tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9837770996456036592024-02-11T15:43:26.836-08:00Writing The Messianic(notes on poetry & poetics)Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.comBlogger160125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-70579316274994380612023-06-16T09:46:00.004-07:002023-06-16T16:55:06.218-07:00Wonder, Pathos, and The Death of Monsters: On Douglas Trumbull and Ray Harryhausen
When Tom Hanks inducted Ray Harryhausen into the Academy of Motion Pictures with a lifetime achievement award in 1992, he declared, with perfect sincerity: “Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane. I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made.” He was not wrong.
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Perhaps it helps if you are of a certain age to appreciate the insouciant wit and insight of this outrageous remark. Does it reek of nostalgia? Of course. But it gets at the very heart of what makes movies a magical experience.
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As a boy in South Bend, seeing it on a Saturday matinee TV program called “Creature Feature,” Jason enchanted me. Re-discovering Jason as an adult, though, has been a revelation. The first thing to say is that Bernard Hermann’s score ranks as one of his very best. Since some of his other legendary works include Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and Psycho, that’s saying a lot. Jason’s swelling brass and pounding drums conjure heroism incarnate: the music of the greatest boy’s own story ever told.
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VGa9mnm6n4"></a>
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What I never cottoned to, though, as a wee lad is perfectly obvious now: the homosocial bonhomie that marks the Argonauts, in particular, the ephebe Hylas and Hercules, played by the great Nigel Greene, who also distinguished himself in Zulu as the calm, masterly Color Sergeant. Their friendship – and I call it a friendship, rather than a lover’s tale – is foundational to the spirit of the movie. Is it homoerotic? Almost certainly. The filmmakers seem to be winking their eye here. Yet like any pair of impetuous lads they get into a spot of bother on the Isle of Bronze. As if to allay or countermand any “tendencies,” once this adventure reaches its sorrowful conclusion the film is at pains to place us back on a firm heteronormative footing by having Jason rescue at sea the utterly beguiling Medea.
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Played by popular bit actress Nancy Kovack, Medea is a stunner, as Dante Gabriel-Rossetti would put it. (She later guest starred in many TV series of the 60s, including Star Trek, usually cast as a seductress). What’s left out of the film – and properly so – is the wrath of Medea once she and Jason return to Greece How she slaughters her own children, according to Euripides, to take her vengeance on him for jilting her. Hell hath no fury. But such complex gender dynamics has no place in this happily simple YA tale. <p>
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Medea truly shines when the story arrives in her native Colchis, As high priestess to the goddess Hecate she and her maidens perform a dance in full Martha Graham mode: flowing robes, long dark tresses, the whole modernist Sapphic works. Hermann’s skirling woodwinds make for a vibrant paean. It’s stirring, majestic, and well, pretty damned sexy, too.<p>
But I digress. <p>
Before I get into special effects though, a few words about cinema in general. When critics talk about f/x they always mean specially processed shots designed to render the fantastic in a realistic way. Coleridge’s verisimilitude, in a word. What they so often forget, however, is that all cinema is a special effect. <p>
In his famous essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” French film critic André Bazin lays out a powerful and deeply influential account of what sets film images apart from all previous instances of pictorial representation. “Only a photographic lens,” he writes, “can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation … the photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.” Bazin’s conception of the film image is almost mystical. <p>
Bazin envisions the power of the cinematic image as somehow impossibly liberated from the director’s framing, as though the lens itself were solely responsible for delivering us to the real. In our current era of blockbuster filmmaking, we’ve grown habituated to being bludgeoned by the gigantism of motion pictures. Outside a few rare practitioners, like Terence Malick or Steven Soderbergh, the image has shrunk to an impoverished thing. Instead we are assaulted by massive spectacles of destruction, or what Bazin calls elsewhere “the Nero complex” of film makers obsessed with visual bombast. The anti-cinema of CGI is used by most directors to obliterate perception, rather than tutoring the eye in how to see more deeply. But some of the greatest moments in the history of film derive their power from a certain withholding, a discretion of the camera, a holding back, or merely a sly bit of inference. At the same time it must be remembered that all filmmaking, even the most naturalistic (think Ford, Renoir, De Sica) is a form of special effect, and that the greatest special effect ever devised in the movies is still the close up. There’s something divine, beatific, mad, transfiguring in a close up. <p>
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OK. Now that I’ve got that out of my system.
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There are only two special effects masters I can think of who might be ranked as actual auteurs, or co-auteurs, so profound is their impact on the visual look and sensibility of whatever film they work on. One of them is Douglas Trumbull, best known for the Stargate sequence in 2001, the mothership in Close Encounters, and Blade Runner’s infernal L.A. He also directed two intriguing but somewhat lackluster SF films: Silent Running and Brainstorm, which was Natalie Wood’s final movie.
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In the spring of 2015 I invited Trumbull to visit my Science Fiction Cinema class at Amherst College. Instead, he invited us to his remarkable studio/farm redoubt in the southern Berkshires. After giving us a tour of his compound, which included a design shop/library, woodworking and metal shops, and a fully-equipped studio, with a green screen scrim and a crane, Trumbull demonstrated his state-of-the-art projection system. Dubbed MAGI, it’s a kind of super-duper 3-D, based on shooting at 120 fps and producing film of almost hallucinatory clarity (Peter Jackson and Ang Lee have employed this technique, with mixed results). The sample short he screened for my class was about the reality of UFOs and smacked a bit of crank conspiracy theory. Trumbull is a true believer. But like many true believers he has absolutely no sense of humor about the subject.
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Trumbull is on a quest to eliminate “blur” from action sequences. Personally this has never bothered me. But it’s an idee fixe for some filmmakers. In the manner of some serious visionaries, he never once smiled during all this except when, while addressing the class, I called him “a master of the sublime.” In general he gave off the sullen air of a neglected, albeit immensely successful, genius – a man who has accomplished miracles in film yet is still rolling the stone uphill. I suppose many great filmmakers feel the same way. And it was a thrill to see the table top scale model of L.A. used for the opening shots of Blade Runner. About twenty feet long, each building or structure packed with thousands of LED lights.
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Trumbull’s MAGI project is not really practical for wide-scale distribution. Built like a pod that can seat about 50, there is one currently at the Smithsonian. <p>
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<p>The other master is from an older generation: Ray Harryhausen. Where Trumbull excels at creating vistas of the technological sublime (see under David Nye and Fredric Jameson), Harryhausen specialized above all in the pathos of the death of monsters. In this he followed his mentor, the great Willis O’Brien, who made King Kong’s death a pathetic spectacle of the first order. Harryhausen stages monster death throes as though he were in the Globe Theatre:
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“For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground<br>
And tell sad stories of the death of kings”<br>
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Imbuing his otherworldly creatures with life and purpose, he then slowly, beautifully, majestically destroys them. Watch the death throes of the great green dragon in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The way it thrashes about, a giant arrow imbedded in its fore-flank. Or the epic showdown between the dragon and the Cyclops. Or how Gwangi (an improbable Allosaurus from a “lost valley” somewhat on the order of Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World”), tormented by flames inside a grand Mexican cathedral, whips and yowls to its uncomprehending demise. The fall of the lost, confused Ymir in 20,000,000 Miles to Earth from the top of the Colosseum. The agony of the magnificent Rhedosaurus in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a forerunner to Gwangi, as it, too, burns alive, trapped inside a Coney Island roller coaster. (Lee Van Cleef, be all your sins remembered).
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The spectacle of the death of a monster is sublime for several reasons. It is staged on a gigantic scale, like the death of some elder god: larger than life, towering over the aghast human on-lookers, and laden with pathos. As they die, the emotional tone of these films shifts from terror to pity. What, a moment before, had been wreaking havoc and destruction, is suddenly invested with what Emerson called a certain alienated majesty. These creatures are lost geniuses of their inhuman realms: strangers in a strange land, in many ways undeserving of their fate at the hands of latter-day usurpers. Often the monster’s fate seems like an allegory for a world of mystery that is being destroyed by technology and thoughtless expansionist progress. <p>
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<p>What these beasts tend to share in common is that they are often themselves removed from some original habitat, transported to the future as it were, or from another planet, to a place where they don’t belong. They are refugees from myth or prehistory.
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Beyond distension or scale, though, what Harryhausen’s monsters express is their vulnerability, their common fate with us lesser mortals. We identify with the monster, only at its demise, since we undergo the same fate. Its colossal aggression and rage are suddenly tempered; in its death we perceive that its wild behavior had only enacted the primal revulsion we all feel at the thought of our own death. The monster is the mirror. They act less out of malevolence than instinct; melancholy exiles from lost worlds of ancient sovereignty, disrupted by technology and man’s fatal ambitions.
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Harryhausen’s particular brand of magic peaked in the 60s. His final film, 1982’s disappointing Clash of the Titans, through no fault of his, is a slog, stifled by the pseudo-Shakespearean presence of so much august British acting royalty. The pacing is abominable and the monsters are never really given their proper moment in the spotlight.
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But his earlier films have lost none of their weird power. What endows these doomed creatures with such fearsome charisma? It’s simple, really: they’re miniature clay models filmed using the painstaking process of stop-motion animation, an antiquated technique all but forgotten today (except for Wes Anderson’s twee films) but which possesses incredible charm. Stop-motion, with its slightly uneven contrivance, makes Harryhausen’s brutes seem both less real than real and more real. Their uncanny liveliness embodies the very stuff of childhood imagination. (When I was five, I underwent a tonsillectomy. I insisted on taking my shoebox full of plastic dinosaurs with me to the hospital. Playing with them gave me great comfort when I awoke the morning after. This sums up for me the Harryhausen aesthetic in a nutshell).
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In the deaths of these hand-crafted monsters we witness a world stripped bare of the brides of enchantment – all their chthonic power usurped; the very complaint registered by Theodor Adorno and Max Weber. Myth is brought low, as D.H. Lawrence might put it. Man’s appetite for supremacy exacts its puny vengeance. It can only be satisfied by the throes of reptilian extinction. But who gave us permission to kill these fantastic gods? How dare we slay awe and terror? And what price for that deicide did we not reckon with?<p>
The motion of Ray’s monsters is not jerky. When the cowboys are trying to lasso Gwangi, the snapping of the dinosaur’s jaws is astonishingly fluid and vivid. When Jason battles the Hydra the illusion of movement is more real than real. You believe in these monsters. They are fearsome, yet somehow never evil, however threateningly they may loom over their human antagonists, who have suddenly found themselves radically displaced in scale. And they far surpass the CGI-generated dinosaurs of the bloated Jurassic Park and its sequels.
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In her book On Longing, Susan Stewart explores our fascination with both the miniature and the gigantic. <p>
“The miniature offers us a transcendent vision which is known only through the visual. In approaching the miniature, our bodies erupt into a confusion of before-unrealized surfaces … [wheras] we are enveloped by the gigantic, surrounded by it, enclosed within its shadow … we find the miniature at the origin of private, individual history, but we find the gigantic at the origin of public and natural history.”
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Harryhausen’s creatures dwell on the borderline between the miniature and the gigantic: they are gigantic to the film’s actors when superimposed via optical printing. But we get an extra thrill from knowing that they are also scale models, exactingly manipulated to create a believable yet still uncanny life-like appearance.<p>
<p>Harryhausen brought life to many monsters throughout his career, but it’s the downfall of the implacable metal giant Talos in Jason and the Argonauts that offers the most moving depiction of a monster’s demise in his output. When he drops his massive sword and clutches with both hands at his throat as the ichor gushes from his heel, we feel a strange pity for this frightening colossus. Harryhausen’s genius is to invest his creatures with genuine pathos as he brings his monster’s suffering to a fevered pitch. The pain Talos feels in his carefully choreographed death throes is grandly operatic. His tragedy in a way is inseparable from his muteness and self-opacity. He cannot know why he is dying, he can only undergo it. Ray Harryhausen’s extraordinary monsters kindle one of the most powerful sensations the movies can give us, a sensation that very little CGI can successfully deliver: wonder.
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Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-42704078755697970972023-06-11T15:41:00.007-07:002023-06-11T15:41:37.270-07:00The Unabomber“THE PURE PRODUCTS OF AMERICA GO CRAZY:”THE UNABOMBER & PURITAN PATHOLOGY<p>
The author FC, now known to us as Theodore Kacyzinski, makes a by now familiar case against the putative evils of technology in his tendentious manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Part reactionary Luddite jingoism, part half-baked psychological analysis, his essay is immediately notable on two counts: its complete lack of intellectual distinction, and its utter failure to delineate a specific and practicable method for the abolition of technology. FC’s Cassandra-like warnings of humanity’s imminent doom from technology we have been hearing since at least the time of Blake. His brand of pre-Industrial nostalgia is nothing new. What’s of interest in the document is the awkward, self-conscious motion of a deep and private pathology on full display. This is a conclusion, moreover, any intelligent reader can easily arrive at without knowing anything more of the violent pogrom Mr. Kacyzinski directed toward American technocrats.<p>
One of the more curious features of the manifesto is its author’s focused rage against what he calls “the dangers of leftism.” Leftism, FC assures us, is one of “the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world” (6). (N.B. Because of Internet formatting numbers for quotes refer to paragraphs, not pages). Who are these leftists? None other than the “socialists, collectivists ... feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like” (7). Left out of this accounting are environmental activists, long and almost exclusively associated with the Left. For FC, though, they are part of his revolution against the industrial state. Leftism is subjected to a sophomoric psychoanalysis, its causes found not in the formation of the modern nation state (the French Revolution was a failure, we are told in passing), but in “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.” This latter condition might best be described as going so far as to want to live with other people. The inferiority that mysteriously afflicts only members of the Left (or causes them to go Left, it’s not clear,) expresses itself through feelings of hatred for anything that is “strong, good or successful,” which basically includes all of “Western civilization” (15). <p>
It would be tedious to outline the remainder of FC’s outlandish conceptions of history and culture. He castigates contemporary humanity for pursuing “surrogate activities” instead of real goals, but he never states what a real goal looks like (40-41). From his description of the surrogate goals, they look a lot like real ones. Interestingly, when he begins to expound on the nature of freedom, FC almost rises to the level of discourse analysis. His attack on the institutional practices of surveillance, the culture of the modern police state, etc., sound a Foucauldian note (95). And a little later on, we come on this cogent diagnosis of our ills: “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness.” Marx himself couldn’t have put it better. These are brief lapses into reason, though. Immediately, we are back on FC’s relentless hobbyhorse. <p>
At the heart of “The Unabomber Manifesto” lies a deep terror, not of machines or technology per se, but of what can only be called ontological mutation. For FC, dogmatic essentialist that he is, human nature is a category of the real that has seemingly remained undisturbed for millennia. He correctly intuits that technology acts as a kind of self-reflexive mechanism capable of effecting qualitative psychological changes in human beings. And he is afraid that these changes will only lead to the increasing collectivization of humanity. There’s a sneaking compulsion to admit that he may, afterall, be right about technology, though for all the wrong reasons. FC’s answer to the terrible threat posed by technology, however, is expressed in an absurdly nostalgic longing for the past, for the primitive, and finally, for an order that is not any order at all. His revolutionary project, his vision, is a-utopic, in a sense, for he has no wish to replace the existing order with a new order, only to abolish it (182). <p>
But FC’s paranoia about technology is really a fear of progress in general and it has ample precedent in American cultural history. Historian Richard Hofstadter has admirably outlined this strain of American paranoia in two of his books, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. William Carlos Williams has perhaps best summed up this reactionary Puritan fever in his poem, “To Elsie” (from Spring and All), where he writes, “the pure products of America go crazy.” Though he only hints in his manifesto at a form of violent resistance to the industrial state, FC’s modus operandi as the Unabomber is as American as apple pie, exemplifying what historian Richard Slotkin has called in The Fatal Environment and other works the central trope in the American Frontier Myth, namely, “regeneration through violence.” Briefly, “the structuring metaphor of the American experience,” the trope of regeneration through violence grew out of the colonists desire to reconstitute their personal lives and institutions, a desire that inevitably became linked to the violence used to attain it.<p>
FC is the postmodern avatar par excellence of this peculiar strain of American “nativist,” Know-Nothing isolationism. This ideology, which he shares in common with the numerous militant groups now flourishing in the hinterlands, relies on a discourse of rugged individualism for its philosophical underpinnings. Its true psychic vector was located by D.H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature. Commenting on Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, Lawrence writes, “you have there the myth of the essential white America ... the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” The cult of the American pioneer derives more from Nineteenth-Century propaganda than from the actual historical record. The settlement of this country, as historians Donald Worster and Patricia Nelson Limerick have pointed out, was made possible by the very government and business interests FC decries for the accelerating decline of the quality of life.<p>
Heidegger’s conclusion in “The Question Concerning Technology” that technology offers humans a deeper way into Being sheds some much needed light here. For Heidegger, the process of Enframing (which is accelerated by technology), whereby things, and through things the quiddity of Being itself, are reduced, singularized and homogenized, threatens to pauperize the human relation to Being. But it is precisely this danger which offers humans the opportunity to engage Being at a deeper level of cognition. He quotes Holderlin to illustrate his point: “But where danger is/There also is the saving power.” As Heidegger puts it, man’s solemn duty to watch over unconcealment (that is, truth, or the presencing of Being) is heightened by the danger technology poses. “It is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within granting may come to light, provided that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the coming to presence of technology” (32). And it is precisely this kind of argument (its arcane rhetoric notwithstanding) for a deeply responsible engagement with technology -- with its awareness and acceptance of the full complexity of the issue -- that eludes the benighted FC. For in the final analysis, as Heidegger so wisely realizes, the problem of technology is first, last, and merely the continuing problem of how to be human.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-65525343394183056442023-05-15T16:42:00.006-07:002023-05-16T16:59:55.771-07:00Knowing, Alex Proyas (2009)<i>N.B. I wrote this review shortly after the film came out. Originally it was to be part of a longer piece on SF films whose central themes dealt with latent or hidden extra-solar codes that hold the secret meaning of human history. This theme is locatd at the juncture where teleology succumbs to the pathology of paranoia. Other films to be considered were "Prometheus" and "Stargate." The piece isn't quite finished. I offer it here FWIW. Having also directed "Dark City," "I, Robot," and others, Proyas, along with Andrew Niccol, is one of the most prominent among contemporary SF auteurs at work today.
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Like the comedy Ghost Town (2008), this 2009 film directed by Alex Proyas belongs to an emerging class of post-9/11 films that offer consolation by way of displaced representations or allegories of grief. It is also a film about the dangers of the risk society. More importantly, for this discussion, it exemplifies many of the features of the alien artifact film. The first two elements, it should be noted, are combined in the figure of the second of two ghosts who occupy and drive the film’s protagonist, John, namely, the figure of his wife, who, we learn via backstory, died in a hotel fire. The means of her death – by the failure of a building – seems designed to echo or point to the larger catastrophe of the World Trade Center’s structural collapse. Both events – the actual disaster and its pared down fictional counterpart – indicate the basic unreliability of modernity, the fact that structures and entire systems can overload or breakdown, often without warning.
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[As an MIT astrophysicist, John is actually little more than a mouthpiece for the script’s metaphysical nostalgia. In an early classroom scene he expounds tritely on whether or not the universe functions by design or randomness, teleology or contingency. Later, he tells X that he thought he was supposed to feel it when his wife died, halfway around the world.]
