovery mode, I was dismayed by the clanking vocabulary of the critical matter. I got the loopy satire of, say, Bruce Andrews, and appreciated the cogency of Silliman and Susan Howe, and I trusted, having some 1st hand experience (hoka hey! I am Facebooked among former Franconians (Franconia College, just to be clear), tho Grenier is not as yet among that number), Grenier's wired interest. but beyond some few, I discerned in LANGcrit a rattled academic barf of big words meant to look big, and fit the academy's need. which I did not see in Olson, tho he talked over my head so often. Prynne pragmatically takes a LANGUAGE sort of involvement, and an intellectual embrace, and presses that verbal activity into a diurnal sort of squeeze of process and margin. please nod if you catch my drift. I am also confronted with how English in the UK sounds different from that of the American states, as furthermore does the poetry of Canada sound in slightly different, slightly unfamiliar, tones. vive la difference, fer sure, tho I might struggle with unfamiliarity.

Carl Annarummo published my recent chapbook, but beyond that evidence of percipience, he makes really nifty books. look at what he has produced. I recommend all of his work.
unrelated, but another wonder worker, Donna Kuhn and ferlies of visual and word.

taking a moment to feed my blog, on a springy, daylight saved day in southern New England... I downloaded a word processor called Jarte (and you can too). it is a simple word processor without a lot of extras. writers do not necessarily need all those extras as offered by Word and OpenOffice, both of which I regularly use. it occurred to me that I get the same jolt from getting a new word processor as I do a new pen or notebook. just as a new pen or notebook seems to open possibilities, likewise different word processors. just the difference of the interface, I guess. changing where I write has always seemed to come thru in the writing. watched portions of 3 movies yesterday, while doing other things.

1. that movie by the Farrelly Brothers about Siamese twins, starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear. clearly a South Parkian willingness to risk bad taste. Damon and Kinnear are connected at the waist, they share a liver. while their condition is occasionally awkward it is never disabling. it helps that they can switch sides at times, which is not explained and is barely pointed to. it is a surprisingly goodhearted movie. playing somewhat against type, Kinnear is the confident one and Damon is tremulous.
2. that smoking industry movie starring Aaron Eckert. his character is a lot like his role in Dark Knight. his character is a crisply accomplished and efficient lawyer defending the tobacco industry. he is pretty charismatic.
3. Troy. seeing the trailer at the theatre had me, specifically the shot from above of the 1000 face-launched ships headed towards Troy. I have seen it several times and enjoy it, tho it has its weaknesses. the gods have been excluded from the story, which is okay. Zeus and the gang would distract from the human story. the movie opens with a nice evocation of a battlefield, with Agamemnon's army about to face that of Thessaly. it is hard to conceive of the hand to hand clash of such armies. the battle of Cannae, Hannibal's greatest victory over Rome, saw an army of at least 50,000 Romans destroyed. some of those were made slaves but most were slaughtered slaughtered slaughtered. having a visual rendering of something like that, I mean a representation of two large armies meeting, is fascinating to me. whoever played Agamemnon was perfect. he is beefy and blustering and pompous as I imagine Agamemnon to have been. Brad Pitt as Achilles is good despite an overarching Brad Pittiness. you cannot forget that it is Pitt there, the guy married to the goddess Angelina (and not to that pale hamadryad Jennifer). Pitt is convincing vis-à-vis the physical prowess. early on he goes up against a steroid giant, whom he efficiently dispatches with a Michael Jordan sort of leaping feint. when Achilles and the Myrmidons hit the Normandy shore, Achilles is blurry ferocity. this ferocity brings to mind John Cleese's Lancelot in Holy Grail. the movie presents a lot of great shots of Troy and the battleground, a lot of presence. Eric Bana as Hector is terrific. he clearly hath not th'advantages of Achilles but proceeds nobly natheless. Orlando Bloom, despite all the great swordplay in Pirates and Rings, is stuck being a washout as Paris. it is a thankless role. there are plenty of changes in what we know of the Troy story, some of which seem gratuitous. Patroclus is the nephew of Achilles, brash due to youth rather than hubris, and Achilles can focus his attention on Briseis. the movie fizzles out after Hector dies, mainly because that love story is tired.

Steve Tills comments on my reaction to Elizabeth Willis' intro to Lisa Robertson, below. I should say that when I make bold statements, I imply, and you should infer, a question mark. as in, in this instance, is Willis' intro as disturbing as I think it is? that would require you (Dear Reader) to go to iTunes and download the podcast. I have read Willis' poetry, and like it, but I wonder why poetry should be transmuted into an academic quandary of code. poetry itself is a code, but the key is, poetry's code is immediacy. words in poetry are leaping life. Emerson was right enough that every word was, initially, a poem, an exalted expression of the world's experience. trapping poetry in a dialectic of segregated meaning is distressing. I wish others would listen to Willis and tell me how far off the mark I may be. as I said earlier, what she says is not meaningless. her words just seemed to have a push away, as if poetry were an Arcanum. it may be. when pressed, I have told people that I wrote poetry, which often seems to amount to admitting that I do weird, if not quite criminal, things. that is a sad encroachment. Robert Grenier did not speak in an involved haze, in the classes I took with him, but in the realm of personal (his) experience. school should not change that. but maybe I am prickly on this point, and unfair to Elizabeth Willis. does poetry need to be an isolation? maybe so, that is largely my experience. I gravitated to writing poetry because the field was open. I did not know what poetry was, so I could make up the necessities. the necessities flowed in and out. writing is a directive, and impetus toward confirmation. sorry if I compelled sleepiness with that sentence. one writes as an act of discovery. that would imply a personal language. the stutter of writers like Olson or Creeley, or Dickinson--look at her work--is instructive, a revelation in speech. speech is active. poetry is an active moment in language. it will not be rightly described by stalled words. I acknowledge my ignorance and my resistance in these matters, because poetry is not, after all, not easy or easily quantifiable.

In Podcasting News...

1. listening to a podcast called Jordan Jesse Go, which is 2 guys talking, mostly. they are funny, often unexpectedly so. in the most recent episode they mention a teacher they had at UC Santa Clara, or whatever it is exactly called. said teacher was Kasey Mohammad, whom they describe as strange but interesting. hey, I almost know Kasey, beyond rep, from being on the Flarf list... in a similar vein, Stephen King mentions Creeley and Olson in his novels. the world of poetry is so small...


2. in another podcast, from iTunes U, actually, is a reading given by Lisa Robertson. I have not read much of her work so that is fine. thing is, Elizabeth Willis gave an atrocious intro. the atrocity of which I speak concerns the stodgy academic talkspeak she employus. it is not gibberish that she speaks, but a stultifying overlay. is poetry indeed such a code of segregation? the4 lecture by Harold Bloom that I have mentioned here was a pleasure to me because he revealed his pleasure in the works of poetry. Willis' intro had the makings of a bad lecture, a congestion of words around but somehow not in a subject. let's not do that sort of thing, k?