Silliman's Blog

Richard Manuel & Bob Dylan

Some thoughts on seeing No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s masterful biography of Bob Dylan, earlier this week.

Working only with archival footage – the intimate interview with Dylan himself had been conducted by Dylan’s manager prior to the decision to get Scorsese involved – the director managed to avoid what might be the greatest trap in an endeavor of this kind: reifying (if not deifying) its subject, or any particular version of the subject. During the period covered by Home, we see Dylan move through four distinct phases as a musician:

1. A performer of other people’s music – this is Dylan the folkie, the one we find on his first Columbia album.
2. The composer of his own topical tunes – this was the breakthrough work that got him identified with the topical song movement & the likes of Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, and others who writing songs about the events of the 1960s – the absence of these other writers is one of the noteworthy absences from the film, as is that of Ramblin' Jack Elliot, perhaps a more important influence than either Woody Guthrie or Dave Van Ronk.
3. The composer of more poetic acoustic tunes – there is a wonderful scene of Dylan performing “Tambourine Man” at the “Topical Song” workshop at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 as Pete Seeger sits behind him scowling, intently trying to fathom out this new more elliptical discourse.¹ This is the Dylan who is captured on Another Side, an album that was careful to telegraph that this was a Dylan you had not heard previously. In fact, tho, the Dylan of the eponymous first Columbia record was hardly the same as the one of Freewheelin’.
4. Dylan in his first electric phase, the one that lasted through three solid albums (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited & Blonde on Blonde), making it the longest period of consistency in his career, even to this day.

Reading Chronicles & other bios of Dylan, it’s apparent that there was another Dylan even before these four, the rockabilly teenager who played (miserably by all accounts) piano for Bobby Vee under the name of Elston Gunn. Scorsese elides over this period so quickly that I don’t think you can get a sense of it distinctly in Home, focusing more on Dylan’s own later appropriation of Bobby Vee’s name for awhile before Mr. Zimmerman headed off to New York City.

Θ Φ Θ

One year before the debacle over Dylan’s electric performance at Newport in 1965, the one after party I got to attend at the festival in 1964 – I’d been invited by Buffy Sainte-Marie – found performers like Sainte-Marie, Noel Stookey (Paul from Peter, Paul & Marie), John Sebastian, Dylan & others jamming songs from what was then the first Rolling Stones album. Indeed, that was where I first heard of the Rolling Stones.

The dichotomy between folk & rock was indeed fairly hard in those years, tho the emotional force against the music had much to do with the corporate control of mind-numbing music. While Dylan’s entry into rock opened up the music’s lyric potential, the British invasion – not just the Beatles & Stones, but also the Animals & John Mayhall, who took Chicago Blues rather than the Tin Pan Alley of Gary Lewis & the Playboys² and their ilk, as their point of reference – was already breaking up the tight-knit control a half dozen labels had on the pop charts. Indeed, within two years of Dylan’s going electric, I saw one concert at Winterland in San Francisco in which the opening act was Pink Floyd (who had just released their first album), the second act was The Doors (who had just released Strange Days, their second album), and the headliner was Donovan. The so-called San Francisco Sound of the 1960s – the Dead, the Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company – really was the influx of folk musicians into rock.

It was ironic that Columbia Records signed Dylan – and fortunate for him that John Hammond basically let him do what he wanted to do – when he’d already been rejected by Folkways and Vanguard, the two major folk labels of the period. Tho Columbia is now part of Sony, Dylan has stayed with the same label for 44 years. Bruce Springsteen is another John Hammond project who has stayed with the label his entire career. (Hammond’s own son, John Jr., a fine roots blues musician, originally signed with Vanguard.)

Θ Φ Θ

Hearing Dylan going electric at Newport in 1965 reminds me, more than anything else, of what a great blues band Paul Butterfield had. Between his death & Michael Bloomfield’s o.d., it left precious little as a record of its achievement. The loudest concert I ever heard was a Butterfield performance in the old U.C. gymnasium in ’65 or ’66. The recordings of Dylan on his world tour to the U.K. in 1966 with the Hawks (soon to morph into The Band), with Mickey Jones sitting in for Levon Helm at drums (Helm having been appalled at the booing Dylan was getting & wanting no part of that – he returned to the group during its long “hiatus” at Big Pink after Dylan’s accident) are nowhere nearly as cohesive instrumentally.

Some of the clips show Dylan wearing his herring bone suit when touring with the Band. I remember seeing him in that suit at a show at the Berkeley Community Theater in, I believe, early 1966, thinking that it was the type of clothing I’d only seen before on older blues musicians. To my eye, it still looks much quirkier than the polka-dotted blousy shirt he’s wearing in the photo above.

Θ Φ Θ

One of the more interesting moments in the film is Allen Ginsberg choking up as he recounts his experience of first hearing “Hard Rain,” played for him at a party in Bolinas by Charlie Plymell. “I wept,” Ginsberg says, clearly recognizing the reflection of his own influence in Dylan’s lyrics, “The torch had been passed.” I remember my own experience, first hearing that song. Lacking Ginsberg panoptic reading (he was 37 in 1963, I was 17), I can clearly recall the hair on the back of my neck standing up: I had never heard anything like that before anywhere. It was an announcement that the world was going to be different very very soon – in spite of its apocalyptic message, the song gave me an unshakeable optimism that I would return to often over the next couple of years.

Ginsberg’s presence on the film makes great sense, not simply because he knew Dylan. Nor is he the only writer in the film – James Baldwin shows up twice, we hear a snatch of Kerouac & in a shot of heads at the Cedar Bar you can make out Frank O’Hara as he blurs past, unannounced & unquoted. Dylan may or may not be a poet, depending on your definitions – in my book, the answer is not, but frankly I don’t think it’s an important question – but his aesthetic, in virtually all its phases, is distinctly New American. And if Dylan’s own sense of logic in his songs is never that far removed from Ginsberg & the Beats (hear, say, the echo of Ray Bremser in “Positively Fourth Street”), the writer he is most like (I’ve said this before, but Home underscores the point) actually is Kirby Olson’s Doubting Thomist, Gregory Corso. Compared with Ginsberg or Kerouac, Dylan is almost shockingly uneducated – he’s not kidding when he says that he didn’t go to classes at the University of Minnesota – and yet he’s brilliant & an absolute sponge of data, an autodidact whose program of study, if one can find it anywhere, is a peculiar combination of cultural studies – sans theory³ – and the Bible. These twin sources have been constant throughout almost all of his different periods & personae.

Θ Φ Θ

In the film, his oldest acquaintances call Dylan a “receiver” (what a Spicerian term that is!) and a “shape shifter” & to the degree that Scorsese has to settle on a Dylan to use as his focal point, the one he gives us is Dylan the chameleon, the artist who is always at a remove from his own public identity, an actor who is forever “on,” leaving betrayed friends who thought they knew which one was the “real” Dylan everywhere in his wake – virtually all of whom have decided to forgive him. At some level, that’s not genius, but a personality disorder, a kind of narcissism perhaps, but one that seems utterly disinterested in his own Self. Certainly that’s consistent with the artist who “don’t look back,” who has lived his adult life with an invented name & who has come up with a new Dylan roughly every three years now since 1960. At the same time, the line that will stay with me from this film perhaps longer than any other is a wistful Joan Baez, who seems still able to get in touch with some kind of love for the man, saying that she has no idea what he’s thinking, “I know only what he’s given us.”

¹ Tho I was at the ’64 festival, I missed that session, going instead to listen to the jug band of Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachel & Hammie Nixon perform at a blues workshop. To this day, that is still the best acoustic blues show I’ve ever attended, so I can hardly say that I regret my decision. When I finally met Dylan at an after-party at the Viking Hotel later in the week & asked him what he was working on, he pulled a typescript of “Tambourine Man” from his coat pocket. I was already starting to read Allen Ginsberg & Michael McClure & the rather vaporous surrealism of its text didn’t strike me half as strange as it seems to have hit the older Popular Front folkies already in their 40s.

² On Lewis’ records, most of the roles played by “studio musicians” turned out to be Leon Russell.

³ He has the anti-intellectual’s distrust of theory in all forms.

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If Rodrigo Toscano & Maxine Chernoff have both produced volumes that are really chapbooks posing, through the miracle of book design, as more fleshed-out projects in perfect binding, Eleni Sikelianos’ The Lover’s Numbers, which appeared in the “by subscription only” Seeing Books Series in 1998, reverses the process, offering 66 poems that would surely to well over 100 pages were it printed in the same type & leading as either of these other volumes, but which instead comes forward as a crowded – there are virtually no borders at either top or bottom of the pages – in nine-point type.

Like Chernoff, Sikelianos’ approach is the palimpsest around a central topic – the theme throughout is her relationship with her husband. The topic here, by definition, is both meatier (in every sense of the word) and less bookish (or, for that matter, political) than either Chernoff or Toscano. The work that results is erotic, arousing, optimistic, happy – this book is going to appeal to a very different kind of reader. Here is “# 63”

       si vis me flere
                  – Horace

If you want to see me flower
vis-à-vis your hot diminuitive hand

my heliocentric little parliament of bees
then ellipse the bees as bees are
so perplexed when expressed in more abstract
terms & deaf
to the contiguity/stroke invention

if you want to see me flower                          parlay, name

the lacteal season in your mouth who’s dumb-housed now – Tell your ten fingers how far down to go – Below
             – Believe

& see how my hymn of her lies unmustered, distant (hymen)
& see how my lingua-clots uncloud

o erudite little ambush

if you want to see me flower
Then whistle.   Then whistle.

That largest line is printed with its “break” flush left (“fingers” is the first word of the second line in the book), a strategy halfway between poem & prose that I’ve seen lately on the part of a number of younger poets. The first few times I saw that, I thought the typesetter didn’t understand the function of a hanging indent. This obviously would not apply to Seeing Eye impresario Guy Bennett. So now I realize that it’s intentional – the nature of the poetic line itself is changing.

I’ve noted before the one of Sikelianos’ great strengths as a poet is her intuitive grasp of the line. Hardly anyone since Olson & Irby has used so complex a line with so much grace. The Lover’s Numbers is just one more demonstration of her sometimes breath-taking (note pun) capability here:

alba, luster-white, I grasp & train after
lust I err ever depeopling a night

’s somnambulance with wicked
umbrage caught in what’s about ‘I am

what I yam’   ‘who I was at what I am’
animus-rushed against the racing

rushes
           dear one

With a topic that is both indeterminate & limitless, Sikelianos is hardly bound by just what is here. I don’t frankly get the gist of her subtitle, “Crimson Coat (Trilogy),” but nothing I read here tells me that this sequence couldn’t extend indefinitely, through all of love’s stages over the course of a life. Even if this project doesn’t, it would be great to see this book available again & in a format equal to its subject’s heft.