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The film’s prologue is set in a 1959 Lexington, MA elementary school named for William Dawes, a heroic Minuteman, invoking both the early alarms of the Revolutionary War, Cold War paranoia and the threat of total destruction, and a perverse boomer nostalgia for lost innocence. The installation of a time capsule (undertaken while a brass band badly plays the pastoral-triumphalist portion of Holst’s “Jupiter”) likewise signals both the onset of an alien knowledge that drives its child possessor Lucinda (the story’s main ghost) to dementia and eventual drug overdose. As we learn she is unwillingly subjected to transmissions from the alien archive of the future in the form of telepathic noise represented as overlapping whispers, which she is forced to translate into a series of seemingly meaningless numbers. The gleaming time capsule itself emblemizes Cold War anxieties with its burial of the now for some possible future retrieval, even after Armageddon. What its designers hope will stand as a message to the future becomes for that future a note from the angel of death. <p>
[Brief note on time capsules: 1939 World’s Fair – to be opened in 6939. Implies an absurd faith in the future; it's meant to foster a hope in continuity, but becomes instead a message from our ruins to latter-day archaeologists and an acknowledgment of our fragility].<p>
The film’s core theme – astrophysical theories of randomness versus determinism (a code word perhaps for intelligent design) – is explicated in an MIT lecture by the hero, John Koestler (the last name here rather needlessly alluding to Arthur Koestler and his book on the paranormal, The Roots of Coincidence). Still grieving the loss of his wife, J. appears consumed by the theory of randomness – “shit just happens” as he bitterly tells his class – there is no higher or larger meaning or design. Here the film plays up the binary of randomness/determinism all too reductively, as though the former were equivalent to nihilism and not some form of deeper complexity and emergent systems behavior that develops rhizomatically into decentralized self-organizing systems. "God," in this view, is not merely in the details; he <b>is</b> the details. <p>
After his son Caleb, during a ceremony marking the opening of the time capsule, receives the mad scribblings of the girl from 1959 (Lucinda Embry–the name portentously suggests both illumination and embers) it becomes clear that her random strings of numbers depict a map of worldwide disasters. Some of these disasters are natural – earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis – and some are man-made: 9/11, the first one decoded; along with other plane crashes and massive infrastructure failures.
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While this mix of registers proves fatal to the film’s logic, we might read these disasters as all man-made in the sense that the high death tolls they incur are the result of massive population clustering in narrow coastal and urban areas which lack adequate alarm and evacuation procedures. Cities, in other words, like buildings, or planes, or cars, are death traps, waiting for the right set of random circumstances to trigger their destruction. The conditions produced by the risk society greatly increase the likelihood of the traps’ chances to engulf its inhabitants.
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John is able to decode the alien archive further and realizes that three events have not yet occurred. The first one (which leads to the decoding of the remaining set of unexplained numbers as lat/long coordinates) is a spectacular crash of a commercial airliner over I-90. This disaster revisits the trauma of 9/11 in a visible way, even if on a reduced scale. Improbably, as part of its fantasy of redemption, John staggers through the plan’s scatter path as EMT’s, who’ve arrived with miraculous alacrity, escort a few improbably surviving passengers away from the burning wreckage. He decodes, but is also unable to stop, the second of three remaining disasters on the list, this one involving a subway crash in NYC.
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Both of these disasters are like compulsive re-enactments of both 9/11 and his wife’s death. His foreknowledge of them only makes him feel more impotent to stop them. He becomes a Cassandra-figure, isolated in his ability to make his warnings understood by the authorities, the classic position of the hero outlined by Sontag in her early, influential essay “The Imagination of the Disaster.” <p>
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Teleology here undergoes a shift from the dream of a completed totality, the fulfillment of history through universal emancipation, to a paranoid sign system in which all things, once understood as interconnected and legible, only signify total destruction and universal anarchy. The knowledge of all things is a zero-sum game. In a related sense, the knowledge of the beyond – of the future – which the alien archive transmits (thereby contaminating its readers with a kind of lucid dementia) is also a form of religious experience, a conversion from the placid containment of unbelief’s protective repression to belief’s holy terror. <p>
What the alien archive finally represents is a theology of trauma – apocalypse, followed by survival of the chosen ones. The conversion experience John undergoes and later, if more reluctantly, Lucinda’s adult daughter, Diana, allows them to make sense of their pain and loss – which, finally, is the task of stories and art in general. The archive or code may not save them, but it does offer shelter for their children, thereby insuring a future for the human.
[The SF Ark. The aliens have come to shepherd Earth’s children to a new planet, a rather sappy vision of the Wordsworthian sublime]<p>
The logical link between man-made disasters and the planet-killing solar flare which strikes at random is never made by the film. The earthly disasters are produced by a risk society; they are the result either of the hazards of accelerated modernity or its corollary, the reactionary forces of political terrorism. The solar flare is a cosmic accident. It could be argued that it embodies the ultimate form of risk – that of living at the mercy of enormous and ungovernable stellar forces. But in the progression of disasters the film asks us to see that all disasters are somehow created equal: the only difference between the collapse of a bridge or a downed jet liner and the end of all life on earth is one of scale. This preposterous logic makes a hash of “Knowing’s” theological intervention, reducing it to a cynical ploy, an exploitation of the audience’s hopes for redemption.
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The film’s dramatic ending, with a fleet of spaceships leaving Earth to deliver the children to a new world, can actually be read as a fantasy projection of the protagonist, somewhat in the vein of The Sixth Sense. John’s research has already revealed to him the threat the sun poses to the earth. The occult code of numbers, the menacing, black clad strangers (the Whisper People) who appear to be threatening his son only to transform into rescuing angels, all this is simply a delusion he has concocted to shelter him from his own knowing of the inevitable apocalypse. These angels are not rescuers, though; they are angels of death, and the new Eden we are shown at the end is merely John’s fantasy of a Heaven which does not exist. This becomes clear when we consider how this scene is cross-cut with John’s reconciliation with his minister father.
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The rescue of the children and their transportation off-world to a new Edenic home, complete with a heraldic white tree, brims with Christian sentimentality; a sugar-coated denouement to the apocalypse. The trench-coated aliens transform into glowing angelic beings and the staging of the earth’s death takes on the trappings of the sublime. John, “left behind,” makes peace with his estranged father, a Christian minister, who assures him that death is not the end. This is a science fiction version of the Rapture.
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How, then, to read the role of the alien archive in this compelling, but finally cloying, drama of trauma and redemption? The chain of numbers delivers random occurrence into the emplotment of knowing, that is, of pre-determined meanings which, properly decoded, spell salvation. Yet the connection between human catastrophes and the planet-killing solar flare is made tenuously, at best. The archive does not provide answers to this; only further obfuscations. The smaller disasters of history, according to the film, are to be understood as teleologically-driven, preludes leading up to the final disaster, which is itself a leap outside the logic of history, randomly driven, but responded to providentially.
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The antithesis to knowing, of course, is believing. All of John’s knowledge of both science and the future don’t give him the power to alter the course of events. Only by returning home again, like the prodigal son, is he able to reinvest himself with the comforts supplied by faith.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-52131636836750506712022-11-19T09:52:00.001-08:002022-11-19T09:52:16.528-08:00My David BowieThe first time I heard David Bowie was my freshman year in college: San Francisco State, Fall 1975. My new best friend, W., occupied a handsome suite in the 14-storey Verdugo Hall, much nicer than my cramped shabby room in Font Hall. We’d hang out, skipping classes and getting high all day, occasionally making films with the 8mm camera he had on loan from the film department. We shot on the roof of Verdugo (illegal) and in the fields of Marin County, where Christo’s miraculous Running Fence snaked across grassy ridgelines. Once, we shot a sword fight in the Japanese Gardens in Golden Gate Park. No one thought twice about it. One of W’s film major buddies was sleeping with his female professor. That’s just how it was in those days. I could walk down Market St. openly smoking a joint.
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We listened incessantly to “The Man Who Sold The World” and “Ziggy Stardust.” At one point, I feel quite sure I thought the latter was the greatest album I’d ever heard. The Sgt. Pepper of the 70s, as one pal put it, probably quoting a line from Rolling Stone. We got stoned and watched “Star Trek” re-runs and argued about Sartre. We were all idiots. But god, what a great time we had in our sprawling decadent ignorance.
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I began wearing beautiful suits I’d found at thrift shops, complete with cufflinks. In imitation of Bogart in “Casablanca,” I sported a tan trench coat and a fedora. I grew obsessed with Garbo and Dietrich because in San Francisco at that time it was just part of the larger gay cultural atmosphere. The newly re-opened Castro Theater, a fabulous art deco movie palace whose program featured Warner Bros. gangster films and MGM musicals, became a second home to me. I smoked cigarettes and affected a pretentious cosmopolitan air, complete with faux British accent. As fate would have it, my first real girlfriend, N., also a massive movie and Bowie fan (we saw “Children of Paradise” several times together at the Surf Theater) had been raised a 7th Day Adventist and refused to go all the way. There followed what seemed like endless nights of dry humping in an apartment I shared with a pot dealer, J., on Guerrero and 24th, on the edge of the Mission District, which in those days was still a bit sketchy.
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When I moved back to Huntington Beach in 1977, these guises and interests faded away. Our little group of culture fanatics was immersed in Bowie, but also Roxy Music (a natural extension), Eno, and the burgeoning punk scene. Bowie’s romanticism still exerted a powerful aura, though. The heady, naked yearning of “Word on a Wing” or “Wild is the Wind” was like a drug. “Wild is the Wind” especially carried an extraordinary power. An aria of sheer longing, it stripped you bare, reduced to pure trembling emotion. It offered kenosis and embodiment at the same time. Erotic longing as decreation? Bowie wasn’t just a sensuous rocker; he was our Sinatra and Elvis, combined. Of course, Sinatra was our Sinatra, too. Bowie led quite readily to “In The Wee Small Hours of the Night” and the rest of the Chairman’s catalog.
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With Bowie’s departure a significant chunk – not of my youth, which is long gone – but of what it meant to be young is in no way lessened but magnified. Till his death, I had no idea how much he meant to me. He was just there – a kind of structure of feeling for feeling. When Lennon was murdered, I was devastated. I remember finding out about it by picking up the LA Times on the way to work that morning. The bus ride, the whole day in the office, passed in a daze. But I didn’t grow up with Lennon or The Beatles in the same way I grew up with Bowie. He made it safe to be, not dramatic, exactly, but passionate and lyrical and free to revel in artifice. Life was theater, his songs said, but that theater was real – more real than anything, because it made reality bearable – and without that theater, without the power of artifice, the whole thing was a brutal joke and a lie. Bowie’s theater made it possible to re-imagine your own life. He was the great champion of the weird and the different.
<p>
Oh you pretty things<br>
Don’t you know you’re driving<br>
your fathers and mothers insane?<br>
Let me make it plain.<br>
Gotta make way for the homo superior.<br>
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The allusion to the X-Men and mutants says it all. He told us we could invest our lives with glamour, even if it was a borrowed glamour. That it was OK, even cool, to be different.
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But Bowie’s appeal went beyond even that. There was something gnostic about his many personae and his dangerous songs poised on the edge of nothing, as Simon Critchley so smartly characterizes them. Gnosticism in rock is not nihilism nor hedonism. It’s the recognition of alienation in a world made by an alien god. Bowie was the poet laureate of gnostic rock – of otherness, difference, weirdness. His music’s power came not from about singing about loss, which the blues and rock have always sung about, but a more fundamental metaphysical predicament having to do with being adrift in being, with the flux of identity, the fluidity of the self and the power of music to conjure multiple avatars out of a desire for belonging, even while realizing that heimlich will always be unheimlich.
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Perhaps Bowie’s most gnostic turn came in the Nicholas Roeg film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, based on the novel by Walter Tevis. The story is one of an alien’s attempt to rescue the remnants of his race from their dying planet by bringing them to Earth. But his introduction to earthly culture leads him to become an alcoholic (in fact, the novel is a brilliant account of alcoholism as a kind of gnostic amnesia, along the lines of “The Hymn of the Pearl”) and he forgets his mission, succumbing to apathy, amnesia, and despair – trapped in the world of gross matter. The gnostic turn becomes an elegy for a fallen race.
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So many of Bowie’s songs are suffused with a sense of elegy. From “Memory of a Free Festival” to “Blackstar,” he gave us a sense of the pleasures and sadness of the fleeting, the mortal. Bowie recognized, as no rock star before him had, that we are always double, always split, always sliced in two by the mirror. Rather than try to heal that split, he owned it, exploited it, claimed it as the heritage it was. His songs proclaimed that we are multiple rather than singular, and that that was a good way to be.
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Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-42675968570221138232022-11-15T13:01:00.004-08:002022-11-19T09:50:48.738-08:00Annals of LA: Remembering Dutton's BooksDavis Dutton, known only and always as Dave, ran Dutton’s Books in North Hollywood for something like 30 years. His father founded the store around 1960 and after a career in journalism, which included a successful stint as editor of Westways, back when it was a real magazine, Dave took over when he retired. Situated on Laurel Canyon near the corner of Magnolia, it was a large, ramshackle structure, parts of which, judging by the layout, might once have belonged to a residence, with tiny alcoves resembling long gone closets or bathrooms, and other parts wide open shop spaces with wall-to-wall bookcases running three sides of the room and free standing shelves and tables in the middle, no higher than five feet, which gave the place, for all its overcrowding, a free and easy feel. The front faced west, onto Laurel Canyon, and was glass from about two feet up to the ceiling. It was, in the classic used bookstore cliché, a glorious, disheveled mess, a true blue fire trap. And for a brief time, about two years (1988-1990) it was my home away from home.
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Dave was an utterly sanguine type. I never saw him get flustered or out of sorts. There was a deep kindness to the man, a total refusal to sit in judgment even when it was so obviously called for. He kept the radio dialed to the local classical station, KUSC, which is how I first came to hear Vaughn Williams. The 5th Symphony and the Fantasia for Thomas Tallis were on constant rotation back then and they entranced me.
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Dave and I grew quite close in a short time. I was just starting to find my way as a poet. It was at Dutton’s in 1989 that I discovered Michael Palmer's "Notes for Echo Lake" and Susan Howe's "The Europe of Trusts" -- books that changed everything I thought I knew about poetry. Dave out me in charge of the poetry section and it was at Dutton's that I launched my short-lived poetry journal, Antiphony. Short-lived as in it enjoyed all of one issue. Funding was the problem. But that first issue was rather sweet, if amateurish. Four of us book clerks were poets: myself, Eve Gardner, Elena Phleger, and Herman Fong, who was the closest among us to being a real poet, someone with actual publications, and boasting an MFA from UMass-Amherst where he’d studied with Jim Tate. It was rounded out by contributions from three old college friends: Michael Forrest, Steve Tracey, and Fuschia.
<p>
Dave had purchased Will and Ariel Durant’s library and had stored it offsite. Not, perhaps, the best site for persevering it. But as I learned, the secret of his thriving empire lay in shrewd real estate investments. He owned many homes across the Valley, which he rented out, and this income helped to subsidize the stores. He had three of them when I worked there: the main one, on Laurel; the Burbank store; and a downtown location in the lower level of the ARCO tower, which was home to major law firms like Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher.
<p>
The Durant library was his pride and joy. I often wonder what became of it. Did he sell it off? Donate it? Once he cracked open a box and dug out a red Loeb Library edition of some Roman author -- it might have been Seneca, but I can’t remember now. The book was heavily annotated in Durant’s fine, spidery hand. Written in the margin of one page, he’d exclaimed, “Utter rubbish!” This was fine stuff.
<p>
Another time we were retrieving books from one of his garage depots to fetch back to the store in his rickety two-tone VW van, a vehicle which itself served as a mobile book depot and was so overloaded with boxes I was in constant anxiety when I drove it. Would it even shift out of first gear? (Dave also owned a classic white T-bird from the 50s). Dave hauled up the garage door. We were on a non-descript cul de sac of dull ranch-style houses – the Valley is full of them. A black widow spider hung in its messy web about waist high, in a tangle of shelves and boxes. Another person, quite blamelessly, wouldn’t have thought twice about casually swatting it out of existence, say the way Detective Randall does when he and Marlowe explore Jessie Florian’s garage in “Farewell, My Lovely.” Dave chose a different approach. Tenderly, with a rolled up newspaper, he coaxed and cajoled a very reluctant spider out of its nest and harm’s way so he could get at the box he needed. I think at one point I made some exasperated interjection. I simply could not fathom the patience he took to spare this dangerous animal. He quite calmly batted my objections aside. And I stood there, humbled, in awe of what could only be called a quality of grace.
<p>
Another book mission, in the rattle trap van, took us up a long narrow winding lane in the hills, somewhere above Sherman Oaks. It was quintessential LA. Spanish tile roofs. Palm trees. Mercedes on the curb. The good life. Dave pointed at a tree. “When I was a boy I saw an angel in that tree,” he said mildly. I saw no reason to question or even wonder at it. I believed him implicitly. Like Blake and Thoreau, Dave Dutton enjoyed a very direct rapport with the world that most of us are barred from.
<p>
The bookstore itself housed some 350,000 volumes, new and used. Dave was always buying, always scouring estate sales and the like. Some authentic old school book scouts brought him rare finds. The kind of vanishing type best described in the Cliff Janeway detective series by John Dunning, like “Booked to Die,” and “The Bookman’s Wake.” Grizzled unkempt eccentrics who looked like they’d just washed up to shore but who possessed deep fonts of expertise in the book trade and rare and first editions – a kind of hard won knowledge not to be found on the internet. Dave, who knew his stuff, and who was the great champion of the downtrodden and the underdog, relished shooting the breeze with these guys when they drifted in with some odd, precious cargo.
<p>
The store also functioned as a kind of waystation for those of us who worked there. The assistant manager was a classic book nerd type, whose dry wit and stoic demeanor belied a real sweetness: Steve Daly. David Abbott was an actor on the make, incredibly good looking and charismatic. He wrote and starred in a one man show about Van Gogh that was truly brilliant. And then there was the mysterious Amy Albany. Petite, with large blue eyes, platinum blonde hair, and always clad in vintage dresses – I’m pretty sure we all had aching crushes on her. She was sweet, haunted, wounded and not a woman to suffer fools gladly, Her father was the great jazz pianist, Joe Albany, who’d been a sideman for Bird. She gave me cassette tapes of his work which were thrilling. He’d become a junkie and died from his addiction and it visibly haunted Amy. She went on to write a book about him and produce a moving film, “Low Down,” as a tribute to his genius.
<p>
Then there was the great Rushdie dust up. When “The Satanic Verses” came out in 1989, the Ayotollah, as is well known, put out a contract on Rushdie, or declared a fatwah. Rushdie was forced to go into hiding, assume an incognito, and keep his head below the parapet for a few years. Bookstores which carried his novel were said to be in the crosshairs too. But Dave refused to knuckle under. We proudly displayed “Verses” in the storefront windows. The LA Times did a story on us and carried a picture of the crew, looking stoic and heroic. I never really thought we’d be the target of a terrorist attack. But it was all bit a heady and unnerving and the entire incident only served to deepen my admiration for Dave. He didn’t make a big show of it. It was more like a low key, “hell, no.” Thoreau, again.
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<p>
One of the great things about working at Dutton’s was the actors who came in. I engaged in energetic conversations with JT Walsh and Williams Daniels about Dickens and other show folks. Molly Ringwald's family home stood on a side street off Laurel. Her father Bob was blind and sang in a first rate barbershop quartet. I remember helping her finds some obscure titles on jazz. The store had a great film section. It’s where I first bought “I Lost It at The Movies,” and “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1928-1969.” And there was a nice sideline to be had in renting out leather-bound books to studios for set dressing. When Steve Haft, the producer of “Dead Poets Society,” ordered so many linear feet of books, we delivered. Somehow, someone in the store, got me a copy of the script. After reading it I had the temerity to write Mr. Haft with some recommendations about the choice of poems the script featured. Instead of using Vachel Lindsay’s racist and obnoxious “Congo,” why not go with Whitman? I was pretty obnoxious. But then, I never thought much of the movie.
<p>
I’m pretty sure I got this script by way of a Dutton’s regular, a classic gentleman of the old school by the name of John Myhers. He was a jobbing actor whose chief claim to fame was, I suppose, his role in the film version of “How To Succeed in Business without Really Trying.” He was effortlessly gracious and charming – a total ham and a wonderful racounteur. He was in the store nearly every day -- just came to shoot the shit with Dave. I felt a bit sorry for him. But he was a generous man. One day he took me aside and said, look here, you ought to be reading screenplays! And he put me in touch with his agent, a woman named Shirley Mann, who maybe was once married to the celebrated director Daniel Mann. Or was it Delbert? Who knows? It was entrée to a whole other world.
<p>
Shirley had a nice little office on Sunset Blvd. But not the really nice part. It was just shy of, that is to say, east of Crescent Heights. It was Crescent Heights adjacent, one might say. But I was too naïve to note the distinction then. My interview was brief. She just assumed I knew what to do. I only read two or three scripts for her, for peanuts, as I recall – maybe $40 each? They all had to do with werewolves. One of them was pretty good. Her method was unique and quite efficient. I was to come into the office and type out my report on a large double-sided index card, back and front. Front for synopsis, back for analysis. Like I said, efficient. It was really all these B-movie scripts deserved.
