Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

As opposed to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In both cases, it is the director’s movie, with emphasis of auteur intent. Both of these movies stay within hailing distance of the books wherefrom they derive. Something to be said for that.

Still, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is really Kenneth Branagh’s and it came out about the same time as Coppola’s effort. Returning to the source of iconic movies, both movies are wickedly flawed but both are visually well turned out. One knows one is watching lame movies, but one is compelled even so.

It is hard to judge the original Frankenstein, as well as the original Dracula. I saw both movies first when I was young, and their scariness, as well as their weirdness, were incontrovertible. Dracula is a bit sluggish in parts, I realize now, but it initiates a visceral response. The original Frankenstein deviates greatly from the book, but hits on some archetypal concerns that resonate. Coppola and Branagh pull out the stops for their movies, resulting in flamboyant but finally stinky affairs. And away we go!

I do not know what Branagh is doing now, but he certainly has lost darling status. Frankenstein seems to be the tail end of his yeasty period, when he was freshening up Shakespeare and, I don’t know, E. M. Forster? I saw that clattering Shakespeare movie that included Keanu Reeves but probably nothing else by him.

So anyway.

The movie opens with a bang, a ship sailing in the Arctic Sea. It is in desperate straits, caught in the ice. Thus confounded, they discover Doktor F himself, driving a sled. This introduces the 2 hour flashback. It is not always a deal killer, but I am not enamoured of long flashbacks. In this movie, as in Heart of Darkness, one forgets that there is this narrative device working, and it is a shock of sorts when we return to it.

I do not know how old Frankenstein is supposed to be as we step into the flashback, but it’s a little embarrassing, like Mel Gibson as the 40 year old teenager in Braveheart. I know it is acting but there is a bit too much face time in both cases, the director presenting himself as a callow youth. Probably not a good idea for people to direct themselves, as a general rule. Brings in some less than salient motivations.

As I said, the movie is visually compelling. Geneva looks great, with hills alive with the sound of music, and the rendering of the period looks fine. A nice oedipal sitch percolates between Frankenstein and mom, with Helena Bonham Carter as a lively satellite.

Mom dies, alas, in gory childbirth, which presses Frankenstein to go on his devilish quest to create life. This comes to a head when Frankenstein’s professor, John Cleese, is killed by, hey, that’s Robert DeNiro!!! Frankenstein proceeds to piece together a body, churning in obsession as he does so. At this point things become rococo. In the big reanimation scene, Branagh inexplicably removes his shirt and dashes about. I get the icky feeling that Branagh buffed himself up for this scene. Thru out this scene he is drenched in amniotic fluid that he collected creepily in an earlier scene. There to make him glisten and glisk, I wot.

Frankenstein’s labouratory is gadget rich, including the de rigueur Jacob’s ladders zapping between rods, but lacks the drama of the original movie. No electrical storm! Still, Branagh bungling about amongst all that equipment looks crazy enough.

Okay, the creature is created and he manages to escape. I do not know what possessed DeNiro to take the role, except that it offered a chance to commit heavily, i.e.: a lot of makeup work. It is like Raging Bull, showing the lengths that he will go for his art. Uncomfortable lengths, I would imagine, judging from the amount of makeup he had to endure.

Boris Karloff’s monster is little like what Shelley wrote, as you probably already know. Shelley’s intention was philosophical, she was not trying to scare the bejesus out of you. The inarticulate creature with the bolts in his head and tendency to kill: that is disturbing. He also brings forth sympathy. The chatty philosoph is less interesting, tho the concatenated problems of the narrative are compelling..

DeNiro’s creature is more Shakespearian in tenor. He seems malevolent, tho greatly misunderstood as well. I do not really want to go in that direction with this sort of movie. Branagh plays it all at a high, phony pitch, so nothing that DeNiro could do would work. And heaven help us, sutures everywhere. I think Frankenstein was just practicing his sewing technique on the creature, which must have contributed to the creature’s angst.