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A really useful – if in one way bizarre (because completely gratuitous – I simply happened to be reading the two books at the same time) – contrast to the claustrophobia that o’erwhelmed me in Chernoff’s Among the Names, is Rodrigo Toscano’s Partisans. Like Names, Partisans is a short book – 49 pages of text – generously spaced to enable perfect binding. Like Names, Partisans is a single cycle – in this instance twelve poems constructed around a dozen grammatical tenses, treated here more as theoretical relations toward time, manifested through engagements with the seven basic pronouns. Where Chernoff falls back on a rich realm of reading (she offers two pages of notes, essentially a running bibliography), Toscano builds outward from these simplest materials – I, you, he, she, it, we & they – using line, ear (especially the doubleness of puns) to expand meaning. The result is that where Names feels constricted, almost airless by its end, Partisans feels open-ended, almost limitless in its horizon:

Present Perfect Progressive

Through weeks of exchanges
of speech

(and not only speech)

Between persons
toward objects

Between products
toward futures

At a time like this
but of the past
toward up ahead · here
up ahead · here

Worlds

As in a tangled net

These attempts at inquiry
as blades

Or treats
perhaps
as samplers
of wordwork

For handlers
of wordwork

Albeit
muster
spite

(if not comedy)

An extracted surplus
does
go somewhere

A surplus
transforming
does
cause something

Who’s been verbing
around noun-fields

Flouting history, rambling spleen’d
< a sign of Timidity >

Fumbling segues, trancing sex’d
< a sign of banality >

Spouting ethics, shunning touch
< a sign of Celebrity >

Sorting concepts, draping needs
< a sign of Obscurity >

Been reading "world"
through shards, reflexive
famed "fragments"

(as compelled to)

Non-collective
petty
rebellions

Nevertheless
how could one have them translate
another’s
mine to yours
yours to mine
ours to theirs
theirs · to who’s?

(and why would one care to know)

Collective Desire

Consider
what can be sparked
by something like
how have you been?

how have you been
is an initial
seemingly containable
question / greeting

Been

Partisans even approaches Chernoff’s own domain of gifts, but instead in terms of debt, bringing in IMF & the World Bank (with the implicit grammatical problem of how it is that developing nations never end up developed).

Partisans consequently is an engaged, even optimistic work. Strictly on its own terms, it’s a delight to read, sharp, witty, polyvalent. It’s taken me six years to get around to reading it, but leaves me hungrier than ever to read everything else Toscano produces.

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Maxine Chernoff’s poems often feel like palimpsests around a given topic, image or idea & in Among the Names – her most ambitious project to date – she raises this to a higher level: 33 poems, all directly or indirectly touching on the act of giving & the social relations it enacts. There is, especially in the early poems in the sequence, great pleasure in the cascade of short lines, often shorter than a simpler phrase –

(“her snazzy
           new Lexus”)

– that cumulatively feel a good deal like the work of the late Larry Eigner (tho without his own poems’ rightward drift across the page).

Chernoff at first is dazzling in the number of aspects she can raise with regard to this question or knot of interactions. Later, tho, as the book rushes to completion, I found myself irritated instead, as if, rather than opening issue up the way, say, Rachel Blau DuPlessis does the question of the unspeakable in Drafts, Chernoff is content to have her cycle, which ultimately feels claustrophobic & contained – if this book & its individual sections were only a fraction of what was/is needed if this to be a real investigation. Indeed, to yield just 53 pages of text for the 33 poems, Apogee has been most generous in its use of space, giving what is really a chapbook a major presentation – the cover is a photo of an Anselm Kiefer construction.

My dissatisfaction made me wonder if I was completely misreading this project. What if, for example, these 33 poems were in fact first drafts of texts that would ultimately come to five to ten times their current length, and what if they were then to be joined by possible twice as many others – really fleshing out the conception of gift? It made me realize that there is a major project lurking here, one certainly equal to Chernoff’s considerable skills as a poet. But Among the Names offers us just a glimpse, holding back far too much.

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What is a lap? It exists only when we are sitting down, disappears the instant we rise. It, in some sense, is a fold in the body that is not the body as such, but which cannot exist without it. A lap is also a complete circuit such as one might make swimming or else running a circular or perhaps elliptical track. Again, it is neither the track nor the pool but only our circuit of this space – it cannot exist without it. Somewhere between these very different meanings, something exists that is, in a positive sense, a lap. Let’s call it Lapland. Or perhaps let’s not.

It is that positive, but ultimately unnamable space, that is the focal point of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ longpoem Drafts. Poem after poem circles, crosses, comes to this place, never – at least through the first 38 sections – completely to inhabit it, precisely because it resists habitation. It dissolves the minute you stand up.

I have been reading Drafts it feels like forever. Reading any individual section, tho, is – or has always felt so me to me – much like first reading one of Pound’s Cantos or a new section of Zukofsky’s “A” – it’s not something you can do lightly. Reading any individual Draft is completely exhausting in much the same sense that climbing a very steep hill forces one to marshal & deploy all of one’s resources. Having now finally completed the first big Wesleyan volume, I find myself overwhelmed with the grief that is the inevitable consequence of completing a life-changing text. It’s something even the most compulsive or ambitious reader (I’m neither of those) gets to feel only rarely in one life. It has been ages since I felt it in mine with such depth or fullness.

For me, the key text in this first volume is Draft 33, “Deixis,” a poem that casts every earlier poem in a new, deeper light, gave meaning to DuPlessis’ process of “folding” texts – identifying, so to speak, the location of the lap in each – transforming all of Draft’s stuttering & muttering – the very first Draft begins after all on an almost preliterate note, seeing the horizon of the alps, or something very much like it, in the shape of a capital N – into, in fact, the poem’s most articulate moments. Thus I understand – tho it has taken me this long to realize it – why that first Draft, composed some 19 years ago, should itself be entitled or subtitled “It.”

A friend said to me awhile back that they were surprised by my support for DuPlessis’ project, that she seemed so much more of a rationalist than I’m usually given to liking. That, tho, is her strong suit, her Objectivist or post-Objectivist heritage & what I think she shares with poets as diverse as Louis Zukofsky & Barrett Watten – the poet who sees their project in terms not alien to science, even if it is a science less of incremental testing & retesting & more of the cosmological sweep of thought we associate with Einstein, Leonardo or Goethe’s Faust.

The next volume, with the complicated title of Drafts – Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis, is of course already waiting, with its cover image of sculptures by the Philadelphia Wireman – the topic of earlier Draft 22¹ – and the first published map of the Drafts scheme to date, built around that most curious prime number, 19. At the rate I’m going, DuPlessis may actually have completed the poem entirely by the time I complete this volume – tho I note that its 20 sections take over 220 pages, where the first 38 took “just” 267 – there’s hope yet that a single Draft might scale to the size of “A”-12 if not longer. So I find myself setting forth on this next book with the sense – hope even – that there are worlds yet ahead to be discovered & that I plan to indulge myself completely, taking the time necessary fully to get there.

¹ The Philadelphia Wireman was an anonymous folk sculptor whose marvelous constructions were found one day in a vacant lot in 1982, discarded perhaps because the artist had died & his (or her) space was being cleared for new tenants. Everything else that is known about him (or her) must be deduced from the works.

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On Monday and Tuesday of this coming week, Martin Scorsese’ documentary portrait of Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, will be broadcast on PBS in the United States and on BBC2 in the U.K. The DVD of the show has been on sale for a week now, along with two new CDs, one music taken from the film itself, the other a pair of performances apparently recorded at the Gaslight Café in 1962, plus a coffee table book. I haven’t seen the DVD or book as yet, tho I’ve heard both albums, which are terrific, among the very finest of the “archival” projects that have shot up around Dylan outtakes & bootlegs over the years (the Gaslight performances have been circulating for years, tho never so crisply remastered). Part of what makes the No Directions Home CD so terrific is the quality and nature of the material on it, all taken from Dylan’s early career (indeed, there are some home recording & “pre-Dylan” tapes from Minneapolis included). Most of the songs, tho, are alternate takes from Dylan’s various Columbia recording sessions. By now, of course, people have become used to how radically Dylan can re-envision some of his songs in performance, so that they bear little audible (or emotional) relationship to their first recorded forms. Yet these are versions that were, in many instances, recorded the same day as the iconic performances we all grew up with. Even then, they suggest, Dylan could imagine the same song carrying a very different tone from the one that eventually was released in vinyl.

Like so many male poets my age, I have listened to Dylan’s best songs now for decades, forever trying to fathom how he is able to capture such surreal-yet-accurate images with a shorthand precision that, even after four decades of familiarity, is simply breath-taking:

Up on Housing Project Hill
It's either fortune or fame
You must pick up one or the other
Though neither of them are to be what they claim
If you're lookin' to get silly
You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don't need you
And man they expect the same

What makes that stanza work is precisely the contrast between the convoluted “go back to from where you came” with the utter directness of the last two lines.

It has become something of received wisdom that Like a Rolling Stone is the best single rock tune ever recorded. But there are a half dozen other songs on Highway 61 Revisited that could just as easily compete for “best song”: Tombstone Blues, Ballad of a Thin Man, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – from which the passage above is taken – Desolation Row, the title track itself , and Queen Jane Approximately. That this intensely intimate vision came through such a crabbed & guarded personality at all is perhaps the best argument for Spicer’s concept of dictation, of voices being transcribed off the radio from Mars, that can be made. Beyond the lyrics, part of what makes that particular album work so well is Dylan’s own discomfort with the rock genre itself, to which he was still quite new¹ - he throws in things – organ, police whistle – that were pretty much unimaginable in 1965. It’s gaudier, more carny-like in tone. The end result is the surrealism of psychedelics combined with the paranoia of meth, a poisonous cocktail that captures that era perfectly.

From the CD, I get the sense that the Scorsese documentary ends at this point, or perhaps with the motorcycle accident a year later (a photo of Dylan on the bike is included), and perhaps that makes sense. The hiatus that followed clearly divided the young Dylan from the several other invented versions that began to show up thereafter. And as brilliant as many of the songs are after, say, Blonde on Blonde, none approach this unique combination of effects again.

¹ The No Direction CD includes the infamous recording of Maggie’s Farm that was roundly panned by the folk purists at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The performance predates the recording of Highway 61 by just a few months.