<p>
From there I branched out: ITC, Viacom, Lightstorm, Kathryn Bigelow, HBO – everything else. But that’s another story.
<p>
Dave hated doing book signings and I much later came to know why. They’re a lot of bother and trouble and very few copies get sold. Having given many readings myself now, I can say that book signings are transitory tributes to an author’s vanity. His younger brother Doug, who ran the fancy, upscale Dutton’s Brentwood on San Vincente over on the west side, excelled at signings. The likes of Margaret Atwood would drop by to shill her wares. But Dave wanted nothing to do with them. The one exception I can recall him making was for his old pal Larry McMurtry. Larry was himself, besides being a Major Author, a bookseller of no small repute. When he came to town, Dave closed the store so that Larry could roam the shelves unhindered by the public, while a few of us stood respectfully in the wings should the Great Man need anything. It was all a bit theatrical and somewhat out of keeping for Dave. But he was just helping out his old buddy.
<p>
No account of Dutton’s can be made without the luminous presence of his wife, Judy, who I am convinced was the secret genius of the place. Judy had a kind of swoony zaftig grace and a razor sharp wit and oh yeah, she also kept the books. I’m quite sure the place would have floundered without her capable guiding hand. Every year, she would re-read “Pride and Prejudice.”
<p>
Dave Dutton was like a second father to me. I don’t know why he brought me under his wing but I will always be grateful for it. He died a few years ago -- Alzheimers -- up on Whidbey Island. His niece, whom I've never met, wrote me to let me know. I guess I was on some list of people he wanted notified. Even in death, he was still reaching out.
<p>
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-37575028330017137182022-10-07T09:09:00.002-07:002022-12-06T12:29:32.469-08:00On First Coming to HarvardOne of the first things I told myself when I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2006 as a Lecturer in History and Literature was, “don’t get colonized.” This was a bit like saying, right you before jump into a swimming pool, “don’t get wet.” Resistance to the swamp that is Harvard was futile, and reader, after eight years there I was good and soaked.
<p>
Nevertheless, my initial efforts to stay grounded and maintain a sense of balance amid the intimidating glamour of the Harvard aura proved moderately effective, at least at first. I was no damned historicist, no sir; I stuck to my theory guns and secretly poo-pooed all the vulgar American Studies types I found myself working with.
<p>
Still, a doubt nagged at me. Not only were they all better dressed than I; they seemed to speak a private language, an idiom of their own that they’d absorbed from their famous professors in Am Civ or History or even English. I was an outsider. A guy from the hinterland, who’d earned his doctorate at the University of Colorado at Boulder and worked on that most unfashionable of subjects, poetry. What did I have in common with scholars who worked on race relations during the Cold War, or the history of the NEA?
<p>
Defensive and unsure of myself, I sought to fend off this invasion of Harvardization, which I took to be a creeping mental poison, a slow spiritual death that led by degrees to an ever-more inflated sense of self-importance, entirely irrespective of one’s actual accomplishments or one’s dubious position on the greasy pole of academic hierarchy. When I heard a graduate student ask, in all innocence, and with more than a bit of disdain, “what is cultural studies anyway?” at a cocktail party I nearly flipped. How could these people be so naïve about the state of our field?
<p>
(Reader. she later became a dear friend – because, you know, Russians are the best.)
<P>
But the desire to fit in, to belong, is strong. And after a while, as I learned, historicizing adds a new dimension to literary studies which I soon began applying to my own work, even if, as a formalist, I remained skeptical of its claim to serve as an all-explaining matrix. My succumbing to the Harvard way happened in stages and really, I can only plead self-defense, an urge to camouflage myself, chameleon-like. First, I cut my usually long, unkempt hair a bit shorter. Second, I invested in a couple of good, all-purpose sport coats and dumped my stone-washed jeans for some higher quality denim from The Gap and Banana Republic. I credit my girlfriend at the time with invaluable fashion advice. Realy, it was all could afford at the time!
<p>
And while I was still an easy going guy with an open Midwestern manner among friends, in public, when strolling across the green square of Harvard Yard, or through the echoing marble spaces of Barker Center, I adopted a glacial stare of relaxed indifference or even mild contempt. My beard was a natural aid in this effort, lending me an air of gravitas while I kept my gaze fixed dead ahead on some point just beyond the rabble passing by, even if one of them was Stephen Greenblatt who, when not whispering secretively into his cell phone, wore a look of wry bemusement – his own protective armor?
<p>
I learned my technique from the master, Greenblatt’s colleague, Luke Menand, for whom I T-A-ed one semester. Menand had a way of gliding by almost invisibly; he walked with the air of someone determined not to get impeded (shanghaied) by some passer-by. An animated exchange with him was a slight nod or maybe some raised eyebrows and the ghostly suggestion of a nascent smile.
<p>
It was Menand who, one day when we happened to fall in together on our way to campus (he appeared, as if out of thin air, treading the narrow walkway through the old churchyard back of First Church, expertly picking his way – a path I had taken many times myself) and we actually had a chat. It was then he clued me in on one of the key mysteries of the Harvard way.
<p>
After discussing how much we still enjoyed Kerouac (on the syllabus that week) and how impoverished today’s students seemed for want of actual unplanned experience, he mentioned how no one at Harvard escapes the inexorable pressure to do more. He asked if I'd ever been on the campus of Johns Hopkins, No, never, Well it's the most intimatedinf place you'll ever see, he said. Even Luke Menand, winner of the Pulitzer, felt it. The pressure to produce was tremendous and bore down on everyone, it seemed. No wonder this bastion of liberal thought gave off such an air of desperation and anxiety. Harvard made everyone feel small and inadequate, only as good as your last essay or book. The massive marmoreal weight of its history and prestige oppressed us all, beginning scholars or accomplished geniuses.
<p>
But there were other things about Harvard that while they initially bewildered me, eventually became rather commonplace, even blasé. I found a way to inoculate myself against their contagion, a malaise driven by class-status and the kind of uber-organizational determination students brought with them straight out of elite prep schools. That’s not to say I didn’t have some truly wonderful and special students who somehow rose above all the bullshit. But I’ll never forget my first real “Harvard-type” student, the delightful and maddening R.
<p>
R. was a petite blonde, impeccably put together, unnaturally self-possessed; a terrifyingly sunny young woman who seemed determined to bowl me over at our first tutorial meeting in the Barker Center Café, which was flooded with sunlight but felt like a black hole. She had just finished “The Bostonians” and thought it “just” the very most brilliant thing, though of course perhaps not as good as “Portrait”, but then what is? What, indeed, I shrugged, suddenly needing something stronger than coffee. It was like being accosted by Tracy Lord in “Philadelphia Story.” Did all Harvard students carry on this way? I felt caught in some infernal Jamesian scenario myself, unable to parry, much less respond to this hyper-articulate display of sophistication.
<p>
I was soon to learn that it was all a sham. R. was a great talker of texts, a true champion, but when it came to actually writing coherent, persuasive essays about them, she was a mess. She procrastinated on a weekly basis, failed to turn in work on time and when she did, her essays were riddled with typos, wretched grammar, and weak, if not non-existent, arguments. Her idea of an essay was a glorified book report. I’ll never quite forgive her for making me suffer through Maugham’s ghastly melodrama, “Of Human Bondage,” which she chose to write her final paper on.
<p>
A snippet from my two-page report on her essay (the paperwork in H&L was horrendous):
“You rely too much on terms like Dickensian, Victorian, and Bildungsroman, employing them as if their meanings were stable and transparent, rather than multiple and contested. Simply asserting a term in place of actually working through its implications and hidden conflicts does not an argument make. This tendency lends itself to a clumsy series of repetitions throughout the essay, the chief of which is the overworked term unconventional.”
<p>
Yet, unsurprisingly, she went on after graduation to not only publish a novel about her freshman year at Harvard, but to take up an assistant editorship at a major fashion magazine. And really all was forgiven by weekly by-line in the Crimson on student fashion which was so smartly observant and so funny -- well, it was impossible not love R.
<p>
Despite all my cavils and bitching, Harvard was, in the end, enriching. The dinners with Jorie Graham, Peter Sacks, Tim Bahti, Lyn Hejinian, Ann Lauterbach, and Michael Palmer were wonderful. Sitting across from Stanley Cavell at the Faculty Club. Meeting Jane Gallop and Virginia Jackson and Crisanne Miller at the English Institute. Hanging out with Fanny Howe and Christina Davis. So many more …
<p>
Then there was the time I went to the bar at the Faculty Club (a place that resembles nothing so much as a funeral home) and ordered a Negroni. The result was undrinkable.
<p>
And then there was that latter day Colossus, Bill Corbett, who held court every Monday around 5 during the semester in a designated back booth at Grafton’s on Mass Ave. It was very much a men’s club, all poets, who argued affably about the Red Sox or old movies, etc. Occasionally the rare intrepid woman would join us. Jackson Braider’s lovely wife, Lisa, was one – witty, unflappable, the very image of grace. Peter Sacks would stop by the table now and then and he and Bill would trade insults. “Oh that took the mickey out of you, Corbett!” Peter would crow.
<p>
It’s funny, as they say, the things you remember. I recall going with Ingrid to a party on Pearl St in Cambridgeport. I forget now who our hosts were. It was loud and wall-to-wall crowded with people twenty years my junior. In other words, hell. But for one moment all that went away when my office mate Karene Grad walked through the door, date in tow. I’ve never forgotten the smile she gave me. It seemed to lift me right out of my shoes. (Karene helped me get a gig in BU's Writing Program, which really saved my ass).
<p>
So many amazing colleagues, many of whom, like myself, were asking themselves what the hell they were doing here. People like Aaron Lecklider, Kim Reilly, Paige Meltzter, Amy Spellacy, Lisa Szefel, John Ondrovick, Karen Bishop, James Murphy, George Blaustein, Anna Deeny, Sarah Cole, Karene Grad, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Some of the smartest, funniest people I’ve ever known. We were all in it together and only our sense of the sardonic saved us from despair. Thought looking back now, in 2022, I think, for me, at any rate, despair still holds the high cards.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-32316749761735903852022-01-26T17:54:00.000-08:002022-01-26T17:57:46.083-08:00PUBLIC FIGURES, Jena Osman (Wesleyan 2012)N.B. I'd forgotten I'd dashed this off back when Osman's book first came out. Apparently I'd thought better of submitting a rather negative piece but now I've reconsidered. I've never been a fan of Osman's conceptually overdetermined work. Yet this was was a book I held out hope for when it first appeared. Instead it proved to be a deep disappointment.
<p>
This book-length poem-essay is written in the spirit of Benjamin and Sebald (with a nod to Paul Virilio’s work in “War and Cinema”), focusing on the construction of the historical gaze. How do public “figures” – commemorative statues by and large erected to mark military campaigns and victories – shape, that is, figure public space? These lieux de memoire, as Pierre Nora calls them, not only elegize historical events, but inform the social and psychological commons, the space of everyday life.
<p>
The book hinges on the conceit of the statuary gaze. “The idea occured.//Photograph the figurative statues that populate your city. Then bring the camera to their eyes (find a way) and shoot their points of view. What does such a figure see?” In the photos that accompany the text, we get a few underwhelming shots of some statute’s line of sight, which is hardly the same thing as “what they see.”
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<p>
This method wants to provide a powerful way to think about public space though it runs the risk of de-historicizing the very issues Osman wants to re-historicize. Statutes don’t gaze but are meant to be gazed at, of course. But if they could be said to gaze at all then what they see is neither the past nor the future, but the present, mapping it as an eternal now stripped of trauma, a kind of amnesia performed in the very act of commemoration by which civilization elides its own barbarism. As Benjamin remarked, “historicism is a vulgar naturalism.”
<p>
<i>Public Figures</i> follows rather loosely a tradition of documentary poetics that runs from Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” through much of Charles Olson and Susan Howe’s work on American history. Like Olson and Howe this is a book about the latent possibilities of form, especially form conceived of as an act of political intervention. As a meditation on history however it is somewhat banal. As a meditation on the possibilities for the non-lyrical poem it breaks some new ground, but occasionally where it reaches for the essayistic mot juste only manages the flattest of platitudes.
<p>
Image: Thinly masked critiques at the end of the disasters.<br>
The leader as bishop is a hawk with heads sutured at the ends of each wing. <br>
With knees in the mud. <br>
The parrot, the ass, the dog, the monkey, the wolf. <br>
Infantalized humanoids, all cower in their bestial cover behind the leader like a<br>
cloud, his wings holding back their perfidy of which he is a part. <br>
You are the shadow at the back, looming like a trace of escape. <br>
<p>
Caption: Man with safety orange sweater looking in backpack, then putting it on back. <br>Man running while on cell phone. Family of three. Troupe of charlatans. <br>
<p>
Story: You’ve been evaluating your options. On the one hand, all has gone according to plan. On the other hand, you feel yourself losing your motivation, your focus. The data set is missing a crucial page, buried at the scene. Focus on what matters: Timing. Persistence. Clarity of purpose. The landscape is secondary.
<p>
The three tiers of response move from immediate perception to common details to fractured narrative and confused self-reflection, inviting the reader to take part in the process Osman follows in her historical detective work. The effect is deliberately unsettling and disjunctive, with the richness of impression giving way to a deflated language of evaluation. This kind of writing, nurtured during the 90s at grad programs in Buffalo and elsewhere, strains for a new kind of verisimilitude, mixing genre styles, collage-like, to affect a new dialectical image, as Benjamin describes it, whereby disparate objects from different cultural moments produce a sudden illumination of the past. But the effort falls short.
<p>
To be fair, Osman’s not really after lyric intensity here. The deliberately prosaic tone of her anti-poetry works to fend off the temptations of the merely beautiful, as if beauty and political commentary were somehow incompatible. (By way of contrast one thinks, for instance, of the late work of Geoffrey Hill, whose inquisitions into the power of the state ring with lyric fury).<p>
No one could ever accuse Osman of acceding to the demands of melopoeia, much less actual prosody. For her, a poem is as dry a report on experience as an annual corporate earnings sheet. She’s a specialist in deflated frisson. The idea here seems to be that ekphrastic writing can not only be bent toward political ends, but that by producing a warmed-over dialectical shock of recognition the reader will be jolted into new awareness of public space. While some of the poems here do accomplish that most of them merely reify the very thing they want to reveal.
<p>
Interspersed with the book’s reflections on statuary, snippets of military jargon culled from The Forever Wars in the Middle East act as vaguely intended counterpoints. These are transcripts, we are informed, from various drone pilots to be found on You Tube. The language of course is clipped, dry, matter of fact. It’s difficult to know what Osman intended to achieve with this gimmicky juxtaposition. <p>
“possible new target approaching target one building <br>
designate new target target five pilot copies sensor” <br>
<p>
There’s no indication if these communications have been altered or edited, as seems the case, or if Osman transcribed them as is. This is in itself constitutes a case of bad faith, the verbal equivalent of presenting edited footage, with its elisions and cuts, as “the way it really happened.”
<p>
For the most part, Osman’s project in <i>Public Figures</i> is resolutely local, focused on her own immediate environment in monument-rich Philadelphia (she is a professor at Temple), a city awash in patriotic “heritage.” She conducts her interrogation of the lived experience of public spaces in order to probe the way they shape the political unconscious of the daily personal sphere, the background replacing the foreground.
<p>
But one wonders how she might have dealt with something on the order of St.-Gauden’s monument to Shaw’s 54th regiment in Boston. Its famous rejoinder, Robert Lowell’s “For The Union Dead,” does some of the anti-monumental cultural work Osman takes on, splicing present with past. Lowell’s poem is charged with tremendous affective energy, a quality conspicuously lacking in most younger experimental poets today, who eschew emotion for the kind of desiccated clinical language of a theory seminar. One might call it poetry by poets who can’t write poetry. In the 1990s this seemed radical, offering the hope for new possibilities in poetic rhetoric and critique. By 2012, it’s become dated: formulaic and, finally, forgettable.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-47995354715052362942021-09-24T10:50:00.004-07:002021-09-24T10:57:00.207-07:00On the Abuse of BeckettDistinguished legal scholar and Obama appointee Cass Sunstein, of Harvard Law School, former spouse of the fabulous Martha Nussbaum and current partner of Samantha Powers, recently contributed a piece to the NY Times on "YOU BET YOUR LIFE
From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation" by Paul Offit. You can read it here:
<p>
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/books/review/you-bet-your-life-paul-offitt.html
<p>
It's a decent, even-handed review, which he probably dashed off on a weekend, like we all do.
<P>
Sunstein is, as should be obvious,impressively accomplished. I recall reading some of his early work on constituional law when I was in grad school for purely personal reasons I no longer remember. But he was the real McCoy. Now that he's ascended into the upper atomsphere, he's taken to writing trendy books on trendy subjects, no doubt hoping to cadge a trendy prize like so many of his peers (thinking of you here, Stephen Greenblatt and Merve Emre). Isn't one Malcolm Gladwell already one too many?
<p>
He may be a brilliant legal scholar but his understanding of modernist literature is, to say the least, lacking -- as I hope I make clear in what follows. This is an expanded version of a letter I sent to the Times. I'm grateful to Sunstein for provoking me to think throgh the logic of Beckett's work, which I've been reading for the better part of 40 years and to which I always and inevitably return.
<p>
To the Editor of New York Times Book Review:
<P>
Cass Sunstein’s too clever by half hook for his review of “You Bet Your Life” is mistaken on two counts. Sunstein writes, “In his 1983 novella ‘Worstward Ho,’ Samuel Beckett wrote his most famous words: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ The history of medicine consists of trying and failing, trying again, failing again and failing better.” As anyone even slightly familiar with Beckett’s work can attest, his most well-known quote occurs at the end of the 1953 novel “The Unnamable” – namely, “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
<p>
Despite the phrase “fail better” being co-opted by the tech-bros of Silicon Valley as a mantra for product development, it does not carry an aspirational message about a continual cycle of innovation. To the contrary, “fail better” signifies that the human condition will always be one of failure and that we must learn to accept it, to purify it, as it were, to commit to it fully since there is finally no escape, no alternative to the hopeless plight of our striving. There is hope; there will always be hope. But for Beckett the comedy of our predicament means that it can never be fulfilled.
<p>
“Fail better” is a spiritual vow, not a marketing slogan. Please make a note of it.
<p>
P.S. The thing about Beckett is that he never extinguishes hope. He makes it clear though that while its attainment is impossible, its fulfillment perpetually deferred, we can never not hope. This is our predicament. The central tension in his work derives from an appeal to hope and the recognition that it can never be fulfilled. This is why Godot never appears. This could aptly describe the films of Chaplin. In “Modern Times,” the film of his I know best, he fails spectacularly at everything he sets his hand to. Yet the final shot shows The Tramp and The Gamin jauntily walking off in the sunset to nowhere.
<p>
Failure thus becomes its own achievement, an end in itself, rather than something to be overcome. This is the source of the grim comedy that animates all of Beckett’s work. We are condemned to an utterly bleak situation – the comedy arises from the growing awareness of an surrender to that bleakness. This is why Beckett may finally be understood as a profoundly spiritual writer.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-51070699109525819642021-08-08T10:00:00.003-07:002021-08-08T10:26:41.555-07:00FUGUE MEADOW, Keith Jones (Ricochet Editions, 2015)Note:this review originally appeared in John Tranter's now defunct online Journal of Poetics Research.<p>
Just at the outset of his career, American poet Keith Jones is already writing with the confidence and élan one expects from a fully mature writer. His scintillating poems are both demanding and vibrantly lyrical, steeped in the disjunctive complexities of the modernist legacy. His work so far, collected in two short, but powerful, books, demonstrates a deep commitment to the intricacies of the dissonant word and its multiple, fragmented registers of melos and meaning.
<p>
Jones’s first book, <i>Surface to Air, Residuals of Basquiat </i>(Pressed Wafer) was a finely textured response to the late painter’s work through a series of tightly symmetrical poems: three stanzas with two lines each, and a final couplet set off in counterpoint at the bottom of the page. Stark and antiphonally layered, they had the effect of opening up Basquiat’s methods in surprising ways, illuminating both his work and his life from a variety of angles.