Once the creature decides on revenge for the shitty way the world has treated him, things zip along. He murders Frankenstein’s very much younger brother, the one born as the mother died. The creature implicates I am not sure who she is, friend of the family, in the murder, and she is forthwith hung. Baron Frankenstein (who later steals our heart as Bilbo Baggins) is next. Finally, it is Helena Bonham Carter’s turn. The creature has the sort of nimble everywhereness of Jason, Michael, et al. Dramatic but pitched outside believable. HBC is the erstwhile adopted sister slash almost soon to be spouse of Frankenstein. I do not know what Branagh had against her but her last few scenes are unlikely to show up on her cv. The creature kills her by plunging his hand into her chest and pulling her heart out. She is then flung aside. The result of this is that her hair catches fire, which consumes her, as well as the Frankenstein homestead, which appears to be Versailes. At this point, Frankenstein calls a time out.

Well, he admits the hubris of his ways, and promises the creature a woman, which is what all of the creature’s restlessness is finally about. Frankenstein works his magic on Helena, but the work seems less successful. Maybe using a cleaver to detach Carter’s head, to be attached, I think, to the falsely accused woman, maybe that messed up some of the intricate machinery. She has even more sutures than DeNiro, and they do not seem to be logically placed. Whatever, Frankenstein realizes he still is charmed by her, and reneges on the deal with the creature. We plummet to denouement.

The denouement occurs back in the Arctic, with Captain Aidan Quinn listening to Frankenstein exhaust himself with the story, exhaust right unto death. The sailors set Frankenstein’s body adrift, and they invite the creature back to civilization with them. But the creature calls Frankenstein his father, swims out to the body, and sets the byre on fire. The End.

I think I was 13 when I read Frankenstein, found it dry. I want to read it again because I think it might be worth it. The philosophical quandary in the movie is just hokum and not worth a second thought. The movie might have been better had it stuck to the outlines of the original movie rather than the novel. The visceral impact of movies is interesting, and it is not based on articulated ideas. Think of those movies of the 30s: Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, The Mummy: they stick with you, despite the staginess of them, and the lack of modern day cinematic firepower. They are not really thoughtful, they delve into emotional depths. Hollywood slop should stick to Hollywood slop. The poetry is in that very slop, not in huffy speeches and hyped sincerity.

All these movies play on dreamlike archetypes. The eager showmanship of Coppola and Branagh are interesting as human excrescence but lets don’t infer depth in the presentation. They harbour on the surface, which is fine and chilling, but poetry finds a word and turns it. The preposterous effort of these filmmakers is worthy of a sneer or two, if we can only think of poetry trying to establish a more solid stance in the worrying distance between us.

Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula

Watched this last night. Have seen it before but not in years. Hollywood at its Hollywoodest.

I have thought of this movie in comparison to Plan 9 from Outer Space. Two wound up auteurs. One has a budget, and one does not. For all its flaws, I think Plan 9 redeems the effort better than does Dracula. I am not claiming that Wood is a better film maker, but his obsession is more interestingly conveyed than Coppola’s. Not that Dracula isn’t an eyeful natheless.

Coppola follows the book pretty well, and well he should because (to my surprise when I read it), Stoker wrote a corker. I assumed it would be like Frankenstein, which is much dryer than the ensuing movies would lead you to believe.

The cast of Dracula is a clutter of familiar faces and varying efforts. Gary Oldham as Dracula overdoes it in a compelling way. His accent is impenetrable, but you cannot help watching him, even with his blood orgasms. Whoever did his makeup went the same route.

Anthony Hopkins hams it up something fierce. I think at times he got swept up into the vortex of Oldham’s version of an Eastern Europe accent. Keanu Reeves is stiff and unreactive. Weird things are going on around you, Keanu, just to 411 you. Reeves was in whatever Shakespeare play that Kenneth Branagh directed and showed a similar disconnection with the material. Not bored or disaffected, just not exactly present.

Like Reeves, Winona Ryder is stuck being British, and that means dull and precise. She is paired with Sadie Frost, who gets to be vibrant and playful and wild, which just makes poor Winona look bad. Cary Elwes, Richard Grant, and Bill Campbell are comic book characters. Coppola did not have time or inclination to develop the minor characters.

The movie, as already intimated, is lavishly laid out. I would have liked to see more of Dracula in his younger days, savagely warring against infidels, but that stuff just sets the scene for London bloodthirst.

Coppola does fun stuff like showing shadows of Dracula doing things other than what Dracula is doing. Reeves hardly notices. When Hopkins is about to kill Frost, who is in Nosferatu mode, she barfs blood in his face, wowzer! I mean it looks so silly, as if it were a low budget teen movie. That’s what the whole movie is about, disparate efforts and disparate approaches jumbled together.