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David Melnick’s “Hasty Fields” reminds me of how image schema can set up large areas of connotation within a given work of poetry. The poem, on the face of it, seems relatively abstract, including (and somewhat early for this) elements of found language focused on the materiality of the language itself. Yet I read this as palpably a portrait of New York City, 1968. My rationale for this is the one concrete reference in the poem – Andrew Cordier / simpleton – and how it turns or evokes aspects of other, more abstract tones hidden within other words. Thus, by the poem’s end, the “brawning arms” allude back to the “mantle / broken,” conceivably even a rare sports reference for Melnick – it may be the only one in his entire oeuvre – to Mickey Mantle, the Yankee center fielder who retired that year.

Cordier was a career diplomat, an American who was a founding executive of the United Nations (and who served as an informal or backchannel emissary for the JFK administration to UN officials & perhaps others) who had gone on to become the dean for the School for International Affairs at Columbia University, a program that was a flashpoint for anti-war efforts in the 1960s, targeted by SDS as an instance of Defense Department money on college campuses (and very possibly a conduit into careers in the CIA). The 1968 student protests at Columbia were among the most prominent in the country that year, leading (for example) to one sit-in where Life magazine took a two-page photo spread of a student sitting at Columbia University President Grayson Kirk’s desk, feet up, with (if I remember correctly) one of Kirk’s cigars. That student was poet David Shapiro, one of Melnick’s friends in New York. In any event, Kirk resigned soon thereafter and was replaced on an interim basis by . . . Andrew Cordier, who held the job for two years. SDS leader Mark Rudd once characterized Cordier as an “imperialist joke” & the term “simpleton” here reflects that rhetoric.

A name on this order stains every other word of the poem, much of which appears to be a veiled discussion of the downsides of privilege. Today the phrase has become opaque, but in its time, Cordier’s presence here tilted everything. The New York it conveys sets up how, for example we will read a more open & neutral reference to British royalty a page later. These schema set up how the other terms in the poem are perceived. Thus, for example, the allusion to Mickey Mantle is (at best) a pun, a secondary connotation pushed forward with a wink, tho that echo would appear to be its function in the poem as such.

I’m not proposing, for example, that one should read this (or any) Melnick poem with the same sort of exegetical excavation methods Hugh Kenner brought to the work of Pound & Joyce, because that clearly is not where Melnick is going with the poem. But, rather, how in a field of otherwise abstract language certain interpretations are privileged, foregrounded, over others. Thus, “hasty fields,” the phrase, means what? The image I carry with me is of student-police confrontations on the claustrophobic quad at Columbia. One side of an alternative life circa 1968, against which the rich kid junky Warhol-hanger on is another very different mode of rebellion.

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“Hasty Fields” is not necessarily the most typical poem from David Melnick’s Eclogs. It is, however, one that I could imagine setting in HTML without driving myself completely over the edge.

hasty fields
     eight soldiers
          perturbations

field pieces
     Andrew Cordier
          simpleton

sensual music
     not a California
          occupied

          a good deal
of her time in recent weeks as she found fewer excuses and excused more and more of her little faults through daily habits of mental circumambulation; I found fewer of her

Ay que hombre

allowing much of a
     pill grown
          antedates inc.

should be a lot of fund
     epending on the will

& imagination of the
          host and hostesses

          where your money is

tackle some
     one of the two

          you / are very wise
          ease the feeling
          anxiously from door to door

number of teeth on view

she was a
     girl
          I can a

ssure you
     Saturday the b
          eauty

(sorts) wonder

Winter
     Buckingham Palace
          merchant family

slow & painful
     gout
          tortured him

we so warm
     -ly approve
          refused to enter

only too plainly
     left his mantle
          broken

borrowed (it
     neighborly
          considerate

broke
     through
          his brawning arms

          garage
             door
                opium
                   system

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The first book I ever blurbed must have been David Melnick’s 1972 Ithaca House volume, Eclogs. Would that all of my blurbs stand up to 33 years of hindsight half so well as this:

One’s immediate attraction to these poems lies in their clear craft and almost infinite suggestiveness. Yet beneath this dreamy, erotic world of glimpses awaits a powerful and complex machine, a structure which can be perceived through the jeweled surfaces if only the reader will understand the title of “These are the Aspects of the Perfect” to be a statement of literal fact. Uniting for the first time the “French idiom” of the New York School and the field composition techniques of Duncan and Olson, Melnick has achieved the last significant goal of modernism and begun a major career.

There’s hubris, no doubt, in the idea that modernism has (or had) goals, let alone ranking them, and yet in an important way, I still feel that I got this exactly right. Eclogs is a hinge text, one of the last great books to accept the premises of the New American Poetry &, in the same instant, one of the first to assert a new one, one that envisions materiality for language as physical as paint is to a painting or stone to sculpture. It’s a close kin to Creeley’s Pieces or Ashbery’s Three Poems, tho far more Zukofskyan than either of them might have thought possible back in the early ‘70s.

Composed of ten poems – the book is just 39 pages long – whose airy open field physicality belies the density of the writing itself, Eclogs is at one level completely autobiographical, yet seen & heard thru such minute fragments that one focuses instead on their presence more than on what lay hidden behind the arras veil. This is a focus that crystallizes in Melnick’s next volume, PCOET, and in his homophonic translation of the first three books of The Iliad, Men in Aïda. By these later works, reference has moved simultaneously in two different directions: toward Homer, through the ear, but toward a ludic surface more filled with the names of friends & other poets than any text of the late Ted Berrigan. It’s a double-edge that one finds first in Eclogs, most immediately in its third poem, “These are the Aspects of the Perfect” ( a title that anticipates Rodrigo Toscano’s Partisans by a quarter century), with its frank equation of sex with economic exchange & posed questions asking if in fact “Fresno (poets” – there is no later closed parenthesis – don’t represent the same principle. Melnick is thus capable of being the most playful & serious of poets, the texts themselves oscillating between pure joy & the deepest depression, each moment inextricably bound to the other.

All of these books – not to mention the work never printed as such – have become difficult to obtain. Happily, there’s a project at hand that should see them eventually issued as a single volume, tho possibly not for another year or three. When that volume does appear, those who have barely read Melnick are in for a treat.

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Rachel Loden’s The Richard Nixon Snow Globe is a brilliantly crafted suite of 20 poems that take – with some generous exceptions – the 1970s as their image base & the poetics of roughly the same period as a cue to form. As well executed as it is, there’s a curiously retro feel to the project as a whole, one that reminds me in part of the invariable fallacy of the well-wrought urn. The next generation can always do it better, cleaner, more sharply defined than any generation that leads by making it new. A poem like “My Subject” or “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Station” will always outshine its model¹, but in do so can never be its equal.

Loden attempts to overturn the problem thematically, suggesting at some level that Bush II’s regime is an echo of the Nixon cabal. But in spite of the presence of Rumsfeld & Cheney on both playing fields, the analogy doesn’t hold. The Nixon administration was never a kleptocracy, which is all Bush II would have been save for the bungled wars on Iraq & Louisiana.

Loden’s second strategy extends the work out beyond the field of the Nixon regime altogether: Hugh Hefner, Cinderella, a crime scene on the San Francisco peninsula, notes from a surveillance. Individually, as with “Miss October,” these can be among the most effective poems in the book. Thematically, tho, they cause it to feel more diffuse. And the book as book is never stronger than when it’s focusing on the complex, overwhelmingly dark persona of Mr. Nixon, a voice Loden captures with spooky accuracy.

Indeed, at some level, this book is not unlike Nixon himself – brilliant, frustrating, ultimately self-defeating. It makes one wonder how it might be done differently, say, by focusing on the current set of gangsters defiling the ornate upholstery of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There are figures in the present regime every bit as complicated & conflicted as any in Nixon’s environs – Colin Powell & Condi Rice in particular. Kissinger was hardly more of a Rasputin figure than Karl Rove. Rove, tho, as a personal figure, is the essence of bland. He radiates pudgy softness with an undertone of resentment as his driving force, a figure more suited as the villain for an Our Gang comedy than the more Shakespearean tragedy Loden projects around Nixon. Linguistically, the current set offers up only the malapropisms of Bush II & the arcane self-justifications of Donald Rumsfeld – both, it’s worth noting, have already been set into verse elsewhere.

Possibly, the analogy Loden is seeking is more Marxian one: the first time (Nixon) as tragedy, the second (Bush II) as farce. If so, the project overall feels incomplete. There are minor figures – Haldeman & Erlichman, for example, Martha Mitchell, the Watergate burglars themselves – all of whom might have been mined to deepen the project. Ditto the prosecutors who eventually pushed him from power, especially Senator Sam Ervin, “Maximum John” Sirica or the avuncular Archibald Cox. There is, tucked in the history of that administration, the outlines of a larger, deeper, finally darker project than the 20 poems printed here, or their companions in the earlier Hotel Imperium & The Last Campaign, suggest.

Rachel Loden has struggled with Nixon in her own way as deeply as Kent Johnson wrestles with Araki Yasusada. Ultimately, as an idea, Loden’s is the far more important – and difficult – project. Scattered as it has been across different books, however, it never quite fully comes into focus. If anything, the best point of comparison isn’t Johnson at all, but perhaps something closer to the way Robert Duncan ran Passages amid the poems of several different volumes. But – as I’ve written here also of Passages – Rachel Loden’s Tricky Dick poems would have far greater impact gathered into a single collection in which they – and they alone – are the focus. Given that there is no sign yet that she has exhausted this fixation with the dark side of American public life, that book may still be in the making.

¹ David Bromige & Robert Duncan, respectively.

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Sometimes I come to even a small book late, as with Marc Kuykendall’s My Picayune Anxiety Room, a charming chapbook published three years ago by Barretta Books of New York in an edition of just 162 (12 signed & numbered, the remainder hors commerce). With just fifteen poems, only stretching out to a second page, you would think I might have finished this treat the instant it arrived. Yet I know the “unread books” bookcases – I have three, one large one for poetry, two smaller ones for critical writing and for fiction, biography, history & memoirs (all lumped together) – include other volumes no larger than this that reach back into the early ‘90s if not earlier.

Of course when time has passed since a book like this has been published, especially by somebody whose work I can’t really say I know¹, I’m curious as to why I haven’t heard more, or more recently, from or of them. Is Kuykendall one of those poets who will publish only one or two small books & move to something else as a defining life activity? It’s not possible to know from this reader’s distance, nor is it any characterization of quality – Ebbe Borregaard has some of the very best poems in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, but over the four-plus decades since that first came out, he’s been one of the least public of its contributors. David Melnick just has three books over the past 33 years and Eclogs, his first volume, has fewer poems than does Kuykendall’s book. Yet Melnick has more, and more ardent, followers than ever. Twice this week I’ve received inquiries concerning his current whereabouts (in retirement in San Francisco) & his recent writing (nonexistent).