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<p>
<i>Fugue Meadow</i>, his latest book, is similarly keyed around another path-breaking postmodern artist, jazz trumpeter Don Cherry who in 1969, with drummer Ed Blackwell, recorded Mu, a double-album that many consider to have sounded the first notes of world music. The book is dedicated to recent victims of racial violence in America, Michael Brown and Eric Garner among them, making a direct link between the cruel inequities still visited upon black Americans and Cherry’s vision of a polyracial musical paradise. As Jones writes in the opening poem, the new still carries a revivifying power:
<p>
new <i>down</i> here new moss new spring grass this song<br>
might as well feel this way this weave<br>
<p>
this fold<p>
Like Cherry, Jones is concerned with the weave and fold of sounds and words. How folding and refolding generates new sounds, new connections, a set of new possibilities for the poem. Or as Jones puts it elsewhere, in what might be a statement of the book’s defining principle:<p>
We are a new theft<br>
at the limit <br>
of the borrowed<br>
<p>
Poetic imagination thrives on theft. So the limit of the borrowed is also the threshold of the utopian still-to-come. The utopianism of Cherry’s music is announced in the album’s title – “Mu,” for music (and <i>Fugue Meadow</i> rhymes and echoes that with its first syllable); but also “Mu,” the legendary lost continent in the Pacific whose prehistoric destruction by geological cataclysm led to a vast global diaspora, a seeding of peoples and customs from India and Peru to Greece and Egypt. <p>
Mu, like OM, might also be thought of as an attempt to represent the ultimate phoneme, the original sound which gave rise to all other sounds. Indeed, as Nathaniel Mackey, whose own “Mu” series derives loosely from Cherry’s music, notes in his preface to <i>Splay Anthem</i>, “any longingly imagined, mourned or remembered place, time, or condition can be called ‘Mu.’”
<p>
”Mu” in this sense is less a piecing back together of lost fragments from some original whole, than a vision of a utopia-to-come. “Mu” represents a new global potentiality – the belated emergence of a world sound that is also, in Hegel’s term, world-historical, signaling through music Spirit’s coming into a new awareness of itself. <p>
But where Mackey takes “Mu” as the basis for an ongoing mythopoetic series investigating the afterlives of diaspora, Jones’ focus is narrower; resolutely historical, a tapline into personal echoes and resonances evoked by Cherry’s powerful and haunting music. <p>
BLACKWELL STUDIES /BLUE MOUNTAIN PLACE / HAVEN A FAR SHORE<P>
I go in from Syracuse nude & with energy. to find the space: the infinite series: <p>
the arc’s quiet math: “Do not disturb my circles”<p>
I am painting the air within, tree-limbed, pointing to night. I will roll the infinitesimal / <p>
soldiers fleeing what you sing, now we say lunar, the tuck of spirit, big bold nothing <br>obscure<p>
launching a thousand ships, caves-in the halo of yr ceiling<p>
after you, <b>chance is measure</b>, chance<p>
is breath
<p>
With its wry punning on the drummer’s name and a series of academic books published by Blackwell this poem draws together themes of intuitive seeking and political resistance. In a poetry dedicated to an “infinite series,” one that impels soldiers to flee by its unsettling music, chance can be the only measure. To follow the music where it leads you – no wrong notes, only next notes. Only next breaths. <p>
In an audacious act of confidence, Jones invites his readers to follow the poems while listening to Cherry’s music at a website the publisher, Ricochet Editions, has generously provided. <i>Fugue Meadow</i> produces a multi-collaborative site, one in which poet, reader, and music interact and form recombinant modes of listening. “To duet/a numinous/sound.”
Jones’ exquisitely calibrated poems offer an annotated deep listening – the most through-going kind of attentiveness one artist can pay another: not translation but response. There’s an acute, almost micro-tonal act of hearing at work here. The poems fall fold over fold into further fold – a force-field of folds, reticulate, echolaic. One example will have to suffice. This is from partway through “[Track Eight 0’42”]” – which corresponds to Cherry and Blackwell’s sublime composition “Bamboo Night:”<p>
5’54”. heart round peak, like hard nipple, one go upland, toward sky<br>
to dance. to get new, to ground many in love. <br>
say it twice. with yr feet. <br>
love dance<br>
map.<p>
“Love/dance/map” – the simple circularity of this triad spells out an entire poetics. The root of the poem is in the rhythm of the music, in the dance, as Pound once asserted. Reading this while listening to “Bamboo Night” draws one into an intense erotic duet: flute and drum; love/dance/map, intertwining and playing off each other. While it’s not necessary to listen to Cherry’s album or even know it to appreciate these poems, some familiarity with it will open up <i>Fugue Meadow</i> to new levels of attunement.
<p>
A fugue meadow names both a musical structure and a field where rigid notions of cultural identity dissolve. To enter a fugue state is to carve inner time out of linear time – to be in time as time, singing it as its very transpiration and expiration, a breath consuming itself for the sake of withness and witness. <p>
the sorrow with which it is twined<p>
a vacating of loss in the kingdom of loss<p>
a broader finite condition<p>
rhythms linked to Mu’s vanishing<p>
an inquest, an inquisitor’s kiss<p>
Breath is everything for the trumpet player and the poet, the caesuras here marking the necessity of breaks, little ruptures, in the texture of the lyric that allow the lost fragments of sunken Mu a way back into song. <i>Fugue Meadow</i> accomplishes what we long for song to do: to lose our way in order to find it; to undergo exile as a form of home.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-17064064117430829942020-04-04T17:01:00.002-07:002022-10-12T16:42:49.639-07:00MOVIE LOVE or, Seven Moments from the Ontology of the Cinematic Image<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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N.B.: I was originally asked to contribute this brief piece to Ken Taylor and J. Peter Moore’s web journal, LUTE & DRUM. The site seems to have gone dark, perhaps temporarily. So in the meantime, I am re-posting it here, as it ran.
<p>
In his famous essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” French film critic André Bazin lays out a powerful and deeply influential account of what sets film images apart from all previous instances of pictorial representation. “Only a photographic lens,” he writes, “can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation … the photographic image is bject itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.” Bazin’s conception of the film image is almost mystical.
<p>
But in current era of blockbuster filmmaking,the real is masked; we’ve grown habituated to being bludgeoned by the gigantism of motion picture spectacle. Outside a few rare practitioners, like Terence Malick or Steven Soderbergh, the image has shrunk to an impoverished thing. Instead we are assaulted by massive spectacles of destruction, or what Bazin calls elsewhere “the Nero complex” of filmmakers obsessed with visual bombast.
<p>
The anti-cinema of CGI is used by most directors to obliterate perception, rather than tutoring the eye in how to see more deeply. But some of the greatest moments in the history of film derive their power from a certain withholding, a discretion of the camera, a holding back, or merely a sly bit of inference. At the same time it must be remembered that all filmmaking, even the most naturalistic (think Ford, Renoir, De Sica) is a form of special effect, and that the greatest special effect ever devised in the movies is still the close up.
<p>
Here, in no real order, are moments from a few of my favorite films, movies that I have watched over and over again, each time with a renewed sense of wonder at the possibilities of cinema.
<p>
<b>Black Narcissus | Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger | 1949</b>
<p>
Perhaps the most erotic movie ever made? The vertiginous vistas of the Himalayas, the heavy virginal drop cloth of the nun’s habits against the outrageous, psychotropic palette of a jungle Eden – all these make for one of the most visually sumptuous experiences the movies have to offer. There are many scenes one could point to as singular.
<p>
I’ll choose just one: Sister Ruth (the exquisite Kathleen Byron) as she’s becoming unhinged by her lust for Mr. Dean (David Farrar), the local agent and all-round hunk. The scene is sunset: drenched in otherworldly, beatific light. Sister Ruth’s face is a study in brooding madness. An Indian boy has just entered her chambers with a glass of what he calls lemonade, though it looks like milk. Sister Ruth’s disdain chases him from the room. Suddenly she hears voices, and swirling, rushes to the window. Below her, in the courtyard, her superior, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), and Mr. Dean, are conversing. We cannot hear what they are saying. After a moment, Ruth frantically chases through the halls of the monastery (a former seraglio) to catch further sight of them. Because of the high angle, they assume, in her gaze, a conspiratorial air.
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<p>
The scene ends with Farrar and Kerr stopped on a terrace above a frightful abyss, with Kerr pouring her heart out, and Byron, blown against the latticework, spying down upon them – an infernal triangle. All this while Kerr stands stiff and straight, her face a play of wry, sad, ironic reflection. As a subdued pastoral score plays over the scene, she tells Dean about her lost love in Ireland, about why she entered the order, about how she found peace – and about how, on coming to the Himalayas, all the old ghosts are stirring up. “I couldn’t stop the wind from blowing and the air from being clear as crystal, and I couldn’t hide the mountain.”
<p>
Amazingly, nearly all of “Black Narcissus” was made on a sound stage at Pinewood. Shot by the legendary Jack Cardiff (who rightly won an Oscar for his work), with art direction (or what would now be called production design) by Arthur Junge, it glows with a profane radiance. As a triumph of artifice and the power of color and light, there’s nothing else like it.
<p>
<b>The Third Man | Carol Reed | 1949</b>
<p>
Graham Greene once remarked that he thought audiences simply wouldn’t sit still for the long closing take in Reed’s masterpiece. When he saw it, though, he changed his mind. The scene is Vienna’s cemetery, where Harry Lime has been laid to rest yet again, this time for good. On the way to the airport, Major Callaway (Trevor Howard) and Joseph Cotton’s fool for love Holly Martins pass Harry’s old lover, Anna (the sublimely aloof AlidaValli) walking the long road back. Martins insists Callaway let him out. “Be sensible, Martins.” “I haven’t got a sensible name, Callaway.”
<p>
He hoists his duffle and saunters over to a wagon loaded with wood to wait. Anna is a dark tiny figure dead center in the background, moving ever so slowly toward us. Reed shoots her straight on, at about shoulder height, with Cotton in the left foreground, staring vacantly at nothing. Anton Karas’s somber, melancholy zither score seems to conjure the brittle leaves falling from the nearly denuded trees. It takes about a minute for Anna to approach Holly and when she does, she pays him not so much as a glance. There’s only one cut, near the start of her walk: Callaway’s slightly disgusted over the shoulder look at Martins before he pulls away.
<p>
After Anna finally passes him, Martins shakes loose a cigarette, lights it, and disdainfully throws the match to the ground. The audacity of Reed’s decision to hold that shot for so long, defying expectations, stretching out the tension, underlines perfectly Greene’s bitter world view. In the age of disaster, there can be no happy endings. “Poor Crabbin,” Greene closes his short novel. “Poor all of us when you come to think of it.”
<p>
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<p>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Njr-jbj2s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Njr-jbj2s</a>
<p>
<b>Close Encounters of the Third Kind | Steven Spielberg | 1977</B>
<p>
In my SF film class, I screen this scene of a pilot’s near collision with a UFO to illustrate how much tension can be generated using the most minimal of means. This short sequence, early on, lasts only 3 and half minutes. You can watch it at the link below.
<p>
There are several things going on here. First, the conduct of the air traffic controllers as they try to wrap their heads around the unprecedented. This is Spielberg at his most Hawksian. Even in the face of the impossible, the controller’s professionalism never wavers. The dialogue is mostly technical: questions about the UFO’s appearance (“the brightest anti-collision lights I think I’ve ever seen”) and instructions on what kind of evasive maneuvers to take (“Area 31 maintain flight level, break, Allegheny triple four turn right 30 degrees.”)
<p>
Second, the camera almost never moves. There are three or four momentum-building quick pans to the right and back to the left, which allow extra players to converge into the tight frame already established, and a few cuts from the master shot to a close up of the radar screen but that’s it. (Ingeniously, one of these shots gives us the air traffic controller’s face reflected in tight close up in the green abstract geometry of the radar scope tracking each flight. Face to screen – a brilliant image of movie watching itself).
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<p>
That frame begins with two controllers in it but by the end of the scene contains six or seven men, all crammed into the same visual space. Talk about traffic control. At one point Spielberg takes a page from Robert Altman, using overlapping dialogue: the timing and the sound mix are flawless.
<p>
Third, the entire incident is depicted solely through a radio conversation between the tower and the pilots, with only the sharp green lights of the controller’s radar screen indicating action. All the tension of the scene is built on what we don’t see. This tension about the Unseen, a staple of 50s monster movies, is maintained carefully, like a well choreographed striptease. Spielberg’s staging is masterful here. (There are approximately 20 cuts in this scene. Nothing fancy, nothing extraneous or showy). Not long ago, Soderbergh paid homage to his brilliance by setting “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to the soundtrack of “The Social Network” and deleting all the dialogue. Who else would think to do that? You can view it at the link below. The results are astonishing.
<p>
<p>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXiCKn1HCR4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXiCKn1HCR4</a>
<p>
<a href="http://extension765.com/sdr/18-raiders">http://extension765.com/sdr/18-raiders</a>
<p>
<b>Bringing Up Baby | Howard Hawks | 1938 </b>
<p>
Scripted by the great Dudley Nichols, this may well hold claim as the apogee of screwball comedy. Which is saying a lot, considering Hawks’s other entries, “Ball of Fire” and “His Girl Friday,” or Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels” and “The Lady Eve,” to name just a few. Cute meet: the hapless paleontologist David (Cary Grant), in full tux and tails, comes to a posh restaurant looking for his wealthy patron, Mr. Peabody, when Susan (Kate Hepburn) dressed in a slinky, shimmering silver outfit, literally trips him up with a martini olive. Comedy ensues.
<p>
As the slightly spastic Dr. Lehman advises Susan: “the love impulse in men very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.” What follows is not just a classic comedy-of-misunderstanding, but a barely masked sexual frenzy in the form of slapstick. First Hepburn rips Grant’s dinner jacket as he tries to exit up a stairway. “Oh, you’ve torn your coat.” Then Grant steps on Hepburn’s luminous gown, splitting it open up the back and exposing her lacy under garments. Grant frantically tries to cover up her exposed derrière by clapping his phallic top hat over the tear. As symbolic fucks go in the Code era, it doesn’t get better than this.
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<p>
<b>2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | 1968</b>
<p>
We first see a shot of deep space, without any context. Then a title card: “Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later.” The slow mournful chords from the adagio of Khachaturian’s “Gayane” come up. Slowly, from the left side of the screen the nose of the Discovery pushes into view (in reality, the camera is tracking backwards along the length of the 18-foot model). The globe of the living quarters is at first cut off at the top, as if it’s too big to fit on the screen. A move that George Lucas would lovingly copy ten years later in the opening scene of “Stars Wars” and that has been emulated by numerous SF films, including James Cameron’s “Aliens.”
<p>
(Probably the best homage though is Brian De Palma’s underrated “Mission to Mars,” which features some amazing swirling, inverted zooms through space ship windows along with balletic shots of floating bodies in space, what Annette Michelson calls, in still the best essay on “2001,” “the structural potentialities of haptic disorientation as agent of cognition”).
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<p>
The ship moves forward, stately, imperturbable. The globe’s volume is echoed in procession by the smaller radio array of the AE-35, a satellite dish mounted on the fuselage. Finally the engines hove into view – and we cut to a reverse angle so the ship is now moving past us from the front still left to right. Then cut again, to a middle distance shot in which the ship, seen from its side, stretches across the screen. In every shot, it fills the screen. Time elapsed: roughly a minute and a half. In that time we are transported by the eerie floating alien grace of interplanetary flight, a new form of the technological sublime.
<p>
<b>The Limey | Steven Soderbergh | 1999</b>
<p>
“The Limey” is a classic revenge picture and one of the best “sunshine noirs” of recent vintage. Wilson, an English thief fresh from prison, has come to America looking for his daughter, Jenny. Soderbergh has described this film as a combination of “Get Carter” and “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” And it is. The opening sequences manipulate time brilliantly. Is Wilson just arriving in LA? Or is he on the return flight to London, musing about all that’s occurred? The first lines we hear, while the screen is still black, are Wilson’s, played by a loose, Cockney-slanging but wire-coiled, Terence Stamp: “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me about … Jenny.”
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But it’s not until the film’s climax that we realize these are the last lines he speaks to her killer, the sleazy record producer Terry Valentine (the perfectly cast Peter Fonda). Through an intricate series of cuts, past, present, and future fluidly overlap till the difference is erased. Wilson, brooding on the plane (Stamp’s shriven skull – stark, solemn, and hallowed); Wilson smoking on his dingy hotel bed; Wilson buying guns from two teenage gangbangers in a park. Interspersed with these are repeated scenes of Wilson striding determinedly in slow motion along a sundrenched brick wall, dressed all in black.
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Soderbergh shoots the scene from a distance, at a low angle, so that Wilson appears small against the industrial background. The classic law of thirds composition is slightly distorted here: the thin strip of asphalt and the concrete base of the building appear as one level; the massive red brick of the windowless wall another; and the washed out blue of the sky, cloudless and remote, as the third. He’s a small figure, almost puny – but utterly determined to wreak his vengeance.
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<p>
<b>My Darling Clementine | John Ford | 1946</b>
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The anecdote has taken on the sheen of myth. When asked who his favorite filmmakers were, Orson Welles replied: “the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.”
<p>
In the mid-1940s, Ford made three of his greatest films, each of them documenting the rituals of isolated and embattled communities trying to survive at the edge of the frontier. Taken together, “Clementine,” “Fort Apache” and “They Were Expendable” evince his devotion to the cultural logic of Manifest Destiny.
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In “My Darling Clementine,” his heavily romanticized version of the Wyatt Earp story, civilizing Tombstone involves more than the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It also takes a “dad-blasted good dance,” as Russell Simpson, part of Ford’s stock company, puts it. Ford liked to say that his two favorite things to shoot were horses at full gallop and couples dancing. The dance in “Clementine” begins with a ritualistic walk as Henry Fonda escorts Clementine (Cathy Downs) down the boardwalk to the town church, which is nothing more than a wooden platform and the scaffolding of a belfry. In the distance, the townsfolk can be heard singing “Shall We Gather at the River.”
<p>
Ford shoots this scene with great solemnity and circumspection, the camera discretely tracking the pair at a middle distance as they stay framed inside several receding rectangles formed by the boardwalk, the wooden awning, and strips of sunlight and shadow. They could almost be walking down the aisle of a medieval cathedral. The couple pauses at the edge of the crowd. Downs glances over at Fonda expectantly, while Fonda, looking as uncomfortable as a man can when called upon to do the chivalric thing, removes his hat, fidgets with it, then finally tosses it aside. “Oblige me, ma’am?” he almost whispers. As soon as they mount the platform, Simpson calls a halt to the music, crying out, “sashay back, and make room for our new marshal, and his lady fair!” What follows is a moment of pure joy as Downs and Fonda perform a high stepping waltz, surrounded by a clapping crowd. Fonda’s stiff-legged, stork-like dance step would be laughable, were the expression on his face not so radiant. Ford’s orchestration of this seemingly simple scene is flawless: one of the truly great moments in American film.
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TCbWu1PhLU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TCbWu1PhLU</a>
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<b><b><blockquote></blockquote></b></b>Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-67461942034417936412019-09-19T01:33:00.000-07:002020-04-14T10:01:48.218-07:00Annals of LA: About Jay Cocks<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In 1991 or so I was hired to do research on a film about Joan of Arc. I’d been working for James Cameron at the time, reading scripts. Mostly SF. Or novels like Marge Piercy’s “Woman on the Edge of Time,” which clearly had an influence, shall we say, on “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”
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His wife at the time, Kathryn Bigelow, who’d just come off the now iconic “Point Break;” was going to direct. (Now iconic = early box office pretty low). It was going to be called “Company of Angels” but none of us knew that at the time. At the time it was just the Joan script. Top secret. Eyes only. Sinead O’Connor would play Joan. And maybe Keanu Reeves as Dunois?