The whole vampire meme is worth consideration. At least some pondering of the appeal of vampires is worthwhile. The idea that there is a crew of cannabalistic beasties that live forever either killing their prey or turning them into colleagues kinda evades logic. And thinking such creatures are cool is a stretch, if you think about it.

Well anyway, Hollywood supplies us with hokum to stare into and Coppola has given us a prime example of this work.

15 Books That Will Be There, Deeper

Stephen Ellis facebooked a list of books that he thought would ‘be there’, id est, ones that would last. I could just about have used his list. I cannot quickly locate his list but he had Maximus, Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, books by John Clarke and Alice Notley: a-ok! So what follows is my list, with raptures of critical acuity annotated. I sort of slipped the question from books that will be there—books that will last—to books that influenced me. But I think my list consists of keepers.

1. Maximus Poems, Charles Olson—Olson’s weird scholarship, and how he applied it to poetry has meant so much to me, even if it might not obviously show in my work. He gave so many places to look into, too.

2. Moby Dick, Herman Melville—He gave the novel, still in its youth, a damn good shake. It is a wonder-filled conjunction of interests and motivations.

3. Collected Poems, Ted Berrigan—This is an excitingly fun book, a lesson in adventuresome words.

4. Collected Poems, Emily Dickinson—I could have chosen Leaves of Grass but I find her canny subversions more satisfying. You have to puzzle every word.

5. Letters & Poems, John Keats—That balance between his poems and his letters, and how his poetry places within the context of his criticism and his biography, is incredibly useful.

6. English & Scottish Ballads, Francis J. Child—This stuff is thunder, and it has already lasted a couple of years. I may have started with the versions by Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span but the original ballads do not creak at all.

7. Tottering State, Tom Raworth—An unexpected choice, but it works for me.

8. Collected Books, Jack Spicer—I found this at Grolier Book Shop years ago, without having read Spicer hardly at all. He makes a fascinating possibility out of BOOK, and Robin Blaser supplies a terrific critical essay. All the tools you need.

9. Collected Poems, Lorine Niedecker—Maybe her selected poems is a better book, being more concise, like her poetry, but it is nice to see the extent of her work.

10. The Cantos, Ezra Pound—A great and influential book, news that stays new.

11. A, Louis Zufoksky—Oh yeah, another great book, and we are still learning to read it.

12. My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe—The Maximus Poems show Olson’s eccentric scholarship, Howe’s work, both her poetry, and this critical work, are the results of her eccentric scholarship.

13. Pieces, Robert Creeley—I never cared for his earlier work, and I lost interest in his later work, but this seems to be the best expression of his art. Perhaps I show my own impatience or critical ineptitude in declaring thus. His lines, his pace, and his enjambments, have been influential on me, and i imagine on many others.

14. Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein—Another great and influential book.

15. The Archetypes and Collective Unconscious, C. G. Jung—I came to Jung late, Freud too, but I find that his work, and this book especially, full of usefulness in understanding the creative act. He’s not a messiah, he’s a kook, like Olson. I learned a certain wariness with Olson, and use it with Jung, as well.

Il n’est pas ici

My former employer died recently. I attended his memorial service yesterday. He was a fascinating, and sadly tragic, figure. He and his wife founded the wine business that I worked for for many years. He was a great businessman, and I say that very guardedly.

In the service yesterday, he was described as type A lone wolf, which I find absolutely accurate. He was very much focused on business success, as his own children declared. His 2nd wife was an ameliorating influence, so that the two families (she had been married previously, as well) were able to come together. All of which is largely out of my experience. What I witnessed was a person with great integrity.

He had a certified vision of how a business should be run, and ran it that way. The wine business was a late career project, he had already been extremely successful starting and running several businesses, in semi conductors. As a note to the vision of this business, it was carrying both of the American wines that beat French ones in a blind tasting back in the 70s before this tasting, and put American wines on the map.

This wine business was a wonderful efflorescence of his relationship with his 2nd wife. There was something Shakespearian about him. He divorced his first wife soon after his mother died. His children were in their teens. It turns out that I went to high school with his daughter but I never knew her. His wife brought wine knowledge and an aesthetic sense to the business, Jim brought business know how. Together, they managed to grow a business.

Me, I have always been wary of business, yet I learned to value his vision. Our world is one of transactions. If these transactions can be made with a sense of integrity and balance, maybe it is like respiration, maybe it is a living process.