Kuykendall’s book is quite good – that is both its secret & perhaps its curse. All of the poems are well-crafted, witty, intelligent, impossible not to enjoy. Yet there is little here that I have not seen the likes of elsewhere. In this sense – tho in this sense only – it reminds me of some School of Quietude volumes, well-wrought but thoroughly circumscribed by its historical moment.

Kuykendall writes what can only be called a late-generation NY School text – where images angle just slightly away from the expected & the open, discursive tone harkens back to Frank O’Hara’s adaptation of William Carlos Williams. My favorite piece here is a short one entitled “Two Poems”:

Speaking of ideal conditions,
I was halfway across the pool
getting stung on the lip by a bee
that had flown into my root beer,
when the little boy almost drowned.

I saw you later at the reading,
your gaze was like frozen pebbles.
I read the poem about how
you crushed a rose over my pants,
thought I made it seem like it
was about something else entirely.

That first stanza could be a case study in the influence of John Ashbery – starting in the middle, building through slow narrative twists to a final line that could not be anticipated from anything that has preceded it. The second stanza isn’t quite as successful – those last two lines could have been more efficient – but within the subgenre of love askew it’s a perfectly presentable text. Kuykendall’s obviously aware that the two stanzas don’t quite “fit” – hence the title – yet placing beside one another positions each to operate more sharply than either could solo.

This is a book deeply committed to Auden’s idea that poetry “makes nothing happen.” Yet the craft of each text, combined with a first-rate graphic design (Kuykendall printed the cover himself) betrays its seeming casualness. One wonders just what result Kuykendall was seeking. I, on the other hand, will be seeking out Kuykendall’s future work henceforth, hoping that this strong sense of craft pushes itself out more into a territory yet unknown.

¹ A search on Google doesn’t turn up much, tho a Mark Kuykendall is a graphic designer in Kansas City who claims that his favorite poet is Jack Kerouac & another has been a bass player for Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys. In November, 1845, one Matthew Kuykendall of Kentucky willed to his son Mark “one negro girl named Caroline.” The book's verso is somewhat more helpful - tho it does lack a copyright notice - crediting Sal Mimeo and The Hat for prior publication, plus thanking several people, Larry Fagin & Lisa Jarnot among them.

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Who was it who first proposed the Bolivian government’s display of the corpse of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1967 as an instance of bourgeois sculpture? Ghastly as that sounds, it also rings true. The border between the work of art and the public image has always been one subject to conceptual negotiation. Indeed, in just the past three weeks, there have been more than a few aerial photographs of New Orleans that have suggested an almost Christo-like quality to them.

Let’s take this one step closer to home. There once was an artist whose work with the body, especially in outdoor sites, often resulted images that suggested half-buried corpses. Then Ana Mendieta either jumped or was pushed from her 34^th-floor loft – the echoes from her own work were unmistakable. Her husband Carl Andre, a sculptor whose own signature pieces are of flattened metal laid out on gallery & museum floors, was prosecuted, but acquitted. Regardless of what scenario one concocts in one’s head to explain what might have happened, the stain of the aesthetic is impossible to completely eradicate. The event is all the more horrific because of this.

At one level, Roberto Bolaño’s novel, Distant Star, is about an artist whose work just as dramatically obliterates the boundaries between not so much art & life as art & death. At another level, Bolaño’s book isn’t about this character at all. Rather, it’s about telling & perception.

The context is a group of young poets in a couple of college creative writing courses in Chile in the early 1970s. In addition to the unnamed narrator, we have a couple of teachers who figure into the narrative only peripherally, Bibiano O’Ryan, the narrator’s best friend, Fat Marta, Veronica & Angelica Garmendia – mostly referred to collectively as the Garmendia sisters – and one Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, who even in the book’s ostensible first sentence¹ is called Carlos Wieder. The little coterie’s days as idle students, contemplating their publication in little magazines & wondering as to whom might be sleeping with whom, is blow apart abruptly when Pinochet’s coup overturns the government. The narrator – like Bolaño himself – finds himself in prison, then later in exile in Europe. One of the Garmendia sisters is found with her throat cut, the other (and an aunt) are disappeared forever. Ruiz-Tagle drops from sight. This little scene will not be the birthplace of the new Chilean poetry.

Later – and this book is very much about what happens later – a freed narrator & Bibiano (he is almost never called by his surname, which I had to go back to look up) conclude that a mysterious pilot from the Chilean air force, Carlos Wieder, must be their old acquaintance Ruiz-Tagle. Wieder’s specialty is skywriting poetry, erasing lines between audiences & the concept of publication. The poems quoted sound more like an heroic mode of surreal nihilism than anything else. Then Wieder is said to have given an exhibition, not of his skywriting, but of a series of photographs. This turns out to be the hinge event of the book – and also why I raised the questions of Guevara & Mendieta above – but I won’t say more here, other than that even this Wieder now drops from view.

Virtually nothing in the book, save for the very end, occurs with even remote directness. It is always the narrator hearing from somebody else – most often Bibiano or Fat Marta, and later an ex-Chilean cop now in Paris called Abel Romero – that somebody has alleged that somebody said that something happened. Maybe.

From this point forward, the veiled narrative of Wieder’s actions become even more speculative. Characters are reduced to looking for stylistic quirks in little zines by writers with improbable names. Has Wieder become the theorist for a group of neo-Nazi skinhead poets who call themselves the New Barbarism? And, if so, which one?

Bolaño is operating on a dizzying number of levels here. On one, this is a tale of what happens to a group of, if not friends & lovers exactly, something not so far distant, after a proto-fascist coup. About preparing for a world that never actually happens. On a second, it’s about how you know something – anything – about another person, about knowledge as such, done with a savoir-faire that should ring true for anybody familiar with the literary milieu of young poets. It would all be just gossip if only it were not so terribly lethal. On the next, it’s a masterwork of story-telling, almost the perfect blend of Borges and Raymond Chandler, a combination you don’t think of every day. Finally (or am I forgetting things?), it’s an instance from a South American context of a phenomenon that will be familiar to U.S. readers – the poet’s novel, not because it’s about poetry so much as the uses it makes of this knowledge in both telling its story & plotting that story.

In this latter sense, it’s a direct kin to the work of Jack Kerouac, Kathy Acker, Joe Torra, William Burroughs, Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Auster, Mary Burger, Kevin Killian, Douglas Woolf, Robert Glück, Camille Roy & even Herman Melville, all writers who hover about that fine demarcation betwixt genres. Again, this isn’t a context I think of when I think of South American writing. The closest antecedent I can think of is Julio Cortázar, the Argentine member of Oulipo.

And perhaps it’s the Raymond Chandler element, and definitely it’s at least partly Chris Andrews’ terrific translation, but Distant Star is completely compelling writing. In contrast, say, with a Borgesian type like Nabokov, where the result is always an overworked surface that deliberately slows the reading, Distant Star comes across like a detective novel even as it stirs up all these other dimensions. It’s a great read.

¹ Because it opens in fact with an introduction referring back to Bolaño’s first novel, Nazi Literature in the Americas (not yet translated into English), in which Wieder/Ruiz-Tagle appears to be called Lieutenant Ramirez Hoffman. A onetime Chilean revolutionary, Arturo B., was not satisfied with the version there. “So we took that final chapter and shut ourselves up for a month and a half in my house in Blanes, where, guided by his dreams and nightmares, we composed the present novel. My role was limited to preparing refreshments, consulting a few books, and discussing the results of numerous paragraphs with Arturo and the increasingly animated ghost of Pierre Ménard.”

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Jim McCrary

A very nice write up on the new Black Spring in today’s Lawrence Journal-World. Tho this weblog beat them to it by a little over two months.

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Born into Brothels is a difficult film to watch, more difficult because, as a documentary, the fate of its primary characters – eight children, ages ten to twelve, all the offspring of prostitutes in Calcutta’s squalid red-light district – is something you know they will have to live with the whole of their lives. Zana Briski, the photographer who came to live in Sonagachi district to document the lives of the women & ended up teaching photography classes for their children, letting the kids document their own lives, often speaks of the children as “doomed” if she can’t find boarding schools who will take them on scholarship. It’s hard not to watch the kids with value-judgments in abeyance – the kids work hard, are treated brutally by their parents & neighbors (a scene that is repeated more than once), have no visible formal education & have to flee their homes to play on the streets or rooftops whenever mom brings home a customer. Families, grandparents included, sleep on mats with no fixed sense of order. One boy, having photographed a pair of sandals left in some spilled curried rice, demands, “In what other country would you find people who put their shoes in their food?”

And yet with the resiliency & optimism of almost all children their age, the young photographers picture reveal a world of richness & bright colors, great humor & limitless empathy. One girl’s photograph of her sister’s friend (above) ends up as the cover to an Amnesty International calendar. Another boy, Agavit, perhaps the ultimate protagonist of this film, is invited to Amsterdam to participate in a World Press Photography Foundation show of children’s photography from around the world.

The gap between Agavit’s potential & his present circumstance becomes all the more extreme when his mother is murdered – torched apparently by her pimp. The boy responds with understandable anger & depression, not knowing if he wants to continue with is photography or his (equally magnificent) painting. A portion of the film chronicles “Zana Auntie’s” increasingly desperate interactions with school officials, passport offices, a bureaucracy unspeakably inept & overwhelmed. This is interspersed, literally, with field trips as the takes the kids to the ocean & the zoo (where some identify strongly with the caged conditions of the animals).

The children speak of wanting to leave the district, of not turning into prostitutes or drug dealers, with the same language one hears here from felons about prison reform & rehabilitation, knowing what is expected of them by the camera – indeed by the entire outside world – yet in fact a boarding school & real education would cleave them from their families forever. It’s an almost impossible choice between the most impoverished demimonde I’ve ever seen – no one even bothers to investigate the murder of Agavit’s mother – and something not that removed from the Carlisle Indian School in 19^th century Pennsylvania (which today is routinely presented as an instance of the soft version of America’s genocide of the nations it found already inhabiting the new world the U.S. coveted). And while Briski manages to get most of the kids accepted at various schools, by the time of the film’s completion, only three remained away from the district – one of these a girl who ran away from home to accept her scholarship. The other girls will be “in the line” turning tricks well before they turn 15.

We watched this film with our boys & had a long thoughtful conversation afterwards. What they found most moving was not that these children their own age were being channeled toward prostitution as such, but the evident emotional brutality of parents & neighbors, the idea that these bright, hopeful children were going to turn out like their parents. That’s not separable from the fact of prostitution & its ancillary drug scene, at least not in Calcutta (one father attempted, during the course of the film, to sell his ten-year-old daughter). They all commingle when sex, drugs & money fuse together in the lowest rungs of the world economic system.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education just published Bill Lavender’s account of escaping New Orleans. Considering just how many of Bill’s friends & fans of his poetry read this blog, it makes sense to reprint it here.