<p>
(There’s a huge long story about that which must wait for another time – suffice it to say it was rather dramatic as these things go. Keanu was a sweetheart but in the heat of the moment, underneath the burning klieg lights, poor Sinead kind of lost her shit. I would have too. I don’t blame her at all. She’d just bit off more than she could chew. She was a champ though – a real trouper. Also she told me a poem I wrote about Joan made her wet. We were on a pickup truck, sitting thigh to thigh and I nearly drove off the 405. She was probably just fucking with me but I loved it. She asked Jay to give her five classic films to watch: I don’t recall them all but two of them were “The Red Shoes” and “The Third Man”).
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(So yeah I sat in my office in Warner Hollywood and became obsessed because that is the meaning of research and that ended up becoming my first book of poems ten years later, BURN. Thank you Joe Amato and thank you Charles Alexander. Another story for another time.)
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Most folks don’t understand actors or what the art of acting is – about what it is like to live so close to your emotions. To put yr face on the line – to be so luminous and vulnerable and porous. Poets are the antennae of the race sd Pound. Wrong – actors are. They put themselves on the line in ways most of us would have a hard time imagining. As I tell my students, the close up is still the greatest special effect ever invented. Not sure they get it.
<p>
But as it turned out, as charismatic as she was, Sinead did not really know how to act. We put this sweet tiny woman astride an enormous Clydesdale on the soundstage at Raleigh Studios (the old RKO I think, where Welles shot Kane, across from Paramount and my beloved Nickodells, now gone). The horse was pure grade mega-fauna – srsly whose idea was it to order this fucking beast? But the horse was cool. I wondered vaguely about the wrangler—who would wield the broom? Not my problem.
<P>
In the event, things went south or sideways or some other undesirable direction. Just another day in the office.
<p>
But Jay turned out to be, out of all that welter, one of the rare and truly decent human beings I ever met in Hollywood. Or anywhere else for that matter. A genuine class act. (Leslie Whitney being the other one). (And of course Jay’s late wife, the amazing actor Verna Bloom, full of North Shore sass. I adored her).
<p>
Jay and I bonded over our mutual love of James Agee. Which startled me because in my innocence and arrogance I had already decided that screenwriters were clueless – lightweight epigones. Then I read a few scripts and realized, this shit is hard – it’s pure form. It must be as tightly constructed as a sonnet. It can kill you if you’re not very careful.
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Over Jay’s desk (location undisclosed) hangs an enormous B&W photo of David Lean. It’s a production still from “Ryan’s Daughter.” Lean and his crew are struggling with a large light array precariously perched on a rocky coastline. He’s wearing a trench coat and the wind is whipping it around and like King Canute he seems to be commanding the elements to stop. The sea – yeah, the Irish Sea – is not hitting its marks. It’s epic. It’s heroic. It’s beautiful. This is how you make movies. You do crazy shit but also you look like David Lean.
<p>
It’s 1991 and we’re in a story meeting. Mulholland Drive, 90210, early spring sunlight streaming in, Richard Serra prints on the wall. Originals (KB knew Serra – and Philip Glass – and Mapplethorpe. From her days at the Whitney. There was a stunning BW photo portrait of her by Mapplethorpe that sat on Jim’s desk – I walked by it everyday and little by little I fell in love with it – or her – I could not be sure which).
<p>
But everything else is beige. The walls are beige, the couches are beige – I am slowly seeping into a sea of beige. It is inescapable. Even the smog is beige. A beige apocalypse. LA in the early 90s.
<p>
Kathryn’s enormous but very sweet German Shepherd Bodhi is lounging about. Bodhi would occasionally go into a barking frenzy and then the next door neighbor, a singer-song writer named Johnny Rivers whose chief claim to fame was having written the lyrics to “Secret Agent Man,” a song (and show) I loved as a boy, would complain. Loud and long. It got to be a regular thing. I was tasked with trying to mollify him. I did not succeed. Jay’s response was to write a hilarious parody of one of his songs. I don’t think KB was amused.
<p>
Kathryn and I are interviewing Jay for a bigtime screenwriting gig. We’d just talked to David Peoples (Blade Runner. Unforgiven) – David is great but yeah, no. KB did not dig him. He made a point of telling us that he hates flying so he drove – drove, mind you – to LA from Berkeley. I think this was what sealed his fate. He did not meet K’s threshold of cool. But then I was like, you can write scripts and live in Berkeley? I dropped a lot of acid in Berkeley. Some of it was actually real.
<p>
I am so in over my head I have no idea. I have this absurd amount of power. Except it’s not real power. That’s what fucks with yr head. It just looks like real power. And Jay is just so relaxed --- I think to myself this guy doesn’t care if he gets the job. He’s just sitting there with his legs crossed and he honestly does not give a shit. He’s from New York. He tells stories about writing film reviews for TIME. About meeting John Wayne and Kubrick. He is maybe the best raconteur I’ve ever known (the other being Anselm Hollo) – he has the journalist’s eye for the telling, colorful detail but he never goes on too long, never wears out his welcome. He doesn’t take himself or any of the Hollywood glitz seriously. He just seems hugely amused by it all.
<p>
Also, Marty is his best friend.
<p>
Also, he loves movies.
<p>
KB and I had just read the script for “Age of Innocence,” (which was released later that year and subsequently earned Jay an Oscar nom) and we were over the moon about it. Later I asked him about it and he simply sd, with a modesty that I came to know as typical of him and truly unfeigned, “it was all Miss Wharton.” Yeah, sure it was, pal.
<p>
(The script is credited to Jay and Marty. But to my eye the only contributions from Marty seemed to consist of inserting directions for camera angles – how to set up or shoot certain scenes. Everyone knows this is the worst kind of amateur mistake in script writing. They’ll storyboard it later anyway and you are who to presume to instruct the director about camera placement? In this case you just happen to be Marty so it’s all jake.
<p>
The brief camera instructions are revelatory, though --- Marty, like Hitchcock and Ford, had worked out the visual design well in advance. He’s got the whole freaking movie already storyboarded. He sees it in its totality before a single shot has been taken. You start to learn to see how he sees – will this be a CU? An MCU? A tracking shot? What’s Daniel doing? Where is Winona? Like that).
<p>
I realize slowly that I am in high cotton. But only because I have just read Darryl Pickney’s brilliant hugely entertaining memoir of the same title. The chapter on his working for Djuna Barnes is priceless. I, too, am working with genius-level people.
<p>
KB leaves the room to "take an important call." From her phalanx of agents -- maybe Ken Stovitz at CAA? Maybe Paula Wagner in her black Armani power suit? Paula Wagner is formidable. I have great respect for her. She really knew her stuff. A great agent is like a great director or producer: a master psychologist. She can work the room. She can command the flow of the conversation, the very pulse of the room, the outcome of the deal. It’s an art form I suppose and even though I sometimes cursed them under my breath I realized they held amazing super powers. (On the other hand Jay had some very funny stories and quip about agents which I shan’t repeat here)>
<p>
Then there was that whole phone protocol thing: every call prefaced with a "please hold for a call from X..." Did I do that for KB? Yes, so help me god, I did.
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While she is out Jay and I get to talking. He is so nonchalant, and just so cool and down to earth I find it easy to chat with him. Also, he pays me the major compliment – he takes me seriously – he actually wants to hear what I have to say. He is, as Ingrid would later say (her ultimate compliment) “no bullshit.”
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Somehow we find ourselves talking about Agee and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” I tell him I’ve just read it for another production company but though I love this book as much as anything in American literature I could not figure out how anyone could make a decent movie from it. The rural adventurism has a hook -- sure. But Agee comes off as a fawning creep and the best parts of the book, the stuff everyone loves, are the lyrical passages – “All over Alabama the lamps are out.” Or, “slowly they diminished along the hill path, she, and her daughter and her three sons, in leisured enfilade beneath the light.” You’d have to be a genius to make a good film from this book and anyway hadn’t John Ford already done it in “Grapes of Wrath”?
<p>
Later, after the Joan of Arc movie deal fell apart, I left LA, went to grad school, became a scholar of sorts and thought mostly about poetry and not much about screenplays. I moved to Boston. I got back in touch with Jay. We went down to see him in NYC where he graciously received us and then later invited us to come visit him and Verna at their beautiful home in Maine. We ended up honeymooning there and even though the marriage didn’t last I did write some good poems sitting on the deck of their guest home, overlooking a Maine fjord.
<p>
Over endless cappuccinos we talked about “The Wild Bunch” and “Random Harvest” and a bunch of other films I’d never seen before. He showered us with DVDs – almost all B/W Hollywood Golden Age classics. I was getting schooled, again.
<p>
I suppose at this point I should just state the obvious. If this sounds like a love story, it is.
<p>
CODA: Jim Cameron used to live in the house on Mulholland with Kathryn. You can bet he did not care about the beige. There was one personal trace of him remaining and it made me love him – a mimeographed four-paneled cartoon of some astronauts walking on a desert planet. I think it was dated 1965? This was exactly the kind of stuff I did back when I was a boy. I would look at it from time to time and think, “Emerson was so fucking right.”
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-80818069930418476182019-05-28T10:54:00.000-07:002019-05-28T10:54:34.614-07:00Remembering Ron Sukenick<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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NB: Jenny Dorn asked me to contribute this brief homage to "Square One" after Ron died. The journal name was a post 9/11 reboot of her late husband Ed Dorn's "Sniper Logic" which was underwritten by the University of Colorado. There were a lot of "qualms" going about in those days and still are, I suppose. A typical case of santicmonious CYA.
<p>
But here's to Ron. An inspiring figure. May his spirit continue to exasperate and provoke.
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The first time I met Ron Sukenick it was to interview him in his home for the <i>Boulder Daily Camera</i>. The occasion was the 20th anniversary of the Fiction Collective, which he’d begun in 1974. My editor, Juliet Wittman, warned me that he was not a man who suffered fools lightly. Contrary to this ominous warning, however, I found Ron to be tremendously warm, gracious, and hospitable. That hour or so spent in his study impacted me in a way hard to underestimate. I’d just moved to Boulder from L.A., where I’d worked as a script consultant in the film biz, but where I’d also started up my own short-lived, renegade poetry journal. (Featured here, a great photo by Douglas Messerli):
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<p>
When Ron heard about this, his eyes lit up. “You’re one of us,” he exclaimed. That feeling of acceptance provided a much-needed orientation to a larger literary landscape. Along with discovering and befriending Naropa poets Jack Collom and Anselm Hollo, my friendship with Ron helped to lead me out of my years in the wilderness and into a common conversation about the writing life, one that continues to sustain me today.
<p>
It’s difficult to sum up a career as varied and energetic as Ron’s. What follows is from my introduction for him at Left Hand Books in May 1999, at what I believe may have been his last public reading in Boulder. I have kept to the present tense because the work itself remains with us.
<p>
For over 30 years, Ron Sukenick has been a singular presence on the American literary scene. Radical novels like <i>Up, Long Talking Bad Condition Blues, 98.6, Blown Away, Doggy Bag, and Mosaic Man </i>have reshaped the way we think about the possibilities for a vital contemporary literature – one that takes up its position on the contested & ever-shifting border between postmodern configurations of the self and the iconography of pop media culture. He is also, let me quickly add, one of our most scabrously funny writers.
<p>
Sukenick’s fiction tirelessly reinvents the idea of fiction. As a pioneer of the poetics of resistance and disruption, he raised the stakes of the game to a new level, a level where, to quote from his book <i>In Form</i>, the task of the serious artist is seen as “a strenuous investigation into the laws of reality ... beyond the bounds of convention.” The imaginative power of art carries not only an oracular function, by which new categories of the real are disclosed; it also requires of the artist a genuine ethical concern, which Sukenick defines as “an obligation to the truth of things as revealed by formal thinking.” Both through his own writing, and through the establishment of his small press, Fiction Collective 2, and his literary journal, <i>The American Book Review</i>, Ron Sukenick has worked to insure that the revitalizing energies of a truly dynamic literary underground will continue to thrive – that is: to subvert, upset, shock, exasperate, bedevil, and electrify the complacent consumers of culture everywhere.
<p>
Beauty, we all know, is difficult. Tinker to Evers to Chance. Beardsley to Yeats to Pound. Part of the job for us now as writers is to re-think what Pound called “To Kalon in the marketplace.” How may beauty now relate to commerce? For Ron, it meant moving past the idea of beauty as a bulwark against mass culture. As he said in his interview with me: “Mallarme’s idea of the writer working to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’ was very elitist. I like the language of the tribe. Maybe the job of the writer is to muddy the language of the elite, to get popular language into literary language.” Ron did this with inestimable verve, cunning and flair. <i>Vale, ave</i>, baby.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-66036465004387110322019-04-26T19:56:00.001-07:002019-04-27T00:41:23.467-07:00AN ETHIC, Christina Davis (2013): Revisting a contemporary classic<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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N.B. Chloe Garcia invited me to review this marvelous book in 2013 for the Zoland Press website, which has gone dark. I've reposted it here with some small, but important, revisions which seemed right after some retrospection. It's a book that deserves to be more widely known.(Unfortunately, the blog format does not allow the preservation of indentations so some minor violence to Davis's precise lineation has occured).
<p>
George Oppen’s heirs are more numerous than one might suppose. Robert Creeley, Michael Heller, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Michael Palmer, John Taggart, Norman Finkelstein, Elizabeth Robinson, Julie Carr, Pam Rehm, Joseph Massey, and Graham Foust, among others, come to mind as poets who have registered his influence, either amplifying or re-directing it through an investigation of the poem’s rhetorical resources. But to call these poets heirs gives a false impression, for there is and can be no School of Oppen. What poets take from him is a commitment to form that expresses itself in a ruthlessness toward what language can be made to say. As Oppen puts it “Possible/to use/ words provided one treat them/as enemies.”
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Christina Davis stakes a strong claim to this tradition and her new book, <i>An Ethic,</i> is written less in the shadow of Oppen than as a kind of posthumous collaboration with him – a dialogue with the older poet’s austere, epistemologically rigorous work. The whole point of Oppen’s poetics is to test the meaning of a single word, a single poem, to work out, as exactly as possible, just how much truth a poem can carry, the way a structural engineer might test a suspension bridge to determine its maximum degree of torque and weight-bearing capacity in a windstorm. For Oppen, it turns out that a poem possesses considerable tensile power, provided one applies the proper degree of estranging torque. In this sense, poetry is a bridge that must also resist being a bridge. Hence, the appearance, on the page, of poems that look both remarkably fragile and severely worked out.
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Davis has taken up this difficult regime, but her investigations have less to do with testing the truth of what can be said, then with the desire of the poem to connect, to carry across that unbridged space between loss and memory, absence and presence, you and I, a kernel, a trace, a spark that persists. Oppen’s poetics of ethics is famously founded on what he called “the bright light of shipwreck.” Catastrophe: personal, historical, moral – and the failure of poetry, as well – produces the necessity for a poem that refuses an easy and morally inert subjectivity in order to see the true relations between the self and the world. The Objectivist term for this process, of course, is sincerity. Davis’ sincerity emerges out of personal catastrophe: the death of her beloved father, John. Many of these poems are harrowing disquisitions of the void that appears after the death of a loved one, the long absence and aching desire which persists. They are whittled down cries; spiky confrontations with elegy that honor loss by both admitting and resisting it.
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What sets Davis apart from Oppen is the way her poems hover just an inch above heartbreak. The way she manages the lacerations of loss is precise, controlled, and subtle – this is what she takes from Oppen: a ruthlessness toward her own grief and it makes many of these poems, like “An Elegy,” quietly devastating.
<p>
Above all, beneath all,<br>
<p>
in as many ways<br>
as the spider has<br>
<p>
known the wall,<br>
<p>
I miss and am<br>
member of you<br>
and of that race the grass<br>
grows thru.<br>
<p>
The sonic pattern of this poem achieves an exquisiteness that is in no way precious: the sense of breath and space, the rhyme of “all” with “wall” (as if to say that what was once experienced as unity now suffers a barrier); the spider as a hand, running over that wall, blindly knowing it through touch alone; and finally, the sharp cut of “am/member,” invoking both the call to remembering and its sundering.
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This is a strong collection, but not every poem quite hits the mark. “Addendum,” for instance, comes across as somewhat awkward: “Who was it said: ‘AND//is the greatest/miracle’? Praise//be his/her name.” Perhaps Davis has in mind here a particular “him” – William James who, in <i>A Pluralistic Universe,</i> observed that “and” is the word that links everything to everything; it escapes closure; it deifies our efforts to forge a totality. “The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes.”
<p>
In the moving and completely marvelous “Big Tree Room,” perhaps the central poem in the book, the sense of continuity and rupture is rendered in a series of deceptively transparent meditations on death and re-birth. Their complexity is totally earned:
<p>
It is hard to keep remaining whole<br>
as for the leviathan to stay<br>
surfaced is hard.<br>
<p>
It is hard, and therefore, a task to keep remaining.
<p>
We have not been born<br>
in a while
<p>
Though wrenched from context, lines like these are nevertheless delicious with paradox, defying easy parsing. They invite us to face the size of loss, all the while maintaining a faith in language to equip loss with a meaning – to be born, after a while, after the task of grieving. Or is it under the sign of grieving?
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<i>An Ethic</i> consists of two parts, the first of which is given over to elegy, while the second looks beyond to the world of ongoing, present-live connections. The hinge joining these two is the knowledge that the dead do not sever us from them the present, but bring us more closely to it. In both sections the questions driving the poems’ urgent predicament is the need to recognize both worlds: the dead and the living. This work of seeing is arduous because it also demands coming to account with loss without recourse to easy forms of consolation. This is what it means to create an ethic.
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Davis prefaces her collection with a quote from Oppen’s legendary <i>Daybooks</i>: “An ethic an ethic: ethos …/what other words can be found? Awe perhaps.” But Davis excludes what follows, for Oppen goes on to conclude that awe “is not ethical.” What to make of this? For one thing, it seems to me that Oppen here is insisting on the clearest possible definition of his terms, a process of continual refinement evidenced in both his poems and his journals and letters. To confuse awe, an essentially theological category of affect, with ethics, which must, among other things, adjudicate the precise differences and relations between things, would be to submit to a kind of heresy or distortion. Yet there’s a suggestion in Oppen that perhaps awe is what produces ethics, that it’s an enabling condition. For awe is also a measurement: it marks the distance as well as the nearness between the perceiving subject and the other. It is as much a witnessing of that distance as it is the experience of undergoing the humility it imposes.
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The greatest philosopher of ethics in the 20th Century, Emmanuel Levinas, asserts that ethical relations do not derive from first principles based on preserving the rational pursuit of self-interest. It is far more radical than that, he claims, based rather on proximity and the demands the other’s immediate presence places on me before any codification of law or custom. Ethics, then, is a form of hospitality: a welcoming of the stranger as guest. The poem as an ethic is the primary mode of acknowledging what Levinas calls the “there is” (<i>il y a</i> ), that which, even after the witnessing “I” has been subtracted, remains, demanding attention.
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In his essay on Levinas, “Should Poetry be Ethical or Otherwise?,” Gerald Bruns makes a “distinction between language as kerygma and language as contact, where the one predicates something of something (this as that) while the other is an event of sensibility or proximity in which the visible is no longer an object of consciousness … but is an impingement or obsession.” The poems in An Ethic move back and forth between these two nodes, shuttling from proclamation to touch as if to say the one is the other, only by touch may I proclaim you.
<p>
The book begins and ends with poems entitled “An Ethic.” Both are magnificent. The first begins:
<p>
There is no this or that world.<br>
<p>
One is not more or less<br>
admitted. Into the entirety<br>
<p>
One is invited <br>
and to the entirety <br>
one comes.
<p>
The line breaks are the syntax, as someone said of Milton. Each pause, each hovering, with an air of omen or premonition, freighted with enormous silence, marks the care by which the poem proceeds and defines the very insistence of each instant that must answer to the call of an ethic. The final poem closes with a quote from Thoreau: “What do you see?//One/world at a/time.” This may be the only real ethic – to see this world as it is. Here and now.
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Throughout <i>An Ethic</i>, Davis maintains a deep humility before the visible, the tangible, its wreck and its promise. This humility is the sign of an extraordinary openness and vulnerability, a willingness to be porous to the currents of the moment, the heart, the earth. This is tricky business, because unlike Oppen, who was a hard-headed materialist, Davis, finally, carries an ecstatic, Emersonian outlook. She wants to be overwhelmed, to be carried away in the flood. For the spiritual landscape these poems move in is deeply sensuous. Their apparent modesty is deceptive and should not be mistaken for a lack of scope. “Flock” exemplifies this. It smallness does not prevent it from being called masterful.