His genius became evident when he (at his wife’s urging) began to pull back from the business. She wanted him to relax, something we who worked for him did not think was entirely possible, the concept being so foreign to the Jim that we knew. The people who “replaced” him did not, and when he finally sold the business, it totally lost rudder. I weathered this difficult time, and endeavoured to maintain the integrity that I understood was central to the business.

A few years ago, Lucie was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He consulted with his oldest son-in-law on ways to help Lucie. It turned out that Jim too suffered Alzheimer’s. They were living in a managed care facility, because Lucie had some walking issues. Everything seemingly was set up properly. Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s disease somehow considered an exception to the managed care promise. The facility to refused to manage that specific care.

We visited Jim and Lucie last year. Lucie was bubbly tho forgetful. Jim however… They were not allowed to cohabitate because Jim tended toward violence. Think of it, an executive who had lost his executive function! When we visited, he clearly made an effort to be there. He was largely lucid, but with holes.

Argh!

Lucie’s son said that soon after Jim came to the facility where Lucie had been installed, they were discovered walking hand in hand down a busy road outside of Boston. Their intention was to go to Lexington (where I was born) to buy a house. They were a loving couple.

It is terrible to think of what Jim lost. He was without gyro. My father, in his dementia, was confused. Everyday, seemingly, he would speak of going back home, meaning 125 Fresh Pond Avenue in Cambridge, where he grew up. He was not type A, but he lost grasp of who I was. As he was struggling for his last breath, he gestured me to leave. I was ready to be there till his last breath but he refused that.

This ramble is really a sad admittance on my part. I saw something really valuable in how Jim and Lucie, together, did business. They were keen enough to see what I could offer, for which I am grateful. Alexander the so called Great died young, and then his body was fought over as earnest of whatever effing magic that could be carried on. Jim died, but something remains.

Jim Andrews

Some image work by Jim Andrews. Jim is a web artist, or whatever you call it, from Canada. In case you do not know, tho his presence is pretty strong online. Aside from his artwork, his criticism is really useful and strong. Check out his website, which offers a rich supply of both his vispo and crit: here.

How Many Books Have I Read?

It is a meme®, but interesting natheless. I found it on Nada Gordon’s Facebook. “The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?” X marks books that I have read, honest!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen—X—I like Austen. V.S. Pritchett likened the social interplay in Austen to naval maneuvers.
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien—X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte—Been meaning to…
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling—Nothing against Potter, just never bothered
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee—X, pretty compelling, at least as a high school read
6 The Bible—X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman—Why Pullman, why this particular one?
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens—X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott-
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy—X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare—I have read about half of Francis Bacon’s oeuvre.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien—X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk—Never heard of it
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger – X—Seemed okay when I was 15… I GUESS I WAS WRONG
19 Time Traveler's Wife--Audrey Niffenegger—Never read it but the ads for the movie look smarmy
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot—I read Mill on the Floss
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell—nor saw the movie either
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens – How many Dickens book should one read? I say two.
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -- X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams—X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck --
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll-- X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame-- X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy—Read 200 pages, seemed soapy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -- X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis --
34 Emma - Jane Austen -- X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen—X, Still got to read Mansfield Park
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -- X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres --
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -- X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving—I read Garp, and no longer need to read more
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery--
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy X—I like Hardy, including his poetry
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan-
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert – X, great book, heinous series
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons-
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X-
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth --
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens- -
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck—You don’t read this, you absorb it
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas -- X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac –The idea of Kerouac, by and large, is more interesting than the actual work: I lost interest
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding-
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie --
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -- X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens --
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce- X
76 The Inferno – Dante - X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray-- X
80 Possession - AS Byatt –-
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -- X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -- X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White --
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid B
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X—Not a great book but what a wonderful comic character!
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -- X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl --
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Knowing

Erin and I watched Knowing, yet another weird chunk in Nicholas Cages’ motley career. I guess it is good that he isn’t stuck just doing important Hollywood dramas—yawn—but he doesn’t seem to need his chops so much in flicks like this, tho it is not a lame movie. He is not glamourous and he is not athletic, yet he has been doing roles of that sort. Maybe it’s fun doing these movies. And he still gets paid.

Knowing resembles Signs, and several other movies, scifi and horror, sort of, with some pretension. Cage plays a droopy father who recently lost his wife. And he no longer sees purpose in life. And, hey, his father is a man of the cloth, from whom Cage is now detached. Where might this lead?