'We're Getting Out of Here'

As told to JOHN GRAVOIS

Bill Lavender runs the Low Residency Creative Writing Program at the University of New Orleans. His companion, Nancy Dixon, teaches in the university's English department. Over a cellphone, Mr. Lavender described their journey out of the city.

When we heard about the storm, we decided not to evacuate, because we really didn't think our house was in grave danger. We live in Mid-City, which is a part of New Orleans that's relatively high but not as high as the French Quarter. It's an old house. It's been through plenty of hurricanes.

I guess the storm was at full force at midmorning on Monday. It never was really that bad -- I actually put on my motorcycle helmet and walked around outside at the height of it. We lost power, of course. We still had water, we still had gas.

By about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the storm was over. There was a little bit of water in the street, but nothing I couldn't have driven through. Our reaction at that point was, Well, this wasn't really that bad.

If that had been all the storm was, I wouldn't have regretted staying.

At some point in there, the water did start to rise. It was rising in the full sunshine, with no rain, just coming up in the streets.

Our neighbor across the street, who had evacuated, had a boat under her house -- a 14-foot light aluminum skiff with oarlocks and oars. As kind of a lark, I went and pulled it out from under her house and put it in the street.

That night, Monday night, we went out on the front porch. There was absolutely no light, and there was no noise, and the stars were fantastically clear.

We got up the next morning, and the water was higher. We were trying to listen to the radio, trying to figure out what was going on. We were hearing that the flooding on the east side of New Orleans was really bad. We were starting to hear helicopters flying around.

There was a rumor that the levee was broken somewhere, but that they were going to be fixing it, and that as soon as they got the levee fixed, they were going to be able to pump the water out. I was thinking maybe the end of the week, at the most.

One of my neighbors came to my door and said there was a guy around the corner with a baby who needed to go to the hospital. The guy was scared to death of water.

So we got in the boat, and we were rowing down the street, trying to pick the best route to Mercy Hospital. There was water all the way -- right up to the front door.

Some guy in scrubs got down in the water and helped me dock the boat there on the steps. He was a paramedic who worked for the city. He said they had no power in the hospital, and he had a generator down at his office. He wanted to know if I could row him down there so he could get this generator.

And I asked him, "Doesn't the hospital have backup power?" He said, "Yeah, they have a generator, but it's in the basement."

It was ludicrous, this notion of going to get a 5,000-watt generator to power a hospital. But he said, "There are people dying in here, and it's all we can do."

So we went to his paramedic station, a little two-story metal building. Two of his colleagues were there.

This guy I'm with told them, "I've come to get the generator." And they told him no. He said, "Look, there are people dying in Mercy."

"Well things are tough all over, and before this generator comes out of here, I've got to get me and my dogs out."

At that point, I kind of exploded. I said, "You're not even using the generator. The generator has nothing to do with your dogs." It kind of shamed them. We finally did get the generator.

We had our last good meal that night. We were having wine on the front porch, all the neighbors were out on their porches, and I got out my guitar and sang "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."

That night it was really hot and really still. There were helicopters messing around all night. I had this idea they were either evacuating Mercy Hospital or bringing them a generator. At one point they were so close that I could feel the wind, so I took to praying for them to come over.

It wasn't until Wednesday that we started to get more information. There was a press conference at 12. They said they thought the levee repairs would be done by about Friday. Then they said they should have the water out of the city within about 30 days. I said, "We're getting out of here. We can't live like this for 30 days."

We packed up very hastily -- all our drinking water and a good bit of food. I left my hard drive with 30 years of miscellaneous writings on it, plus Nancy's hard drive with all her scholarship on it. I just tried to hide them in the attic. I didn't know what else to do.

We had to put our cat in a carrying cage, and we put our dogs on the boat. We went and got our neighbor, my friend Charlie Franklin. We told him what we'd heard and we told him it's time to go. He thought about it for about two minutes, and then said OK.

We were nervous. We knew there were no police. We'd been warned that there were roving bands of armed looters. We knew that the boat was becoming a valuable commodity. The dogs were nervous also. They would not let anyone approach closer than about 10 feet from the boat. Charlie had a gun.

When we turned one corner, there was a kiddie pool floating in the middle of Canal Street, and I could see a head sticking up over the side of it. There was another guy pushing it and another guy wandering around in the chest-deep water looking kind of dreamy. They were junkies that had looted the Rite Aid. They were using this kiddie pool to get out of the water to shoot up.

A little further, there was a dead man in the water. Someone had hung his shirt up on a street sign. I couldn't really see his face, but the shirt was sticking up like a tent. We heard later they were tying corpses to street signs and poles.

Across the street was a building called the City Hall Annex. It has a big front porch that was just above water level, and it was full of people, maybe 150. On one end, there were women and kids holding up signs saying, "Help us please." At the other end of the porch there was this mad party going on. They were breaking windows and throwing whiskey bottles around and kind of whooping and yelling.

We were starting to get very careful about our route because we were getting close to the Superdome, and we didn't want to get caught there. Our plan was to go to the Macy's parking lot, which is just adjacent to the dome, where we had parked our car. We were just praying that we might be able to get to the car and drive out.

There were no cops. In this whole ride, we never saw a cop.

When we got to the Macy's parking lot, we saw that the entrance was four feet deep. So we couldn't get our car. We followed the water to the corner of Girod and Carondolet, and that's where the water ended. We had to abandon the boat.

So we started walking uptown, to go to my ex-wife's house, which we knew was dry, and they had a generator and probably food and water. For all I knew, they were still there, because I hadn't talked to them since Monday morning when the phones went out.

We saw this two-story house with the facade completely removed. It was just like a dollhouse. I could see the furniture and the bookshelves, everything neat, nothing in disarray, and these two black labs up on the second floor looking down at us.

After a while, a guy caught up with us. He told us he had walked all the way from the lower Ninth Ward. I'm guessing that must be at least five miles. He told us that down in the Ninth Ward he was literally wading through bodies on the way out. He didn't know where any of his family was. He had a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old kid, and he suspected that they were both dead. He was coming uptown because he had a brother who was a butler in a Garden District mansion.

He told us that in the end there will be tens of thousands dead.

We got to my ex's house. We were just praying that we were going to see her pickup outside the house. But there was nothing, and our hearts just sank. We'd been on the road now for about four to five hours. We were exhausted.

Then I remembered that our friends lived just a few blocks away, and they had left their car. Not only that, but I knew right where the key was. We got to Alex and Kat's house, and the car was intact, and the key was in the mailbox. But we couldn't make the key work in the door. I tried it and Charlie tried it, and finally I said, "Charlie, move," and I threw a brick through the window.

We crammed all of us in the car. We drove to Tchoupitoulas Street and then straight across the bridge to the West Bank, the only way out.

The next day, we were going to leave Charlie in Baton Rouge to take the bus to Alexandria, but we found out that there were 200,000 people downtown trying to get out. So we took him all the way to Alexandria. We started to have the emotional breakdown. It was strange how, going through the whole thing, I just sort of never stopped. None of us did.

But when we dropped Charlie off, all three of us broke down and started crying and pretty much didn't stop for about three days.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Notes From Academe
Volume 52, Issue 4, Page A56

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The perfect counterpoint to Marjorie Perloff’s Vienna Paradox has to be Rosmarie Waldrop’s Ceci n’est pas Rosmarie, half of a pair of delightful autobiographical memoirs by the famed poet, translator, editor & publisher and her equally renowned poet, teacher, editor & publisher spouse – Keith Waldrop’s memoir is called Ceci n’est pas Keith, brought out as a single volume under their own Burning Deck imprint in 2002. Rosmarie Waldrop’s memoir is the perfect counterpoint to Perloff’s because Rosmarie Sebald, four years Perloff’s junior, has had something akin to a parallel life, with some profound differences. Where Perloff’s family were affluent urban sophisticates in Austria, deeply involved in the arts & culture, & indeed in the uppermost reaches of the Austrian government until the anti-Semitism of the Nazis drove them into exile & caused young Gabriele Mintz to refashion herself as Marjorie Perloff, one of the first major American literary critics to focus on the avant-garde tradition, Rosmarie Sebald was the daughter of a German physical education teacher who escaped “being drafted” into Hitler Jugend only by the fall of Germany a few short months before her tenth birthday.

The four-year age gap between the two is as profound as the distinction between German & Jew in determining how they perceived the dislocations of the war years – the Mintz family settling in New York while Rosmarie was sent to live with rural relatives to avoid the aerial attacks on her city, which thereafter was occupied for many years by GIs who converted a nearby airbase to Allied use. One such GI was Keith Waldrop, who used his jazz records & interest in the global avant-garde to woo the local girl – and who later used the funds from winning the University of Michigan’s Hopwood Award to bring Rosmarie to America, where she emerged as Rosmarie Waldrop, one of the finer poets of our time & one of the great translators of all time.

If Perloff uses her memoir to investigate an entire range of issues, the Waldrops are more content to let memoir be memoir. And yet the differences between their own interwoven stories are equally fascinating. Keith’s is more easy going, even playful, than Rosmarie’s – tho her formal structure is superficially the more disjunct, less conventional. One senses also – tho Keith may be the least academic “academic” of all time – just how important teaching & the context of different schools have been for him, really the only setting he has ever had for his work as such, a foundation that Rosmarie gets instead from her labor as a translator & publisher – her discussion of the impact typesetting has had in shaping her own priorities as a poet is one of her memoir’s high points.

Tho it is visible really only indirectly in either book, it is fascinating to see how different the avant-garde appears in Rosmarie’s memoir from the one that shows up in Marorie’s. Perloff’s avant-garde is ultimately North American, tho it looks to Europe for a philosophical foundation, the intellectual questions that will haunt it – this is never more clear than in Perloff’s discussion of John Cage, which is really a discussion of Cage the student of Schoenberg, not, say, Cage the Buddhist. Rosmarie Waldrop’s avant-garde is only occasionally American, but is rather a more broadly defined international weaving of like-minded artists. Both Perloff & Waldrop discuss Wittgenstein at some length, but again it would seem to be very nearly a different person.

Individually & together, the Waldrop memoirs are nowhere near as ambitious as Perloff’s. Rosmarie’s Americanization is as much the process of becoming an artist as becoming an American – again that age difference between Perloff & Waldrop yields different results, tho here it is because Perloff was so much younger when she made the transition. Together & individually, all three memoirs give us important insights into the creation of our own post-WW2 literary scene & on the rubble of the old world on which some portion of this new one has been built.

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The Kibera slums in Nairobi, where over one million people live
is an important setting for The Constant Gardner
tho images of it show up in none of the film’s promotional material.