<p>
But she was glad to be looking<br>
<p>
and them not<br>
always to arrive<br>
<p>
was like<br>
<p>
love is <br>
love of <br>
<p>
a future<br>
<p>
Here all the promise of living is contained in awkward grammar (“them/not always”) and a spilling of line breaks; the delay of each one’s arrival is the lived moment of the poem – messianic, that is, always on the way, never quite arriving, an acknowledgement that the future is always the horizon we speed toward even as we know it full well to be bounded by finitude. The future is always about possibility, including the possibility of the loss of possibility. This is one reason we have poetry.
<p>
Davis’ previous work, <i>Forth a Raven</i>, was infused with a fierce spiritual longing that threatened at times to overwhelm its slender architecture. What she has taken from Oppen is a stringency; a steely quality to temper the ardor. The yearning for connection that marks her earlier work has become more palpable due to loss and grief. These poems are utterly urgent and often harrowing in their immediacy, in the demands they make on us to listen, to become present. Davis does not title her book “Ethics,” but <i>An Ethic</i>: a particular, deeply individual set of relations and of seeing grounded in the singular opening up to the approach of the Other, even when, or especially when, the Other is a ghost. What an ethic requires is a response, a turning toward the other, not out of rational first principles, but because a call has been issued and it cannot be ignored. Ethics then is always an event of the impossible – a wholly new response generated to the unforeseen. This is the poem. This is the second life it gives us.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-62126707891655837912019-04-17T04:49:00.000-07:002019-04-17T04:49:11.253-07:00TEN -- Jennifer Firestone<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Jennifer Firestone’s <i>Ten</i> (BlazeVox, 2019) is simply and elegantly conceived as a series of interconnected poems, adhering to the procedural rule of ten lines each. Firestone’s playful, at times capricious sense of lyric is on beautiful display here as the logic of the lines shifts in unexpected and delightful ways, making intricate connections between disparate registers and in the process unfolding the complex seams and ligatures which link the outer world to the inner. Within the restraints of the ten-line procedure these poems amaze with their diverse range of formal turns and the experiences they map out. With their sometimes flat, affectless end-stopped lines that verge on or subvert or actually are aphorisms, these poems produce an uncanny force field of unexpected pathos.
<p>
“It becomes dark, fear of what a day has held. <br>
Some balcony plants live. Yet old ones <br>
have more character. They’re austere and stable. <br>
Portioned nature aware of its limitation. <br>
Is that truthful? Or what one has just is. <br>
Can even be nice. Why need to compare. <br>
Let me stay with sight. <br>
The bird dove into a pine. My mind <br>
says, nest. She vanishes <br>
for so long.”<br>
<p>
Firestone has a consistent gift for ending these poems on a note of quiet astonishment or surprise. This is chamber music, but it often carries a symphonic surge. Each poem proceeds by little leaps of cognition – assembling an array of sensible data on the fly – that feels natural and right but are also acutely rendered observations of the lived world. “She vanishes/for so long.” Here the enjambment accomplishes the work of re-cognition, attesting to the fact that nothing finally can speak for itself – everything we see must be spoken for.
<p>
<a href="http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/new-releases/ten-by-jennifer-firestone-518/">You can read more about and order TEN here</a>.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-62302977591053793272019-02-06T13:00:00.000-08:002019-03-11T23:33:03.890-07:00Remembering Kathleen Fraser, 1935-2019<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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NOTE: I was invited by Stephen Motika of Nightboat Books to contribute this brief tribute to a lovely festschrift his press put out in 2017.
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Dear Kathleen,
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If I were given only one word to describe Kathleen Fraser, it would be “ebullient.” Kathleen, my dear, you are a natural dazzler – not in the egomaniacal blowhard sense of so many major writers, who can’t rest till they’ve sucked all the O2 out of the room. No, your ebullience is just that – an actual and very welcoming overflowing, a kind of ecstatic invitation to share in a continual conversation, one constantly renewed by some fresh perception, some vivid sense of surprise. This is not to say that you aren’t also a rascally Scottish imp. One never knows what you’ll say next. So it is with your poetry. It radiates from a deep concern with the most audacious inquiry. Radical lyric – a sense of experiment as investigation – has always marked your work with its boldly magnanimous spirit.
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My first encounter with you, Kathleen, was in 1975, in your poetry workshop at SF State. That didn’t work out so well. First there was the fact that I was an utterly lousy poet, more enamored of Keats than O’Hara (whom I’d never even heard of that point). And second. Well, second, your kindness could not recall me from whatever drug-induced redoubt I’d withdrawn to. We did not meet again till some twenty years later, when, as chance would have it, we both found ourselves in Boulder, Colorado, in the backyard of Jane Dalrymple-Hollo and Anselm Hollo, standing on line for Naropa’s catered chow. I remembered you instantly, of course – how could one not? From that moment on, a delightful and immensely gratifying friendship was struck up. But it was more than that, of course. Kathleen, you mentored me. Not just by graciously giving me pointed advice on my work and then blurbing my first real book, Burn, or generously securing an invitation for me to read with Jeanne Heuving at Canessa Park through the good offices of Avery Burns, but in so many other ways, too.
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Case in point. About ten years ago I succumbed to the delusion that I was falling in love with a poet of our mutual acquaintance. I was married at the time and so I turned to you, Kathleen, for sage advice, advice, naturally, that was spot on and that I utterly failed to heed. More importantly – in a tradition that has been largely lost, I think – you have, perhaps without even knowing it, counseled me on how to live.
<p>
I think some of this comes through in our exchange of letters, collected and edited by Jennifer Firestone and Dana Teen Lomax in their wonderful "Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community." I wince a bit now whenever I re-read them. My contributions to the conversation are shot through with grad school wonkiness, while yours overflow with lessons in how to see. Your letters are refulgent with the most enticing details of lived experience – the color of light on a brick wall, or how a painting struck you. I felt humbled by this exchange. It taught me a lot – which frankly I’m still absorbing. But the generosity of your gesture I take to be typical of you: the invitation to enter into a conversation. The dismissal of hierarchy. The sense of acknowledgement in a shared life in poetry and the commitments it entails, the demands it makes, the rewards it gives.
<p>
How adequately to express my gratitude to you, Kathleen, for all the largesse you’ve so casually strewn my way? I’ve written about your work several times, trying to articulate just what it means to me and its impact on the larger cultural landscape. So I’ll close these remarks with links to our collaboration and an excerpt from my piece, “White Blink,” written for Jacket 25 (2004) as a response of your extraordinary poem, “WING” (first written, as I recall for Linda Russo's journal, "Verdure").
<p>
<a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/31/lett-prit-fras.html">LETTERS TO POETS: FRASER AND PRITCHETT</a>
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<a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/25/kf-wing.html">ON KATHLEEN FRASER'S "WING"</a>Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-56431916180087433002018-11-04T17:54:00.002-08:002018-12-01T19:43:12.671-08:00Interstellar Revisited<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Rev 11.29.18
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(N.B. This film came out in the fall of 2014 so I offer these belated and decidedly mixed observations for what they are worth. That semester I was teaching my freshman seminar in SF to a very brainy and willing bunch of students at Harvard. Thanks to the university’s generosity I was able to take us on a field trip to see the film at the Boston Commons theater. This entailed a 20-minute ride on the T or Boston subway from Harvard Square to Park Street. One concerned student asked if it was safe, which prompted some gentle ridicule. It’s not a wormhole, dude. I’ve seen “Interstellar” three times now in its considerable entirety. It improves on each viewing, even as the things that first bugged me persist. Especially the Matt Damon bits. And please filmmakers dealing with dire emotional predicaments, could you refrain from using Dylan Thomas as shorthand for your character’s inner states? I’m looking at you, Soderbergh’s “Solaris.” But then, as he notes with disdain in “Contagion,” “blogging is not writing. It's graffiti with punctuation”).
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INTERSTELLAR might just as easily been named “The Melancholy of Extinction.” For every scene is haunted, whether by a diegetic ghost, in the figure of Matthew McConaughey’s intrepid astronaut, Cooper, or by the ghostly prospect of a future earth depopulated of humans.
<p>
Like Nolan’s baffling and preposterous Inception, which my students who never read Freud loved, this film about redeeming lost love is also about making films – in particular, about creating scenes of visionary intensity that only films can give us. Christopher Nolan is a big believer in the Gesammtkunstwerk, or Total Work of Art, an all-enveloping spectacle that transcends its vulgar circus underpinnings to deliver the viewer to an experience of the cinematic sublime. The problem is that his ambition is not always equal to his skill.
<p>
Film scholar Steve Dillon calls this self-reflective turn of films “the Solaris effect,” (which he analyzes at valuable length in his book of the same name). Dillon argues, rightly I think, that since Godard, films have and must signal their mediumicity, their status as films. He examines the work of Spielberg, Soderbergh, and others, using Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” (“one of the most profound cinematic dreams ever conceived”) as a kind of baseline. As he notes, “Classical Hollywood cinema is typically characterized by “invisibility” and “transparency,”
by a continual refusal to acknowledge that the film is actually a film.”
<p>
Self-reflexive filmmakers like Nolan and Soderbergh, taking their cue from Resnais and Roeg, foreground the element of time with elaborate editing schemes so that past and present are intermingled and confused. “The Limey,” which Soderbergh jokingly but accurately called a blend of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” and “Get Carter” offers a particularly striking example of this method. In other words, contra Bazin, every moment of a film is a special effect, whether it uses a long, unbroken take with a stationary camera or the seamless eyeline matching of continuity editing.
<p>
Just as “Inception” ostensibly probed the microcosmic level of the unconscious, in which memories are nested like so many Russian dolls, (it’s memories all the way own, dearie) in search of some abiding emotional center, so “Interstellar” explores the macrocosmic labyrinth of the black hole. Ever since these hyperobjects, as my old prof Tim Morton dubs them, were discovered, black holes have exercised a fearsome grip on the imagination. They mark the limits of presence itself, since beyond the event horizon all matter ceases to exist. Their size, their power, their mystery, place them not so much on an astronomical scale, as on a quasi-theological one. A black hole is nearer to Meister Eckhart’s Godhead than anything in the measurable universe.
<p>
With “Interstellar,” Nolan has remade “Inception,” or revisited the same obsessions. Both films stage the rescue of an impossible lost love (whether wife or daughter); both are dependent for their resolution on a dazzling swirl of montage, a conjoining of unreachable, irreconcilable ends in the name of love, which exceeds its mortal boundaries to achieve a Dantean scale, a truly cosmic force. As Anne Hathaway’s passionate Dr. Brand puts it, “love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.” Hathaway delivers her lines with great conviction and a rhetorical flourish that lends the scene a pseudo-scientific proof. Are we capable, in fact, of perceiving love as transcendent? Or is it just wishful thinking?
<p>
It’s a wonderful movie moment; it sweeps us up in her intensity. But it raises the eyebrows of every skeptic in the audience. What is love, one might say, but an ideology grafted onto a mammalian impulse? And how can it transcend space and time except through the perishable artifacts of art and memory? Nothing lasts. That might be the Nietzschean motto of art, could it speak for itself.
<p>
Before he heads out for the Great Unknown, Coop remarks that “Once you're a parent, you're the ghost of your children's future.” It’s an improbably grim, self-aware and melancholy observation to make, but no less true for that. This moment gains incredible poignancy once he’s gone through the wormhole to a distant a galaxy and falls afoul of relativity on Miller’s planet, where due to time dilation minutes equal years. The three astronauts (only two survive) get back to their orbiting ship to find that Donne’s exquisite line about “gold to airy thinness beat” might be a only a metaphor after all. Coop accesses his stored messages: all 23 years worth. Every single one of them is from his son (a minor, underdeveloped character). At the very last, a grown Murph comes on. She radiates a fierce recrimination that is an integral sign of her love for her father and her rage at his absence and betrayal. Coop’s emotional response is devastating. And this really is the heart of the film. The father’s grief and remorse visibly signifying the ineluctable alienation that time subducts us all into.
<p>
And yet, it all feels a bit of a cheat. Nolan creates the entire film as a way to take the hero (and us) into the impossible heart of the black hole. The ultimate unfilmmable event: like depicting infinity or the land of the dead. The whole point of the film is to demonstrate its own enormous cinematic ambition, to bring us into the tessellated layers of a montage-vertigo, just as “Inception” did. It’s all about the medium; about what film can accomplish; about representing the unrepresentable.
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On the other hand, “Interstellar” is a meditation on how film can defeat time to achieve the triumph or reconciliation of love. Montage conquers time itself by splicing together disparate moments into coherent units of narrative. It’s an allegory about what art can do, about why we have art at all. That it’s awkward at points and sentimental; sometimes poorly plotted (the sequence with Matt Damon as the stranded astronaut could have been cut with no loss to story and a considerable gain in thematic unity) does little to detract from the force of its emotional thrust.
<p>
“Interstellar” is masterful, rather than a masterpiece. But its scenes of grandeur are so palpably rendered that we are carried along by their feckless surge. Part of Nolan’s aim, of course, is to out-Kubrick Kubrick: a hopeless task, but he gives it a good try. The movie’s most sublime scenes only call to mind “2001;” they don’t come close to surpassing it. Yet the same kind of imaginative daring is evident and that is thrilling in an era when clodhopper films like “Avatar” bludgeon us with “message.” The most intelligent SF has gone small – it’s all chamber drama: “Ex Machina,” “Her,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and “Arrival,” (which mixes cosmic awe with some truly uncanny aliens into its bittersweet time-loop redemption).
<p>
Nolan’s desire to reaffirm humanism, defined here by the persistence of human presence in an indifferent universe, is heroic, if naïve. His concept of mortality and love carry an earnest weight of melancholy. Yet the film wants to have its cake and eat it, too. In Nolan’s black hole mysticism, loss never really need be confronted because time always loops back around and our loved ones are never really lost. The sequence in which Coop enters the black hole tesseract to find himself in a bewildering Borgesian library of fractal infinity is beautiful, yet absurd. The scene is gorgeous but strains credulity. “I was your ghost,” Cooper tells Murph later. Nothing is ever really gone. If only.
<p>
Cross-cutting across the effects of time dilation Nolan conjures an impossible continuity between memory and desire, then and now, the living and the dead. This is the real meaning of the title, “Interstellar,” which seems to have baffled Vivian Sobchack’s otherwise penetrating essay in Film Comment. To be “interstellar” is to submit to time dilation. This may be the only film that’s ever dealt with, however mawkishly and unevenly, the ways in which Einstein undoes Proust. Immensity destroys intimacy (a theme tackled with great ingenuity and yes, humanistic affirmation, in Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War”). Nolan probes the borders of these stakes, only to shy away from such an inhuman revelation. The film’s touching resolution is movingly affirmative. Coop bids farewell to an elderly Murph, then flies off to rejoin Brand. Love will keep us together. Ansible me, maybe.
<p>
The film took criticism from some quarters when it was released for what was perceived as climate change fatalism. Why make a film advocating the abandonment of the Earth in favor of some jazzy f/x? But these critics missed the point. What “Interstellar” offers is a rich, romantic vision of our longing for continuity and connection. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, it dares to uphold the idea that the flesh and the bonds which link us surpass the indifferent forces of the larger world we live in. If it fails, it’s because it can’t quite imagine how real loss compels us to build a future after trauma. It never shows us the enormous price paid for the Great Leap Forward. Instead, it posits that hoariest of Hollywood tropes: the happy reunion. The earth may shrivel into a dried out husk and brave men and women launch into the abyss on a quixotic quest to save it, but only by the magic of editing, not logic, do they overcome the odds in the end.
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Nolan is a visually audacious filmmaker gifted with an overabundance of talent. He’s a classic case: someone whose vocabulary is in search of a sentiment. Even “Dunkirk” demonstrates this – a fabulous armature of equipment for expression but absolutely nothing to say beyond cliche – and Sobchack brilliantly gets to the heart of Nolan’s fixation with time, evident since his debut in “Memento,” when she writes that:
<p>
“Fully aware that cinema is, itself, a time machine, he has expanded—and compounded—the relativity of space-time and its effects by layering them in the multiple dimensions not only of Interstellar’s narrative but also of the film’s overall structure and its immersive mise en scène. Simultaneously, all three play out the tension between “intimate” and “exterior” space-time and, in the film’s moving final third, resolve—by unifying—their different immensities and seemingly incompatible values.”
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And yet – relativity. Human value, human love, the entire scale of human social structure. None of it can survive relativistic effects. Another way of stating this, I suppose, is to simply say, that if you introduce relativity into your story, there can be no happy endings. One can only ponder how Kip Thorne’s input was considered then discarded in this regard. But while science has its own iron laws, a story must abide by a different set of formulae. “Interstellar” provides us with the essence of SF: it imparts a genuine sense of wonder. The images the film gives us are transfixing. They are not the story, but they do a kind of work that the story can’t.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-48129792457376577792018-10-28T03:53:00.000-07:002019-03-12T02:22:23.520-07:00THE EXPANSE, or “Remember the Cant” (as in the nefariously destroyed ice hauler space ship, The Canterbury)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Finally catching up with the SyFy channel’s THE EXPANSE, which first aired in 2015, and is now available on Amazon Prime. I’m currently consuming about two a day, trying to pace myself – about halfway through at S2:E4. It’s easily the best serial SF drama since <a href="https://writingthemessianic.blogspot.com/2011/06/on-battelstar-galactica.html">"Battlestar Galactica".</a>
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Unlike BSG, though, it’s committed to a hard SF realism. No FTL or jump drives. No vagaries about galactic coordinates. It all takes place in-system, on an interplanetary scale (distances which we still cannot begin to comprehend) between the Inner Planets and the Outer. And aside from a realistic storyline about space-faring Mormons, there’s no religious mumbo-jumbo, no poorly conceived red herrings about polytheism.
<p>
(I am reminded, however, of one of the Appendices to DUNE, where Frank Herbert, writing a future history, meditates on how actual interstellar travel would disrupt and remake religious belief. “The first space experiences, poorly communicated, and subject to extreme distortion, were a wild inducement to mystical speculation.”) For that matter Norman Mailer gets down to it in Of a Fire on the Moon. “It was conceivable that man was no longer ready to share the dread of the Lord.” Nevertheless, it’s good to recall that what made BSG great was the way it tackled terrorism, intolerance, class, genocide, and you know, the nature of humanity and all that shit.
<p>
"The Expanse" obviously borrows a great deal from Alfred Bester’s groundbreaking 1957 novel, "The Stars My Destination," which as all SF readers know, pointed the way for the New Wave and cyberpunk. Bester imagined a future world ruled by transnational and transplanetary corporations and indeed, the bad guys in The Expanse are a corporation called Protogen, a deliberate echo of the villainous power in Destination, the Presteign Corp. The elite badasses of the Martian Marines in the show are straight out of Bester’s Martian commandoes. Earth vs. Mars, vs. the Belt and the Outer Planets, ditto. There are other allusions and debts as well, ranging from PKD’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (the basis of both Total Recall movies, with their savage depictions of deep space miners as exploited proles), Heinlein’s "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (Luna to Terra: fuck off) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s utopian Mars trilogy. There are even a few nods to Alastair Reynolds (for Fred Johnson, “Butcher of Anderson Station,” read Nevil Clavain, “Butcher of Tharsis” -- that’s on Mars, for you landlubbers).
<p>
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<p>
"The Expanse" features any number of first-rate performers, including the wiry, jangly Thomas Jane as a somewhat shopworn noirish cop and the brash, sensual Dominique Tipper as a conflicted Belter named Naomi Nagata. Cas Anvar, who plays Alex Kamal, is terrific as well: a true-born Martian of Middle Eastern descent who talks with a Southern drawl and is not only an ace gunship pilot but knows how to cook too. But it’s Shohreh Aghdashloo, the distinguished Iranian-American actress, who steals the show. There's more than a touch of Orientalism to her costuming. But she's a player whom the other players obviously respect and fear. And she gets shit done. In the role of Chrisjen Avasarala, an ambiguous Realpoiltik U.N. deputy under-secretary, she turns in the most layered and compelling performance of the series, as well as the sexiest. Her every appearance announces itself with a flourish of silent trumpets. She is stateliness itself, reader. Regal, imperious yet human and compassionate. Ruthless and cunning and almost telepathically brilliant in reading motive and trying to stop an interplanetary war. She out-Galadriels Galadriel and I could listen to her read the phone book all night, if they still made them.