Actually, the movie starts with a girl. The opening caption reads Lexington, MA, 1959. I grew up in Lexington! It is possible that the William Dawes Elementary in the film is what I knew as Adams School. Cannot swear to this. I do know that a Thai restaurant in the next town over has a picture of Cage standing with the restaurant owner, the price of a comp meal. This suggests that Cage was in the area, but we have not yet established probable cause…

Anyway, the aforementioned girl starts maniacally writing numbers on paper instead of drawing pictures of the future for a soon to be buried time capsule. When later dug up, 50 years later, that sheet of numbers goes to Cage’s somewhat strange son. And so the plot ensues.

Cage, an MIT prof, discovers that the numbers are the dates and casualty totals of disasters that have happened, with two more disasters to go. Cage has to convince people…

Thankfully, that meme was not pressed on too hard. We rollick into the chase to find out the secret to all this. Things fall into place.

Perhaps the best moment in the movie, Cage is on I-95, stuck in traffic. He leaves his car to investigate. Suddenly, an airliner is seen swerving down and crashing up ahead on the highway. This is shockingly vivid. Cage dashes into the wreckage to help. It is a compelling, dreamlike scene.

Later, he tries to thwart a disaster in NYC. He thinks at first that it is a terrorist attack, and chases down a petty thief who he misconstrues as a suicide bomber. Despite excellent times in the 400 metre spring for both of them, the true disaster proves to be a subway derailing, which resulted in some flimsy looking cgi and a lot of noise. Whereas the airliner was vivid in its destruction, the subway looked fuzzy and insubstantial. Playing the cgi game, you have to give the goods. Second rate cgi is third rate.

Well anyway, of course Cage joins forces with the daughter of the girl at William Dawes. Her mother died recently, a strange and troubled woman. This woman’s own daughter is also strange, like Cage’s son.

In their desperate race against time® the children are confronted by speechless beings, human in form, who sort of stalk the children and communicate with them telepathically, in sibilant whispers for us in the audience. These parts are really chilling. It is like in 50s movies, where things seem lame and yet. The beings do nothing, really, but it is spooky. Okay, in one scene, Cage, seemingly a world class runner at 400m, chases after one of these beings. He confronts the being, who turns and opens his mouth. Blinding light pours from his mouth, and before Cage gets his sight back, the being has sauntered off.

In a hurry, Cage intuits from a picture in the home of the deceased mother that the point of all the warnings is that the sun was about to deliver the ultimate (at least for Earth) solar flare. The picture depicted a prophecy of Ezekiel, and I do not know how he made this most excellent of leaps.

Here we tumble into what seems like a whole other movie. The beings spirit away the children to start a new beginning. Cage is not allowed to join them. The mother of the girl had already died, as predicted by her mother. We get an homage to Close Encounters, in which we see the spaceship in full cinematic effect. Cocoon did this same homage. Cage returns to his family, and whoosh, life on earth is indeed destroyed. At the end, we see the two children on an Edenic planet. The End.

The last part of the movie is also something of an homage to When World’s Collide, by way of Roland Emmerich’s enthusiasm to show vast destruction (yes, you are right, Emmerich should do a remake of WWC). Alas, for all the local flavour at the beginning of the movie, what we witness at the end is the generic destruction of New York. To see Boston go up in flames would have been different. Anyway, the very end of When World’s Collide, when the survivours of Earth‘s destruction see the new world, what they see is a big technicolour cartoon. The two children in Knowing get a similar rendering of reality.

Knowing isn’t great, but it had its chilling, disturbing moments. It lacks the humour and interplay of Signs, but when it actually fried everyone except the two children, it showed a surprising willingness to get the job done. It is odd that the aliens could manage only the two children and two inexplicable rabbits. If they are going to go to the trouble, you would think they would want to increase their odds a bit. But there you are.

And there Cage is. He does not really work up a sweat, except during those 400 metre sprints. Everyone else in the movie is competent but uninflected. It is a Nicholas Cage movie, yet he is required to just be forlorn, puzzled, and desperately seeking answers, which does not make for a real vehicle for his or anyone’s wares. I wonder if anyone else liked this movie.

Best Simile of the Day Award

goes to Jack Kimball for ...like a second-hand bow tie that pays for itself.

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...