Fernando Meirelles uses a John Le Carré story, one part spy mystery, one part tragic romance, to tell a tale of Globalization: The Dark Side in The Constant Gardner. Viewers familiar with Meirelles’ majestic City of God may be disappointed to see that he has made what is largely a more sinister, contemporary version of The English Patient here – Ralph Fiennes has the franchise for tragic romances set in Africa – but this is an instance in which the plot is not particularly the story that Meirelles is telling. Rather, like City of God, he wants you to see just how it is people in the Third World live today – there are long aerial pans of the endless Kibera slums of Nairobi, a desert refugee camp in the Sudan, not a lion or elephant to be seen. The only hint of the old indigenous culture emanates from the sound track.¹

At one level, the film is standard Hollywood fare – anyone who has seen the Harrison Ford blockbuster The Fugitive knows almost instantly where this film is headed – but it really is as if Meirelles has made two movies, one for the studio that financed it, another for viewers’ back brains, images that won’t easily fade, even if the characters’ comments about them blend easily enough to a typical genre – the evil pharmaceutical conglomerate whose clinical trials are going badly, burying its mistakes more or less literally in a local lime pit, failing to note that its forthcoming wonder drug kills some people some of the time. It’s not so much that Meirelles wants you to see the corporation acting badly, with the aid of more than a few British foreign service officers, as it is that he wants you to see what a clinical trial of western medicine looks like in Kenya period. It’s a scene of poverty that might have looked more stark three weeks ago, before the anarchy at the New Orleans Convention Center ripped the veil off our own version of desperation & put it on the evening news, but ultimately it’s not all that different. “Disposable people,” as one of the characters puts it, look remarkably similar regardless of where they suffer.

The story turns a few of the usual narrative conventions upside down – the protagonist, British foreign service officer Fiennes is not Harrison Ford-like cool under fire or heroic. Indeed he’s filmed at several key points in postures intended to make him seem smaller than his six feet. Rachel Weisz, who plays his wife, on the other hand is filmed to seem taller – she’s actually five inches shorter – he’s often looking up at her, literally. She is the character who sets the plot in motion, a firebrand of an international aid worker who weds the phlegmatic diplomat at least partly so that he will take her to Africa. She’s perpetually asking the embarrassing rhetorical question of public officials, making her spouse’s colleagues cringe before whispering to her husband that he needs to do a better job keeping her under wraps. This, of course, she has no intention of doing.

The story is told in two arcs, starting with the discovery of her murder (the wheels of her overturned jeep is the very first image up on the screen) & her husband’s attempt to understand what happened – she hasn’t told him anything about the scandal concerning the tests of Dypraxa, a "cure" for tuberculosis, she was about to expose. Gradually he comes to understand what she was doing, to & with whom, and, as he does, the very same forces that got her begin to come after him. I’m not going to tell you more than that, except that the ending both is & is not familiar.

Unlike Andrew Davis, the director of The Fugitive, Meirelles obviously cares passionately about the corporate relationships that exist to bring a modern medicine to market. The manufacturer of the drug is not the subcontractor who tests it & the motives of the British government in aiding either of these corporations is as simple as 1500 jobs in a manufacturing plant in the north. Fiennes eventually is forced to understand how all the parties are motivated differently, ending up in a Sudanese refugee camp where Dypraxa’s original inventor is expiating his own sins by bringing aid to the victims of that nation’s civil war. It is a perfect Meirelles’ touch that Fiennes confrontation with Pete Postlethwaite in the camp is interrupted by bandits on horseback “recruiting” new members at gunpoint.

This film has gotten rave reviews in part because anyone who saw City of God understands what a great filmmaker Meirelles is, and in part because it comes at the end of cinema’s summer season, when the market is flooded with mindless fare for out-of-school teenagers. If it’s not quite the great film the reviewers would like it to be, it certainly is a fascinating, often wonderful project to watch. If I have problems with it, it’s partly because of the compromises Meirelles makes to get this tale to market – there is a sex scene early on (a flashback, actually) that is filmed in lighting fit for a perfume ad. Indeed, one of the largest distractions of The Constant Gardner is that it is visually so damn beautiful – whether it’s a scene of herons erupting from the surface of a lake at sunset or a long scan of the Kibera slums. This is a level of romanticism on the part of cinemaphotographer César Charlone that was never evident in City of God when he & Meirelles were dealing with their own continent. This film, however, was made for a different audience, or at least audiences beyond those that saw City. It will be interesting to see which ones show up.

¹ Again like the English Patient. When the CD comes out, it’s certain to be a success financially – world music as easy listening.

Labels: Film

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The Vienna Paradox, the title of Marjorie Perloff’s intense & fascinating memoir, was that the Jews of the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not think of themselves as Jewish – indeed, many had been baptized – until Hitler forced them to do so. As a community, the Viennese Jewish elite had been as thoroughly assimilated into the Austrian society as took place in any European nation. Perloff’s maternal grandfather, a career diplomat, serviced successive Austrian governments even after they had become overtly fascists, right up until the Anschluss, Hitler’s “annexation” of Austria into the Third Reich. The Anschluss forced Perloff’s family to flee, most coming to the United States (tho a couple were able to wait the war out in Italy & still others settled in South America).

In place of Judaism, Perloff suggests, many turned instead to culture, the so-called high arts, as a kind of more secular religion, one that could join them to their Christian neighbors. Having to flee for their lives & assimilate in the New World not only unveiled the anti-Semitism of their neighbors – anything they couldn’t carry with them was of course stolen – but now exposed them to a new world in which the absolute barrier between art & kitsch, between populism & Kulchur, had never been fully erected. From the Vienna of Schoenberg they found themselves in the New York of Frank Sinatra, where a profane haberdasher from Missouri sat atop what emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world.

At one level, Vienna Paradox is the tale of the Americanization of Gabriele Mintz, who ditched her first name in a quest to de-emphasize her “exotic” Viennese roots, emerging as one of the two or three most successful & important critics of contemporary American literature of the past half century. But just as Perloff has succeeded by focusing on our most challenging texts & authors – not without controversy – The Vienna Paradox is the antithesis of the “I did this, I did that” mode of autobiography. Indeed, the book’s weakest moments are often its most autobiographical, especially once Perloff enters the adult realm of college. Her decision to focus her work on the most progressive poets of her time is handled in less than one sentence – tho the decision casts enormous light backward on the community of her childhood & on the idea of a class that immersed itself not, as Perloff makes clear, in art for art’s sake, but in art for life’s sake. If I read what Perloff almost says rightly, the avant-garde (& now presumably the post-avant) carries forward what was best about the old high culture – the constant quest to further thought, to explore, that which could be said to underlie such disparate Viennese intellectuals as Stefan George, Arnold Schoenberg & Ludwig Wittgenstein – whereas the School of Quietude is concerned instead primarily with preserving high culture’s social codes, the elitism that ultimately failed the Jewish participants the instant that the darker underbelly of anti-Semitism was revealed to be a constituent element of such social conservatism.

That is, at least on one level, the unwritten book that still lurks just beneath the surface of these pages. Vienna Paradox is at its best when Perloff is focused on the worlds of her parents & grandparents & the much more wrenching adjustments they had to make, both personally & professionally, coming to the U.S. Already in their 30s when they reached New York, Max & Ilse Mintz had to establish themselves in new careers. High achievers both – a Mintz & Schüller family trait that goes back beyond the time when my own ancestors were still illiterate fish mongers in England – Gabriele’s father became a CPA while her mother was one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in economics & taught at Columbia. Focusing in part on these older generations enables Perloff to invoke her remarkable research & analytical skills in ways that writing about herself really doesn’t permit.

One of the more fascinating aspects of Perloff’s own upbringing was her education at Fieldston School, a private school operated by the Ethical Culture movement, dedicated to the insertion of ethics into the social function most people would reserve for religion. Popular among secular Jews – Rachel Blau DuPlessis has an Ethical Culture background as well – Fieldston could be read as an attempt to recreate the same dynamics that made up, for Perloff, the Vienna Paradox itself. In her own case, however, it was simply the closest private school available. The process of Americanization was already overwhelming her family’s old world dynamics.

The Vienna Paradox is exceptionally readable, more compelling than most novels. If anything, it cries out for a sequel. There is, I think, an entire volume hidden in this sentence (in reaction to professor’s suggestion that she turn the statistical analysis of rhyme from its original focus on Yeats in her dissertation to a poet such as Byron):

More important: I wanted to become a different kind of Modernist: no longer a student of Robert Lowell, but of the larger, early 20^th century world called the Avant-Garde.

Here’s hoping that someday she will write that book.

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This is the best photo essay I’ve seen from a resident of New Orleans.

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Robert Rahway Zakanitch, 2001

Worth noting:

Arthur Danto, the philosopher who serves as art critic for The Nation, has curated an exhibit entitled The Art of 9/11, which just opened at apexart gallery in Soho. The site is worth visiting for Danto’s words, especially when thought about in the context of our ongoing national catastrophe in the gulf states. I’m sure the show is worth a trip downtown as well.

Meanwhile in Austin, Texas, this year’s University of Texas students are getting an undergrad library completely devoid of books. As somebody who discovered poetry by wandering around a library just to see what might be there, this is a concept that makes me break out in a rash.

Yakima, tho, has a Poetry Pole.

Finally, in Kabul, Love’s Labour’s Lost.

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Ron: To blog, or not to blog: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the sitemeter to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous trackbacks,
Or to block sender against a sea of troubles,
And by blocking end them? To die: to link to that dying;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural hits
That blog is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd and linked to. To die, to sleep;
To link to that sleep: perchance to dreamblog: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what posts may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal blogosphere,
Must give us pause: blah de blah,
a bare bodkin dot blogspot dot com!
To grunt and sweat while reading Josh Corey,
But that the dread of something after blog,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No googler returns, puzzles the firewall!
Thus comment fields does make cowards of us all and—

Curtis: THE POST AVANTS ARE HERE!

These immortal lines are taken from Jim Behrle’s That Silliman Sitcom: The Pilot, the greatest something – perhaps spoof – at least since the invention of Corn Flakes. You can read the script here. You can actually see the performance here. Note that it takes two blog messages to get the whole script in. Note also Jim Behrle’s carefully planned costume. And I definitely recommend downloading the video to your own PC to get maximum visual quality, such as it is. My one complaint is that the actor portraying Jordan Davis could have been a little more believable.

Oh, and for the record, no, I don’t eat Corn Flakes.

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For years, people have been telling me what a wonderful poet Lisa Robertson is. Tho I thought her work was competent & smart, I never really got it – really, seriously got it – until I read Rousseau’s Boat, a transcendent chapbook published by Meredith Quartermain’s Nomados press sometime last year. Rousseau’s Boat won the 2004 bp Nichol chapbook award, or so the Nomados website informs us, and the book certainly deserves every hurrah it receives.