<p>
"The Expanse" starts out trodding what feels like familiar ground, esp. in its Outer Belt settings. They owe a good deal to Paul Verhoven's set design for Mars in "Total Recall." But they are to a purpose: investing the viewer with care for each new character as they are introrduced as well as mapping the complex and treacherous political terrain of a 23rd Century that is a far cry from the utopian post-scarcity scenarios of <a href="https://writingthemessianic.blogspot.com/2013/05/against-prime-directive-as-such.html">"Star Trek"</a> or Iain Banks' Culture novels. Gradually the political intrigue, noirish elements, and thrilling space battles are very quickly turned to fresh account. And as the mystery begins to unravel, we catch alluring glimpses of a very cool and very disturbing Novum: the alien or extra-solar MacGuffin called the protomolecule.
<p>
Before he died, Stephen Hawking, whom the world press tends to treat as some kind of cosmic savant, delivered a set of rather standard alarms about possible future hazards for our species that were treated as oracular pronouncements but are commonplaces for SF readers. One of them had to do with the necessity for humanity to extend itself beyond one planet, to colonize other planets and whole systems if it is to survive. But The Expanse, despite individual acts of heroism, shows just how vain and futile such a notion is. Putting Whitey, or anyone else for that matter, on Mars – on Ceres, on Titan, on Europa, on Proxima Centauri -- merely replicates the forces of enslavement and privilege that already dominate human history here on this planet. What good is reaching for the stars if all we do is spread our toxic brew of cruelty and dispossession across the incalculable reaches of deep space? Since SF has such strong roots in Utopian ideology, as Jameson has shown, one hopes that the series finale might offer some kind of transcendent outcome. Season 4 will be here soon. Stay tuned!
<p>
Post-script/spoiler alert!: having finally viewed all three seasons I can only reiterate my enthusiasm for "The Expanse." The momentum of the whole first 2 and a half seasons comes to a very satisfying climax in S3: E6, "Immolation." Jules Mao and his evil scientist brought to justice, along with the conniving Errinwright; Avasarala triumphant; and the greater purpose of the protomolecule revealed (or at least strongly hinted at). After that, the series pivots to a much vaster, well, expanse -- a nice nod to "2001" and seemingly galactic in scope. A bit of momentum is lost with a tedious revenge subplot, but no matter.
<p>
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<p>
My pessimism about humanity acting as an interstellar virus is confirmed by James Holden's grim remark played with understated heroics by Steven Strait) that the protomolecule's evolution into a Stargate only invites "another blood stained gold rush." The final episodes give the beleaguered Belters, those gritty working class heroes, their moment in the spotlight. Esp. Cara Gee's slinky, stoic, cynical, but deeply loyal, Drummer, who emerges as one of the standouts in a cast that is remarkable for how many strong female characters it boasts. "Beltalowda!"
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-62498190459359050462017-12-13T06:26:00.000-08:002017-12-13T06:47:15.870-08:00ORPHIC NOISE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />ORPHIC NOISE, my fourth full-length collection of poems, is now out from the inestimable Dos Madres Press, whose husband and wife publishing team, Robert and Elizabeth Murphy, have made a truly beautiful book. <p>
<a href="https://www.dosmadres.com/">ORPHIC NOISE</a> is available exclusively through Dos Madres' website. If you want to support the valiant work of small presses, please order only through them.
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<p>
<i>The first lines of Patrick Pritchett’s brilliant and beautiful new book suggest this world as his Eurydice, lost but not lost, “its noise a form of shelter.” A world to be recovered not only in the language translated from that noise, but allied in memory with contemporaries both living and dead. His poems and homages meditating on love, family and craft create and define “the hope of being lit.” They have empowered this poet to a deep, granular, attentive listening in which “every streetlight’s a comma longing to complete the supernatural grammar of the sentence.” – </i>Michael Heller
<p>
<i>Orphic is Greek for “torn apart.” As might be a husband and a wife, a mother and a son, a body and a soul, and much, much else in this grieving and beautiful book. As readers, we are not on the road to Sunderland, ‘where everything is empty,’ we’re already there, sundered ourselves by the losses we hear of, with only the poet’s ‘spell of holding’ to keep us from the absolute dark. From the distance, here, between belonging and the void, an extraordinary music rises. This is such noise as Whitman knew, this is the noise that Patrick Pritchett brings, doing so with intimate dignity and stricken wonder.</i> <br>Joseph Donahue
<p>
The Angel of the Real<br>
i.m. Mark Strand<br>
<p>
The one we all finally see, came down prosaically.<br>
Here it is, he said. And opened a book filled<br>
with the sayings of the afterlife<br>
quaint protocols for arranging the final predicament.<br>
<p>
To think, for instance, as a cloud thinks<br>
moving swiftly over green water<br>
or tilting at the bark of an oak scarped<br>
above a field, knotted with chthonic crevices.<br>
<p>
The part that is broken must get said over again.<br>
An elastic song to the angel that<br>
gestures at ripeness but signifies decay.<br>
The lens of my poem darkens with cataracts.<br>
<p>
You told us about absence, but now you are not here.<br>
Blank as an angel’s breviary<br>
your words fade into prismatic noise.<br>
Their secret speech splicing silence to itself.<br>
<p>
</div>
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-18911906116925325252016-12-25T09:00:00.000-08:002016-12-30T14:19:53.181-08:00The State of Poetry Lists in 2016, with Special Reference to Small Presses<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br /></div>
This is not a “best of” list since the very idea of ranking books fetishizes the new and builds obnoxious hierarchies; it also reinforces spurious notions of critical omniscience. Most year-end Best Of lists ignore the vibrant word of small press poetry publishing. They’re less about critical acumen than the dominant market forces of Big Publishing and the ways in which the circulation of the eternal same flourishes thanks to the alliance between publishers and the press.
<p>
It depresses me when I read a review of the same middlebrow lackluster poetry book (Sharon Olds, anyone? Merwin? Rita Dove? ) over and over and over in The Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NYRB, LRB, etc., when there's no mention of two of our greatest poets: Peter Gizzi and Michael Palmer, each of whom brought out works of astonishing beauty this year. This is why a review publication like Rain Taxi is invaluable for its devoted attention to the small press scene, where so much vital literature is being published. The public relations machine of Big Pub exists to produce a monotonous conformity of taste and a banal chorus of critical yea-sayers who seem incapable of or unwilling to consider books not published by the major houses.
<p>
So “best” poetry is perhaps a meaningless category, finally, when so many reviewers, from David Orr to Dan Chaisson, seem to write in an echo chamber. The fact is, as Steph Burt noted a few years back, there’s too much poetry appearing in any given year for any critic to take in and far too little of it that comes my way. I wish, for instance, I’d read Daniel Borzutsky or Monica Youn, or David Lau, or Ocean Vuoung, or Don Mee Choi – but my time and money are limited. I can’t pretend to have been aware of more than a very small percentage of the work circulating through this year’s poetry sphere. This list simply represents books (many of them, I confess, sent to me by the authors themselves) which I found brilliant; works that challenged the boundaries of what poetry can be. And nearly all of them were published in the invisible world of the small press.
<p>
Probably the most diverse and intriguing list I've so seen far appeared in <a href="http://entropymag.org/best-of-2016-best-poetry-books-collections/">Entropy Mag.</a> It's populated with poets whose work I admire and a great many younger ones I'd like to check out. Almost all of them were published by small presses so at least someone out there is paying attention.
<p>
N.B. Of the 21 published titles here, only two appeared from major houses -- FSG and Norton -- (unless you count New Directions, which makes three). Three of the publishers have brought out books of my own: Pressed Wafer, Spuyten Duyvil, and Talisman, though that didn’t influence my choice in any way.
<p>
Lists, as Don DeLillo once remarked, are signs of "cultural hysteria." He is not wrong. Nevertheless, they're rather fun to write.
<p>
The Ratio of Reason to Magic | Norman Finkelstein | Dos Madres Press <br>
Archeophonics | Peter Gizzi | Wesleyan UP<br>
Of Beings Alone (complete) | Lissa Wolsak | Tinfish<br>
Day for Night | Richard Deming | Shearsman<br>
Falling Awake | Alice Oswald | Norton<br>
Poesis | Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Textile Series<br>
Lay Ghost | Nathaniel Mackey | Black Ocean<br>
The Laughter of the Sphinx | Michael Palmer | New Directions<br>
Poems Hidden in Plain Sight | Hank Lazer | PURH (France)<br>
Exile’s Recital | Andrew Mossin | Spuyten Duyvil<br>
Spool | Matthew Cooperman | Parlor Press<br>
The Sampo | Peter O’Leary | The Culture Society<br>
Ask Anyone | Ruth Lepson | Pressed Wafer<br>
Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series | Susan M. Schultz | Talisman House<br>
I Rode with the Cossacks | Bill Corbett | Granary Books<br>
Fugue Meadow | Keith Jones | Ricochet<br>
Self-Portrait as Joseph Cornell | Ken Taylor | Pressed Wafer<br>
Dianoia | Michael Heller | Nightboat Books<br>
Sowing the Wind | Ed Foster | Marsh Hawk Press<br>
House of Lords and Commons | Ishion Hutchinson | FSG<br>
Gap Gardening | Rosmarie Waldrop | New Directions<br>
You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior | Carolina Ebeid | Noemi<br>
Ravenna Diagram | Henry Gould | Lulu Press<br>
Song of the Systole | Matthew Gagnon (ms.)<br>
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-2901410973400085732016-07-14T13:18:00.000-07:002016-12-30T14:18:51.603-08:00“Until We Long for What We Have”: William Corbett’s Re-Enchantment of the Ordinary<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br /></div>
N.B. This essay first appeared in <i>Let The Bucket Down</i>, Issue No. 2, 2014. My thanks to editor Joe Torra for inviting me to write on Corbett's work.
<p>
William Corbett opens his marvelous book about the painter Albert York on an appealingly modest note: “York’s paintings are so clear, so able to speak for themselves, that writing about them can feel superfluous, if not rude.” But of course nothing can ever fully speak for itself. Especially the obvious. The visual is undergone first as experience, second as interpretation. And so it is with poems, especially those we love and come back to over and over.
<p>
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<p>
For several decades now, Corbett has been one of our leading men of letters – the phrase itself has been rendered almost extinct in this age of ubiquitous bloggery and relentless peer-review – but I use it here to indicate a breadth of range and a fineness of attention that once upon a time was the norm, rather than the exception. As poet, essayist, memoirist, art critic, literary historian, publisher and tireless promoter of other writer’s work, Corbett is – yet ought not to be – <i>sui generis</i>. But even if the present time were more thickly populated by writers of comparable range, he would still be a force to be reckoned with, in a category of his own.
<p>
Yet you would never know it. He is all but ignored by the mainstream publishing industry and to his great credit he has never courted that kind of attention. Instead he has carved out his own dominion, guided only by his peerless discernment and an unstinting devotion to the art. (Here’s my disclosure: my chapbook, <i>Antiphonal</i>, was published in 2008 by Corbett’s Pressed Wafer. A year later, he officiated at my wedding. The chapbook is still available. The marriage, alas, is not).
<p>
Corbett’s affinities are bracing and wide: Schuyler and O’Hara; Oppen and Niedecker and Bunting; Williams, Creeley, and Heaney, all celebrants of the everyday, of lived experience, of the moment as it flickers and disappears before our startled and bemused gaze. In this sense, all poetry is elegy, because it testifies to the disappearance of a moment just after it’s appeared. Corbett’s other major vectors are painters: Philip Guston and York, to name just two. His eye is always alive to the possibilities of voice and inflection, line and form, color and tone, to “the music of what happens,” in Heaney’s celebrated phrase. What happens in a Corbett poem is the experience of the everyday rescued from penury – re-enchanted. Because “the everyday,” as the definitive category of common experience, is precisely that site where we feel at once most at home and most alienated.
<p>
This is, of course, the very definition of modernity, as documented by writers from Baudelaire to Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Frank O’Hara. Its focus is not the macro but the micro; the thousands of tiny, barely decipherable (if at all noticed) impingements on consciousness made by the 24-hour carnival that is life in the here-then-gone now. Benjamin, who perhaps more than anyone else, was the chief oracle of this momentous shift in human awareness, put it this way, when describing his massive and unfinished Arcades Project: “To detect the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, individual moment.” One word for what happens when the crystal shines brighter than “the total event” is poetry.
<p>
The everyday is what we take for granted, the unassuming substrate informing inner experience. It is not the medium we move through, though, so much as the medium which apprehends us, shaping and afflicting us in various and unpredictable ways. The moods, whims, obstacles, frustrations, and oddments of experience and memory, the present and the past, braid the nexus of the everyday. It is not, as the term might suggest, merely evanescent, something to undergo and shrug off, but weighted with its own history, its public ties and its secret affiliations. In a very real sense, the everyday is what comprises whatever we mean by identity – among others, and within our private rooms.
<p>
As Terry Eagleton observes, modern theories of aesthetics come in to being at precisely the time when philosophy first recognizes that some form of response to the lived experience of the body becomes necessary. This response encompasses “the whole of our sensate life together – the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of what takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world.” The sensate life forms the core of Corbett’s poetry. What we do. What we see. What we think. How we move.
<p>
Lapidary style is a phrase overly invoked by reviewers. What they usually mean is a kind of bejeweled yet skeletal prose. But Corbett’s poems are ones in which all excess has been pared away. They don’t shine for their own sake nor do they ever call attention to themselves. Such gestures would be flagrant fouls against the fidelity of perception. Instead they provide an irresistible and lucent rhythm: one you fall into and follow along. His best poems possess the rarest of gifts: a deceptively diaristic picture of the seemingly natural flow of thoughts as they lead from one perception to another. In this, Corbett follows Charles Olson’s urgent admonition, but in Corbett’s work these perceptions don’t move among a disparate array of history, science and the local, but within the common bounds of a life. Carefully constellated, they give the reader an accomplished form of immediacy that is at once utterly modest and thrilling. Corbett has taken to heart Basil Bunting’s stark injunction: “Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write!”
<p>
“Walking Basil” (not the poet, but a dog presumably named after Bunting) exemplifies this. I quote from part of it:
<p>
It’s not that I<br>
want to be the man<br>
bent to a reading lamp<br>
or the woman with <br>
a phone to her ear<br>
but want that world<br>
of domestic light<br>
and hearth-order<br>
home from work to wine,<br>
cooking smells and talk<br>
of events, ordinary<br>
and renewable daily.<br>
A world always more<br>
intense in passing<br>
colors knit like<br>
a lamplit Vuillard<br>
because we eavesdrop<br>
and are enchanted<br>
until we long<br>
for what we have.<br>
<p>
In this poem, the need to belong to oneself turns outward to the greater need to belong to an intimate order. The “reading lamp” (by which this poem was, metaphorically, composed) can’t take the place of the “domestic light,” the site where the gaze is directed from the page to the beloved. In this way, the ordinary transcends its own confines, becoming re-enchanted, that is, remembered, if remembering can be thought of as a kind of eavesdropping on oneself: the experience of being both outside the self and inside, too.
<p>
Poetry must be bicameral, or not at all. The ordinary, for Corbett, is where we live our lives at their most prosaic and intense, amid “cooking smells and talk/of events.” This poem, one of Corbett’s most powerful, recognizes that the power of enchantment is not so much otherworldly, as rooted in the texture of the everyday. To long for what we already have may be the most complete enchantment there is.
<p>
John Ashbery famously described the subject of his poems as meditations on the “experience of experience.” The differences between the two poets are large and yet an apt description of Corbett’s work might claim it as “the process of experience.” The distinction, and it’s a major one, is that while Ashbery absorbs and recasts experience into a circumambient hall of mirrors, simultaneously opaque and transparent, his poems always seem to fall back into themselves; however much recognizable territory one of them takes in, it is, finally, centripetal.
<p>
In a Corbett poem, the impulse to connect thrusts outward from the interior to the social. Not that his poems are somehow bereft of interiority. On the contrary, an undertone of contemplative melancholy runs through his work, early and late. These are just a few examples, grabbed more or less at random from his <i>New & Selected Poems</i>:
<p>
Already fall’s harsher<br>
light cuts blown<br>
leaf shadows into<br>
sharper patterns <br>
<p>
from “September Song”<br>
<p>
Unceasing crickets<br>
hold my ear this<br>
second with their<br>
rachet, rachet.<br>
Will the field <br>
fill again with<br>
grackles who hunt<br>
and eat them? <br>
<p>
from “Melancholy”
<p>
My eyes smart. Huge trucks<br>
shift gears down the avenue,<br>
roar off with loads of rubble.<br>
Sitting here holding my breath<br>
murmur of traffic overtakes my ears. <br>
<p>
“When I Read John Wieners’ Selected Poems”
<p>
The abiding note here is plangent. “September Song” not only nods to Kurt Weill. It belongs to a tradition of English song that stretches back from Edward Thomas and A.E. Housman to Thomas Campion and Edmund Waller. Masters of melody, all.
<p>
Unlike Ashbery, Corbett doesn’t chase down the fallen Romantic idol of a once exalted symbolic order, not even one dismantled by gentle irony. Nature is no longer Baudelaire’s forest of symbols, but teeming with William Carlos Williams’ things. Though often thought of as a New York School poet, Boston chapter, Corbett’s vision is really an Objectivist one. In the words of Louis Zukofsky, he thinks with things as they exist, directing them along a line of melody, especially when those things are the processes of thought: memory and desire, regret and yearning.
<p>
This austere practice yields a powerful and often tender illumination. It is a wholly personal response to the world, grounded in what Zukofsky called sincerity: the refusal of an easy, inert subjectivity in favor of a constellation of words that remain faithful to the poet’s process of perception. There is never any straining in Corbett after metaphysical certainties. He belongs to an American tradition that emphasizes how the work of seeing forms the basis of the poet’s ethical contract with the world around him.
<p>
In this sense, Corbett’s poetics exemplifies what the film critic Manny Farber called “termite art,” work that tunnels through its own boundaries, constantly dissolving them, shucking off any claims to Major Significance, just following its nose through an endless warp and weave of tangled words and images. Pound founded his poetics on Aristotle’s metric for aesthetic genius: “swift perception of relations.” This is the key quality of Corbett’s poetry and while it may appear “natural” and effortless, it is the result of a painstakingly achieved form.
<p>
In 2011’s <i>The Whalen Poem</i>, which is probably Corbett’s most singular achievement, the movement of thought is brought to an acutely bracing pitch and tempo. As a testament of late work, it belongs to the modernist tradition of fragmented anthem and elegy: a kind of latter-day "Briggflatts," a summing up, or what Bunting called “spiritual autobiography,” an account of the inner landscape and its weathers. Whalen proves catalyzing for Corbett. On the back cover of <i>The Whalen Poem</i>, Corbett offers a simple account of his process:
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKXOYmcZYlGvkgdHOj1hOXNkWLv3VuJ0_rIDJjyfksI-iLlvn_2ETKSs_suRWKxNrhCjBQL8JmXVUnZDV9HIriVGRElENj5KTYgHENdz3s9usgfZrkgoYSnHOST3BfNBgCeC4hT1wyjpA/s1600/the+whalen+poem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKXOYmcZYlGvkgdHOj1hOXNkWLv3VuJ0_rIDJjyfksI-iLlvn_2ETKSs_suRWKxNrhCjBQL8JmXVUnZDV9HIriVGRElENj5KTYgHENdz3s9usgfZrkgoYSnHOST3BfNBgCeC4hT1wyjpA/s320/the+whalen+poem.jpg" width="180" height="320" /></a></div>
<p>
"I spent the summer of 2007 reading the galleys of Philip Whalen's <i>Collected Poems</i>. I was in Vermont and had the leisure to read slowly, ten or so pages a day. About halfway through the master's poems I began to write THE WHALEN POEM. I kept at it until just after Halloween. No book I have written, poetry or prose, has given me the deep pleasure I felt in writing THE WHALEN POEM."