Rousseau’s Boat consists of four works that fit together so well that it seems pointless to think of them as separate pieces. Two of these, the first and last, are quite short, just one page apiece, as those framing the two longer poems, functioning almost as introduction & epilog. Tonally, they work that way as well & the final poem, “This is the beginning of Utopia / Its material is time.” – yes, a two-line title (complete with quirky punctuation), not as extreme perhaps as Geraldine Kim’s “real” title for her Povel, which runs on for pages, but another sign that titles are starting to move out on their own as formal (& formally constituted) elements of the poem – is brilliant in & of itself, so that the reader, already riding the high induced by the previous pieces, leaves the book on the most intense terms possible.

But the core of Rousseau’s Boat is the two longer central (or inner) texts, “Face/” and “Utopia/” – in both instances I read those slashes as indicating a linebreak with no second line (anticipating, if you will, the second line of the last poem’s title). Or perhaps extending the use of slashes from the first poem, “Passivity,” a text that otherwise appears to be a block of prose, e.g.,

Let’s be sparkling for them. Let’s fluff up our/ pigments. Let’s know fibres. Let’s be a dog./ I wanted to talk about necessity/ and ambience. I wanted to know about/ change.

There are 27 such slashes or breaks in “Passivity,” the final one the last character of its text. The ambiguity this poses to the idea of the line is raised again in the two longer poems, where longer lines are treated like prose paragraphs, running flush left over onto a second or even third line. This sounds ordinary enough, but visually the one-sentence/one-paragraph equation feels quite disturbing – destabilizing any residual sense of the line’s metric or quantitative or logical fixity. Across the ten pages of “Face/” and sixteen of “Utopia/,” the effect accumulates, so that the relatively traditional lines of the final poem (asserted by nothing more than a capital at the left margin) hits with full force.

The idea that a title or text could end on a linebreak graphically demonstrates what couldn’t be seen by one ending with a blank space – that our written language is actually structured so as to prohibit this from happening – the space at the line’s end simply doesn’t “exist.” To call it into being as Robertson does here with the linebreak is to open being itself up to investigation. Which is, as I read it, precisely the intent of her texts & the obsession with time & utopia.

The first two texts here make great use of the word “I.” Of the 36 sentences in “Passivity,” 12 begin with the first person singular and it appears in three others.¹ It appears so often at the start of a sentence in “Face/” that it reminds me of my own “Berkeley” & all the other – mostly later – poems that begin every line with “I.”² Unless one gets hung up with sentence/paragraph distinctions, “Face/” will be read – as I think it should be – as a single ten-page stanza, every other sentence of which appears in italics (precisely, I think, to foreground the formal sentence/line structure).

A man’s muteness runs through this riot that is my sentence.
I am concerned here with the face and hands and snout.
All surfaces strum dark circumstance of utterance.
What can I escape?
Am I also trying to return?
Not the private bucket, not the 7000 griefs in the bucket of
each cold clammy word.
But just as strongly I willed myself toward this neutrality.
I have not loved enough or worked.
What I want do to here is infiltrate sincerity.
I must only speak of what actually happens.

If this book has a topic sentence, that first line above is it. It throws open any number of structural oppositions: self/other, male/female, silence/noise, stillness/turmoil, language/(?). The intensity of “I” here underscores the sense of text’s final line –

I do feel some urgency.

– but it hardly prepares one for its withdrawal from “Utopia/,” where it occurs just 52 times in some 370 “lines,”³ including contracted forms – I’m, I’ve – and one sentence that deploys it thrice. Thus when this text says – as it does twice within 16 sentences (17 “lines”) on p. 31 – “It is me,” the reader sits up & notices.

I’m not going to venture a close or thematic reading here – the text is too rich, it would be easy to slip into something the length of a dissertation & still only crack there surface here. Rousseau’s Boat, suffice it to say, is an intense, complex, emotionally & intellectually exhausting experience. True or not – it’s at least theoretically feasible that this could have been done with a fictive “I” – the reader comes away with a sense of having gotten to know the author on the deepest, most intimate levels. Either way, Rousseau’s Boat is one great book.

¹ I’m aware of course that 27, 36, 12 & 3 are all divisible by three – there’s a lot of formal inbuilding in this otherwise “spontaneous” & free-form seeming text.

² The earliest of which I’m aware is Jack Collom’s “Brag,” which I believe dates from 1967, predating ”Berkeley” by about six years.

³ One becomes conscious that it is not possible to tell if there is a blank space at the end – and perhaps even the start – of any single page in the text.

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There are different kinds of minimalism. One of the most common, thanks to Robert Grenier &, behind him, Robert Creeley & Louis Zukofsky, focuses closely on minute linguistic interactions, magnifying them in effect for closer inspection. Some haiku, on the other hand, tends more toward a depiction or scenic effect. A philosophic mode of minimalism treats it as tho the structure of a haiku held the properties of a syllogism. In each instance, tho, whether one line or as many as five or six, the miniature poem performs by reducing the number of choices the reading mind can make, so as to foreground those that remain.

Chuck Stebelton, the new literary events coordinator at Milwaukee’s justly famous Woodland Pattern, still the best poetry bookstore in the USA, practices a kind of minimalism of the middle ground, something I either have not seen before, or least have never noted as such. What I know of Stebelton’s work consists of a single chapbook, Precious, published by Answer Tag Home Press (the logo is <Answer>, a bit of HTML humor that might not be recognized by readers half a century hence) in an edition of just 75 copies.¹ Precious – there are so many bad puns that one can make with that title that I hope to avoid them all – consists of a single work in five numbered sections, each of which contains six (also numbered) parts. Only one of these 30 sections exceeds two lines – 25 have only one.

What interests me most about Stebelton’s strategies are the sections that would appear to be less than a complete thought. Thus, for example, the first two parts of III:

i
Brevity’s lure,

ii
tells them until then. They’ve gone native
in the West’s most participatory study.

One reads “Brevity’s lure,” both as a text in itself and as part of a larger, somewhat more opaque (or fragmentary) sentence. But how much do we trust our reading? Not as much, perhaps, as the word whose syllables cross the chasm between sections iv & v of part IV, which together spell second. But perhaps more than the gap earlier in that same part IV betwixt city & boats as in our bikes antiqued the city /// boats.

The way words integrate into themselves, syntax, & image schemes isn’t all that Stebelton is about. The whole section with boats reads as follows:

boats. Modal

The next section, starting with a preposition, angles off in a different direction altogether. Indeed, run together from that point forward, part IV would read:

Modal to sea in a sieve, second star on the right and straight on till morning –

Ending on that em dash, a sentence with rather a Maurice Sendak air to it. What, Stebelton seems to be asking, is the relation of these simplest elements of the poem to their counterparts of language & meaning? A good question, generally well executed.

Maybe Stebelton isn’t the greatest poet ever – a line (or section) that reads simply

I come to bury Ohio, not to blame him

leaves me cold. But I am intrigued in how Stebelton is tackling these other small formal problems. They are where you can see him thinking in (& with) the work. And in such spaces, brevity’s lure is very bright indeed.

¹ Tougher Disguises appears to have published a larger collection, Circulation Flowers, but I’ve not seen that book.

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Having watched the chaotic personal style of Terry Gilliam documented in Lost in La Mancha, I’m amazed that anyone in Hollywood would extend him the budget to make a motion picture. This is also apparently what the Brothers Weinstein thought when they advanced him some $90 million to make his version of The Brothers Grimm. They nixed Gilliam’s choice for a lead – Johnny Depp wasn’t deemed famous enough (this was pre-Pirates of the Caribbean) – and also Gilliam’s selection of Samantha Morton as the female lead. They fired his cinemaphotographer halfway through the production & refused to let Gilliam put a prosthetic nose on Matt Damon’s face – they wanted a mug front & center that said “movie star!” Gilliam is said to have been so frustrated & furious that, once the shooting was complete, he went & made another motion picture – Tideland, due out later this month – before sitting down to edit Grimm.

The miracle is that this film works, better even than Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (which we watched one evening at our cabin south of Lost River in West Virginia), tho maybe not so well as 12 Monkeys or The Fisher King – and certainly not as well as Brazil, Gilliam’s masterpiece. Most of the critics reported on the pre-release squabbling between Gilliam & the folks at Miramax & simply missed the motion picture in front of their eyes. Since Gilliam is the sort who makes films for people who like to think, even when it’s a farce, the reviews ensured that it would open weakly, failing to dislodge a pedestrian Hollywood comedy from its top spot in the weekend earnings. Once the film has gone global, moved to DVD & been shown on TV a couple of times, Miramax won’t lose a penny. But they won’t make the megamillions they’d obviously hoped for, either. And one suspects that the 65-year-old Gilliam won’t be working for Miramax again anytime soon.

More than any other film maker since Fassbinder, Gilliam cherishes chaos. If the opening moments of a great movie are characterized by forcing viewers have to make sense out of a world in which unfamiliar elements are occurring right in front of their (our) very eyes – one could build a quite credible theory that the secret to great cinema is just sustaining that sense of bewilderment, the moment before the parsimony principle has clicked into place & given us our predictable genre with its anticipated moments & ultimate conclusion – Gilliam’s strategy is to churn up as much hoopla as is possible from beginning to end, behind which the narrative machine can, from time to time, be glimpsed in motion. None of his films are about character & the plots themselves border on the gratuitous. Benicio Del Toro’s Dr. Gonzo in Fear & Loathing is an amazing performance, precisely because Del Toro has almost nothing to work from other than a beer belly (acquired apparently just for the role) & an equally resourceful Johnny Depp to bounce off. Matt Damon & Heath Ledger (probably best known as the actor who portrayed Billy Bob Thornton’s suicidal son in Monsters Ball) don’t have the depth or chops of Depp or Del Toro, but they do have a major advantage in that the film’s reliance on computer generated (CG) effects appear to have forced Gilliam into story-boarding a plot together.

But plot & narrative are two different things. And hardly anybody makes this more self-evident than does Gilliam. Narrative is the unfolding of meaning in time, whereas plot is the sequencing of events in a referenced world projected by the work of art. Plot, Gilliam seems to be arguing, is necessary but not terribly important. What’s important is what’s happening right now in front of you. Thus it is not that the child is being spirited away to become the necessary 12^th part of the sleeping queen’s centuries-old spell that matters, but how her eyes disappear when they are taken over by the emerging (if Ghostbuster referencing) horror that is the Gingerbread Man.

This insistence on the present detail is a Gilliam trademark, one that is accentuated by his preference for weird angle shots, minimal lighting, crowded sets, with unexpected faces filling up the entire screen (even better if something busy is going on as well, such as the emergence of many little bugs from a cuff or mouth). His films never pause for a breather & one reaction that you can see happens is that some viewers (Roger Ebert is pretty clear about this in his own reaction to the film) take their own psychic pause, as if the constant bustle ejects them from their own viewing experience. They may not – as Ebert obviously did not – ever return completely to the film.

Gilliam films are thus exhausting & not everyone makes it all the way. The Brothers Grimm is unusual in this regard in that it’s a reasonably compact project – one could even call it “neat” by Gilliam standards. Part of how this works is, I suspect, the result of one of Miramax’s interventions. Matt Damon is a stolid, phlegmatic type compared with Johnny Depp, the human chameleon. It is precisely Damon’s pint-sized version of Robert Mitchum at the center of all this rumpus that acts as an ongoing focal point, a still center amid the ongoing circus onscreen. To some degree, that is what Del Toro gave to Fear & Loathing¸ tho it’s not Del Toro’s basic style.

It’s always interesting to see who does, or does not, get it among Gilliam’s supporting cast. Just as Tobey Maguire as was completely clueless as to his role’s function in Fear & Loathing, Peter Stormare, normally a great character actor (his role as the back-alley eye doctor in Minority Report was one of that film’s high points, and he remains famous as the gangster who fed Steve Buscemi to the wood chipping machine in Fargo), can’t seem to figure out who he’s supposed to be. In fact, just as Maguire should have represented the “sane everyman” aghast at the antics of Hunter S. Thompson in Fear & Loathing, Maguire played it as tho he were a reject from a Dumb & Dumber casting call, Stormare is the one figure whose character – an Italian adjunct of the French occupation troops in 19^th century Germany¹ - actually changes over the course of the film. We need to see that in order to understand that the lack of development on the part of the others is not an accident. But Stormare is all over the map, as if he were a different character in virtually every scene.

That’s a risk that Gilliam’s improvisational approach to movie making maximizes. If he doesn’t get away with it 100 percent of the time in The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam manages to do so often enough. Somebody some day will no doubt offer a deep Lacanian reading of all the psychic lightning bolts Gilliam is hurling here – the film’s basic message is that fairy tales are rooted in real lives & that, read literally, they can be horrific because the reality they reflect is as frightening as what happens to a small town when twelve small girls go missing. But I wonder who, exactly, will ever see that movie, even tho it’s the one right in front of us.

¹ The idea of setting the film in “French-occupied Germany” is a typical Gilliam gesture, so wry that you almost miss it.

Labels: Film

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Be there or be square, Jim Behrle says. Actually, I suspect you could be both. Silliman’s blog as a sitcom? I envision Olivier doing Hamlet, myself.

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The autumn before my boys were born, Krishna and I rented a small cabin in the Sierras for a few days. It was the first time in a relationship that was then 13 years old in which we had actually taken some form of an “ordinary” vacation that was not also part of a reading tour or a flight home to visit the in-laws, or some combination thereof – I’d even used a reading to finance part of our honeymoon. The other alternatives had been literally to hitchhike up to Point Reyes, hiking in perhaps after a night at a bed &breakfast in Olema, camping the next night, then spending the third in a motel in Stinson Beach after hiking out the south end of the park.

The arrangement always made taking a significant number of books along problematic. Hitchhiking with a backpack & camping equipment pretty much limited me to three – two books of poetry (I remember one time it was Wendell Berry & John Keats) – plus whatever novel I was reading, and of course my notebook in which to write. Reading tours and trips to the in-laws weren’t much better, tho in fact I might take along as six or eight books of poetry along.

But that trip to the Sierras in 1991 was different in that, for the first time, we were driving somewhere in our brand new two-door Mazda 323, which meant that our storage felt limitless.¹ I must have brought along a dozen books & quickly found that the timeless quality of days away from work made for a perfect reading environment. Since then, we have gone on any number of car trips, but have learned always took along a lot of books & to try to build in as many days with little or nothing to do as possible.²

Yet each time, especially on two-week trips, I’ve largely run out of reading material, or at least run painfully short. I really hate having just one or two books of poetry to read at a time – it feels unnatural to me, I’m often in the middle of dozens at any given moment. Finding worthy volumes of poetry on holiday has meant buying a copy of Evangeline in the gift shop of the Digby Ferry as it crossed the Bay of Fundy, or being ecstatic at coming across a George Bowering title in a quaint little tourist shop in Victoria, BC. And I’m sure I’ve bought more School of Quietude volumes on vacation under just such circumstances than at any other time.

This year, however, I’ve tried something different, bringing along not one but two large backpacks filled with books, 37 in all, ranging from chapbooks to Shakespeare’s sonnets to a recent (but not the latest) Anselm Hollo “selected” & the big Lee Harwood collected that I’m still working my way through. A few books I’ve read before – Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed, David Melnick’s Eclogs. And two have prerequisites, one a novel by Roberto Bolaño I won’t begin until I complete Marjorie Perloff’s memoir of coming to America, the other being the second big volume of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts, an incentive to completing the final sections of the first.

By the trip’s end I will have finished some 17 books, gotten more than halfway through Bolaño’s Distant Star, and read major portions of all the others. I’ll make note of some – not necessarily all – of my reading over the next couple of weeks.

¹ That sense of infinite space within a two-door hatchback disappeared quickly enough once we had twins to wrestle into car seats in back. This Mazda is still the car I’m driving most of the time, having gotten over 120,000 miles on the original clutch.

² Save for four travel days, that was our modus operandi this year as well. Our only other busy days consisted of one spent at Antietam followed by watching the recording of a show of Moutain Stage, and another spent partly birdwatching, partly being on the beach & finally watching The Brothers Grimm at an Ocean City cinema.

Labels: Personal

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“Some horror is beyond words.” I wrote that sentence in this space last December 31 as the horror of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean was becoming known. I feel that same way today. To be on vacation – as least as we do it in our family – is to be willfully dislocated from the news for awhile. Our general principle has been no TV, no newspapers, no daily sweeping through the news sites on the internet. I barely watched any Olympics last summer, and then only because my brother in Sequim was glued to his television for the duration.

But last Sunday, as we got our morning meal in the “breakfast room” of a Comfort Suite in Martinsburg, WV, the room’s television was already speaking of Katrina’s projected impact in apocalyptic terms. So, when we found ourselves late Monday at last in our rental in Bethany Beach, Delaware, we tuned in for a week of horror. Even driving around, we found the local NPR station & listened as All Things Considered’s Robert Siegel refused on Thursday to accept Michael Chertoff’s denial that there were any people waiting for aid at the New Orleans Convention Center, or that there were dead bodies lying unattended on the streets of New Orleans. Five minutes after Chertoff denied the problem multiple times, his office called NPR and acknowledged that Chertoff had “been updated” on the situation at the Convention Center and that Homeland Security and its agencies were “working tirelessly” to help the people there. Food, water & transportation out of there finally arrived on Friday.

The Convention Center is a site that has special meaning for me – a significant portion of “Quindecagon,” part of The Alphabet, was written in a hotel directly attached to the center. And I’ve stayed there more than once when traveling to New Orleans. The horrific coverage on CNN of the death & despair there was worse because I recognized every setting, even the little brick shops across the street that had been emptied out so that the living might survive.

It is not yet time to put all of this in perspective, or to assign blame for the utter collapse of the governmental infrastructure that made this catastrophe happen. We should focus right now on supporting those who have lost everything, and saving whoever remains to be saved. If you haven’t made a donation yet to the Red Cross, Oxfam or another qualified relief organization, do so now.

Later, when rescue helicopters aren’t still dropping relief workers to chop through roofs in search of survivors in the middle of a flood zone, and when we know whether or not this really is the deadliest natural disaster in American history – my mind keeps turning to the Galveston Flood of 1900, when over 8,000 people died thanks to what we would now call a category five hurricane – there will be plenty of time to assess and assign blame. Right now we are still in the middle of such an event that 200 of the 1,500 members of the New Orleans police force have either quit or gone missing, while two others have already committed suicide (a common problem among rescuers dealing with overwhelming post-traumatic stress).

I will say one thing, though, at this early stage. The fault for this disaster doesn’t belong entirely to George W. Bush, even tho he and his thugocracy of a cabinet seem to have blundered for days before they understood that they had a problem. Nor is it entirely those of state and local officials. The levees in New Orleans were built to withstand a level 3 hurricane. Who among us doesn’t believe that every location on the Gulf of Mexico and Southeastern U.S. isn’t going someday to have to deal with a direct hit from a level 5?

Who in San Francisco doesn’t believe that the city will someday be hit with an earthquake every bit as large as the 9.0 that struck southeast Asia last December, setting off the tsunami? Yet there are thousands of San Franciscans living today in brick buildings. In a major earthquake, the mortar between bricks crumbles and the building simply falls on your head, World Trade Center style. That’s another disaster just waiting to happen. Nobody does anything about it because nobody wants to displace the 30,000 or so people who are – let’s face it – the least economically viable people in San Francisco, the least able to cope with that sort of dislocation. Every metropolitan area in the country has some pending disaster on a like level just waiting to happen. On a clear day, you can see the steam plumes from the Limerick nuclear power plant’s cooling towers in our skies here. In case of a meltdown, all the refugees from Pottstown & Phoenixville are supposed to crowd into our high school auditorium. Good fucking luck.

In the 1970s, a very evil man by the name of Howard Jarvis started the tax revolt that has driven the political right’s economic platform from Ronald Reagan – the president who claimed that government was the problem, not the solution – to George W. In between, more than a few others, such as Bill Clinton, have found it convenient to pander to the same general forces. All governmental institutions in the U.S., regardless of level or purpose, are underfunded. We have troops in Iraq buying armor with their own meager funds. We have a space program today that couldn’t safely land a man on the moon if it tried. We have a president who cut flood relief funds for New Orleans by 44 percent. In the 27 years since California put into place Proposition 13, it has seen its education programs – the very state institution on which California’s wealth has been built – nearly starved to extinction.

The disaster in New Orleans was not unforeseeable. But nobody has ever put the resources in place that would be capable of responding to something on this scale, even if it were done correctly. That it was done badly only exacerbates the catastrophe that was lurking all along.

It’s not just the politicians here who are to blame. It’s the fearful, greedy, inner tyrant in every one of us. Every politician – and every voter – who ever voted for a tax cut has blood on their hands this week. Those who have built careers on this may have a little more, as do those who have funded them, but it’s a problem for which we all have to take responsibility. The stench of it is the smell of death rising up from southern Louisiana & Mississippi, rubbing our own noses in our collective handiwork.

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