<p>
What he takes from Whalen is a more daring form of parataxis, or what Whalen himself described as “a picture or graph of the mind moving, which is a world body being here and now which is a history … and you.”
<p>
It’s typical of Corbett’s generosity in what is his most achieved work that it bears the name of another poet. Poetry, for Corbett, is always a conversation. His readings – and he is one of the finest readers I’ve ever heard – testify to this: they are interwoven with poems from other poets, some well-known, some all but forgotten. <i>The Whalen Poem</i> gains its tremendous power from the variety of experience it takes in, the ways in which things are noticed and notated, and from its paratactical flow.
<p>
In a typical Corbett poem, the ordinary slips into the uncanny and back again with remarkable fluidity. In many ways, <i>The Whalen Poem</i> looks back to Corbett’s first book, <i>Columbus Square Journal</i>¸ from 1976. That book thrived on a combination of celerity via juxtaposition and witty discursiveness. To cite one brief example, from the poem “Valse Not”:
<p>
Transience of all things<br>
mutability odes <br>
ruins something any<br>
thing two step.<br>
In college <br>
I had a teacher<br>
he wrote a book<br>
One Man’s Meter<br>
he sang Keats to <br>
“you’re the cream <br>
in my coffee”<br>
and advised me<br>
“Read a good book<br>
after dinner every night.”<br>
<p>
This is not only an apercu on the canon and its secular Talmudists, but the whole tradition of scholarly transmission, filtered by way of Tin Pan Alley, and pulled off with amazing compression and ease. Like the man said: “Dichtung=condesare.”
<p>
In <i>The Whalen Poem</i>, this process is accelerated, raised to an even sharper pitch.
The book begins by invoking Proust in a joke about modernism and what follows takes its cue from that: a search not just for lost time, but the time of the present, too, with all its flooding impressions, its ephemeral worries and urgencies, and amid these, its contingent and extensive joys. It’s also a damned funny poem:
<p>
Clyde B. Tolson gave birth<br>
To J. Edgar Hoover’s lovechild,<br>
A masculine one, Tom Ridge!<br>
<p>
As a delightful riff on Luca Brasi’s wedding wish to Don Corleone, these three lines comprise a seemingly offhand, yet trenchant, critique of our current political crisis and its inbred corruption.
<p>
Throughout the shifts in tempo are audacious, yet never jarring, moving from playful anecdote (Corbett, Ron Loewinsohn, and Michael Palmer trying to steal Whalen’s absurdly over-priced <i>On Bear’s Head</i> from the Harvard Coop just after Nixon’s first electoral victory) to moving meditations on mortality and the wages of both poetry and living.
<p>
Bly saw in his empty shoes<br>
Two open graves.<br>
Melodramatic? Not when<br>
You’re on the road.<br>
Thomas died there drinking<br>
Shots, eating candy bars.<br>
Auden, too. Vienna hotel<br>
Room after a reading<br>
Broken by the mighty<br>
Pull of poetry<br>
And “the chemical life.”<br>
Is there another world<br>
Truer beyond personality<br>
And real life where<br>
Poetry’s mother lode dwells?<br>
And who can square<br>
I want nothing at all<br>
With I want it all?<br>
<p>
Characteristically, Corbett poses this grave spiritual dilemma in the form of a question, rather than presuming to offer an answer. As Frost knew, the mortal stakes of poetry is both a serious business and pure play. This small (yet enormous) gesture by itself defines a metaphysical compass. To think with things as they exist. To dwell with the problems as they exercise us. Corbett’s sympathy for another poet – Robert Bly, grown somewhat pontifical by the time he wrote <i>The Man in the Black Coat Turns</i> – is generous. In a single phrase – “not when you’re on the road” – he zeroes in on the displacement, the risk, the exile, that poetry so often inflicts on anyone foolish enough to take up its call.
<p>
In <i>The Whalen Poem</i>, such moments and details accumulate haphazardly, jostling up against one another: mortality, baseball stats, actors who’ve played Phillip Marlowe, a long account of an old war story told by his father’s oldest friend, dark musings on America’s wars, the sheer weight and evanescence of the quotidian – “Answered emails/Deleted spam/Paid AT&T bills” – all folded into a singular voice that seems to be now here, now nowhere, now everywhere at once, speaking to us in our own voice, if we could think with such speed and grace, addressing our concerns – about money, about phone calls, about meeting friends for drinks and the wages of a life spent devoted to writing poems.
<p>
All of these disparate things are linked together, not by narrative logic, but by an implicit faith that the trivial and the meaningful reside side by side in the mind; indeed, that sometimes the most trivial details are often the most meaningful – and vice-versa. That finally to make distinctions between the two is false—the ultimate instance of bad faith. Corbett finally is a pure phenomenologist. He takes things as they come, bracketing metaphysical speculation, in order to sing them along a line of melody. The act of perception is the meditation because when guided by melody it gives form to experience. The easy movement from one thing to the next is itself the most exact rendering of consciousness, its anxieties, its confusions, its appetites, its small, quickly vanquished, victories.
<p>
In <i>The Whalen Poem</i>, especially, an unhurried parataxis saves perception from the amnesia of the everyday by making the poem an experience of its own process. Not enshrined as an object of beatific contemplation but re-enchanted through a journey from immediacy to unselfconscious reflection: a sense of distances traveled measured against what’s been lost and what’s been retained. Corbett’s poetry continually moves inside this tension – between the now and the then – and breaks it down, turns it inside out, not to arrive at some impossible origin, but to undergo the process itself.
<p>
By eye, by ear<br>
This field in front of me<br>
Slopes to the lake<br>
Looked at and over thousands of hours.<br>
What do I see?<br>
Goldenrod, white and purple asters –<br>
It’s the last day of August –<br>
Ferns brown and crisped,<br>
Blackberry brambles, chokecherry,<br>
Cattails, various nameless weeds,<br>
Faded Joe Pye weed and aware<br>
All I don’t see<br>
What do I know?<br>
Packing up to go home<br>
Bucket of used-up inflatable kid toys<br>
The field? Useless beauties<br>
And discreet, will give up their secrets,<br>
But not to me.<br>
<p>
In this typically understated but mesmerizing pastoral interlude, the ordinary visible world induces an extraordinary humility. A scene seen many times is re-disclosed through a poetic gaze which finally must admit to knowing nothing but what little it’s able to take in. As the painter Frank Stella once quipped about his own work: “What you see is what you see.” But as with Stella, Corbett’s act of looking is not so much a call to minimalism as a rejection of abstraction and its metaphysical murkiness. “Don’t think: look,” is the title of one of Corbett’s books (the line is borrowed from Wittgenstein). He is not concerned with music for its own sake, or the vatic utterance that discloses the real to itself, ala Rilke. His poetics is rooted in an idea of language as a form of basic civility, an abiding faith in the poem as inherently social form of experience and cognition. <i>The Whalen Poem</i> closes with one of the most remarkable ends of any recent poem I can think of.
<p>
Is it possible<br>
Emptiness has room<br>
For all departure<br>
& arrival?<br>
Here’s a chocolate <br>
Chip cookie bigger<br>
Than your hand<br>
Here’s another<br>
<p>
Corbett dallies here with a question of perilously Rilkean import, though it also calls to mind Whalen’s lifelong practice as a Zen monk, who listened for the wavelength of emptiness. Yet as Corbett smartly comments on James Schuyler’s work: “Rilke believed in angels, that the real world is not here and now but in transcendent realms of the imagination he strove to enter. Poetry was one ladder and painting another. For Schuyler ordinary life is real life.” I’m not convinced this was what Rilke avowed. His angels may have appeared above the fray, but they deeply depended on the mortal and the fleeting, on that which dissolves, for their witnessing function. They are not Dantean at all, not confined to praising the eternal, but enmeshed with the real as much as we are. The current of eternity, Rilke’s word for the inner realm of the imaginal, is nothing unless it’s grounded here, in this world. There is only this life. There is no other.
<p>
Corbett’s response to the question he poses – is it a response? or simply a breathtaking and impeccable leap into the quandary of the transcendent? – is accomplished by an astonishingly deft shift in registers, from the formal language of his vatic query to the off-handed colloquial rejoinder. This shift offers a figure for the affirmative generosity of poetry itself, one that insists that the world is always more than what we think it is, and that the poem extends this promise by continually bringing us back into presence, to being alive, here and now, in a body.
<p>
This is the authority of poetry: to not only acknowledge our appetite for the sweetness and largesse of living, but to feed it. To say: here it is, take it. William Corbett’s work answers the question: what is art for? To praise. To acknowledge the pain of the passage so far. To say, this happened and it is still happening. And that that is all we may know of grace. Singular. Enchanted.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-5071049330621236282016-03-31T18:09:00.000-07:002016-03-31T18:09:16.386-07:00In Memoriam Imre Kertesz<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Perhaps what is most curious about <i>Fateless</i>, Imre Kertesz’s deadpan tour de force, is its insistence on the quotidian details of life in the camps, above all, on the purely subjective relationship to time as duration that the narrator, Georg, must adopt in order to survive. The novel’s minute, almost obsessive, and at times seemingly microscopic, but at any rate, purely local, devotion to the passage of time, to the deployment of one moment after another, in a strictly phenomenological way, not only accounts for the dry, almost austere, yet deeply compelling quality of a narrative determined to treat the worst sort of horrors; it also generates what might best be described as the outline for a rather startling species of clinical, situationist ethics.
<p>
Georg’s almost willfully indifferent, near-sublime, detachment from his surroundings, from his Jewishness, and finally from the notion of fate itself marks him initially as someone in the grip of the most profound alienation even before his arrival at Auschwitz. It is not mere adolescent anomie, however, but something more perturbing, and yet at the same, redemptive, if that is not too theological a term to use for a book so deliberately at pains to remove itself from even the hint of such attributions.
<p>
His stubborn persistence in not identifying himself as Jewish and his rejection by both Jews and his fellow Hungarians place him in a kind of ontological limbo which, far from being terrifying, actually endows him with a naïve resourcefulness nearly equal to his catastrophe. His assertion that “we ourselves are fate,” and his insistence that any moment could have brought about a change in conditions are expressions of a kind of instinctual messianism, one that is animated from the ceaseless and unpredictable recombination of events rather than through divine incursion.
<p>
Like Kafka, Georg’s secret is his avid embrace of a poetics of failure; a stance before events that does not inquire after a reason as to their cause, but only how best to get through them. This is fatelessness, and for Georg it is equivalent to a narrow, but nevertheless very real, form of freedom.Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-2181209259133149292016-01-31T13:04:00.000-08:002016-01-31T13:10:56.093-08:00Rachel Blau DuPlessis' "Graphic Novella"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ latest work, <i>Graphic Novella</i>, (Xexoxial Press, 2015) represents both a break from and a continuation of the work she began in her path breaking five volume long poem <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/22/prit-dupless.html"><i>Drafts</i></a>. Break, in the sense that new formal techniques are being explored; continuation because the key themes of <a href="https://jacket2.org/feature/drafting-beyond-ending"><i>Drafts</i></a> are still in play, albeit in a more micrological vein.
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi8sSPQPdq8eOpIqpCL7xOXhGusefjCXEtdAizgle6v1h-ROsZhr0YX5dZTw_HGyQvheF3SdvgbGk7w15c73vt4lcYXbxsoU-9rJQOynR-ua3YIDN-NVAH7ELH49rsn67lnKsDQab_f6I/s1600/graphic-novella-front-cover-sm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi8sSPQPdq8eOpIqpCL7xOXhGusefjCXEtdAizgle6v1h-ROsZhr0YX5dZTw_HGyQvheF3SdvgbGk7w15c73vt4lcYXbxsoU-9rJQOynR-ua3YIDN-NVAH7ELH49rsn67lnKsDQab_f6I/s320/graphic-novella-front-cover-sm.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>
In <i>The Collage Poems of Drafts</i>, an outlying, post-<i>Drafts</i> work, DuPlessis pushed into new territory, territory already implicit in the jagged jointures of <i>Drafts</i>. <i>The Collage Poems</i> (Salt, 2011) stakes its claims on our attentions through its enticing and uncanny melding of text and image, forging new collage-ideograms as part of its extra-verbal texture: a way to both embody the fullness of the word and at the same time, point beyond it.
<p>
Jack Spicer once wrote that a poem should be a “collage of the real.” “I would like to point to the real,” he remarked, “to disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.” What’s missing from this mystical pop-Zen vision is that a poem is nothing, of course, without sound; indeed, a poem is in some ways nothing but sound. That is what constitutes the desideratum of its thingness, Spicer’s impatience with mimesis notwithstanding.
<p>
DuPlessis does not ignore this, even as she intervenes – cuts into – the word by way of the image. She, too, turns to the power of pointing, or rather, presenting clusters of images, not for commentary so much as a way to disrupt the intrigues of plot. The images offer a density not easily submitted to meaning. Rather, they are part of a plot for “cutting down the rays of the plot,” as she puts it. “Rewiring, rerouting, rewriting.”
<p>
The oversized format of <i>Graphic Novella</i> is designed to foreground both its amplitude and its skeletal anti-plot, which unfolds as a series of returns, re-visitations of past work and recursive reticulations of outrage and frustration against the systematic rendering of the subject’s increasing invisibility via the reifying properties of plot. Plot here might be understood more broadly as scheme, as in the universal scheme of capitalist culture to erase personhood. In contemplating the image of two Canon EOS 70 cameras (remember cameras?), the lower one inverted, DuPlessis writes:
<p><i>
The working conditions of being under the sun in the vast<br>
and nimble spaces<br>
of aggressive ruptures and attacks on civic coherence<br>
are such that<br>
cannot hold to one lens when the splay of directions<br>
intensifies, when the twists of connection and misses get more grotesque<br>
and garbled. As they do<br>
round the clock. Insomniac almanac.<br></i>
<p>
“Insomniac almanac” might serve as the motto for the 24/7 cyber-culture we live in now, with its ongoing destruction of time and solitude, a new kind of seasonal calendar in which all seasons are reduced to an empty sameness.
<p>
The poem-essay’s major tone is interrogative and in this it follows <i>Drafts</i>; the poem as inquiry and investigation into memory, cultural constructions of the self, and the possibilities of language to resist or unsettle such constructions. <i>Graphic Novella</i> undertakes a kind of auto-textual archaeology, exhuming the fragments, shards, and bones of abandoned writing and, by way of subjecting them to intimate scrutiny, re-constructing them, in whole or in part.
<p>
<i>Arrests. Burn-out. Wrong decisions. Rectitude. Rigidity. Premature summaries. Presumptive entitlement. Loss of focus.
</i><p>
<i>Has this begun? Well, a process is accelerating. Forget “art.” Paper scraps. Commodity pix. “Flat waste.” A few notes perhaps.
</i>
<p>
The sense of loss, of the struggle to reconnect with origins, or rather, beginnings, false starts, pervades this book-length poem. When is a start real and when does it fail its promise? This is the dilemma of every writer and DuPlessis has made it her central concern in this labyrinthine poem, privileging process over product.
<p>
“Forget art,” she admonishes herself and the reader. If you came looking for pretty here, you’re in the wrong place, bub, though many lines ring with a crystalline vibration. In the wasteland of commodity culture, the poet must become a bricoleur, focusing not on unified vision, but on the scraps and fragments left in that culture’s wake – a detective of the whole. This is the fate of late modernism. Shoring up is hard to do.
<p>
One gets the sense that in composing <i>Graphic Novella</i> DuPlessis created the collages first, then wrote her commentaries on them. This impression is reinforced by the book’s layout, with the images occupying the right-side pages and the text laid out on the left. If we were to think of this as a bilingual (bi-visual/textual) work, the relationship between the two would be that of collage cluster translating original text. Yet this isn’t quite right either. The poem forces us to read in reverse, as it were. And commentary is too blunt a term to describe the interaction and dynamic tension between word and image. It’s a more oblique, sidelong process – inviting and forcing the reader to take in the image first, then read the text, then turn back to the image, then re-read the text. The very acts of reading and seeing are thus the actual subject of the poem, an intricate mesh of post-mortems. Perhaps, the poem seems to suggest, all readings are post-mortem. But if they are, they are also resurrectional, a calling up of the lost, the forgotten, the abandoned, as a way to bear witness, or as DuPlessis wittily puts it “withnessing.”
<p>
The poem closes on a haunting provisional note: “looking for/a page that cannot be turned//because it is inside the page.” These lines are spread out between three mysterious photos of unknown strangers, dressed in their Sunday finest, gathered at some event decades ago. They stare back us as we stare at them. What is it that is inside the page, then? Not essence, not resolution, but the desire for another page. Each page has the potential to open a narrow messianic gate through which another word, another image, another page, might slip.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-44457004630570984192015-07-04T08:36:00.001-07:002015-07-04T17:25:54.944-07:00For Ornette Coleman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1whKgHL4QutsRE4EjdeolG3lc3GnL5mbItkng5-X9jPYHazZUN985TQkH0BMnuu2rTC2rkJh0MGs8YRHayoHHzZLg2P9LAPKJJPtfvQgptNTM21S2zEXUtNMktHC6MUCXN-CkQLouTco/s1600/Saarinen+Chapel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1whKgHL4QutsRE4EjdeolG3lc3GnL5mbItkng5-X9jPYHazZUN985TQkH0BMnuu2rTC2rkJh0MGs8YRHayoHHzZLg2P9LAPKJJPtfvQgptNTM21S2zEXUtNMktHC6MUCXN-CkQLouTco/s320/Saarinen+Chapel.jpg" /></a></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Mourning Song<b></b></i><br>
for Ornette Coleman
<p>
A song crowned of crows.<br>
A fold of notes inside a rose.<br>
Notes broken on the road.<br>
White horn, hover lower.<br>
<p>
Grammar of sound<br>
sung a crow tone low.<br>
Broken vowels hovering <br>
above the horn’s road.<br>
<p>
Over a field a lone <br>
crow flies low.<br>
Song not gone.<br>
Song still blown.<br>
<p>
Horn’s tones<br>
at dusk blow<br>
shelter from the rust.<br>
Each note a road.<br>
<p>
No compass <br>
of chords. Only<br>
horn’s ache.<br>
A crow moon aloft, forlorn.<br>
<p>
Go with a stone’s throw.<br>
A "moment’s gnosis"<br>
making prayer<br>
from dark chords.<br>
<p>
There is a law in what I play.<br>
The shape of chords to come.<br>
Earth horn re-homed.<br>
A white horn blows alone.<br>
<p>
Under low stone<br>
deep groan of horn.<br>
A chord is nothing <br>
but the sound of a man.<br>
<p>Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-59508683323959500232015-04-21T14:50:00.000-07:002015-06-21T13:05:40.665-07:00Robert Adamson's "Net Needle"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Australian poet Robert Adamson’s work is nowhere near as well recognized in America as it deserves to be. The author of twenty books, beginning with 1970’s <i>Canticles on the Skin</i>, and including most recently <i>The Goldfinches of Baghdad</i>, <i>The Kingfisher’s Soul</i>, and <i>Reading the River: Selected Poems</i>, he has also won every literary award his country can bestow on a poet, among them the Christopher Brennan Prize for lifetime achievement, the Patrick White Award, and The Age Book of the Year Award for <i>The Goldfinches of Baghdad </i>(also published by Flood).
<P>
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<p>
Adamson came up the hard way, through a school of brute knocks, spending many of his teenage years incarcerated (as related in his powerful memoir <i>Inside Out</i>). It was in Long Bay Penitentiary he first discovered the works of Shelley and fomented the audacious desire to become a poet. Later, he found Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry and in time became friends with both Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley (his poem to the latter, “Inside Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems,” from <i>The Kingfisher’s Soul</i>, is essential reading). This led to both poets traveling to Australia for memorable events. Duncan’s visit inspired an entire chapter, “Eros,” in J.M. Coetzee’s novel <i>Elizabeth Costello</i>.
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These singular acts of generosity mark Adamson’s own work as well. His poems sustain themselves on a remarkable wavelength of deep receptivity to what Duncan called “the ability to respond.” For over 40 years now, Adamson has been writing incredibly supple lyrics whose investments in the romantic imagination are perfectly balanced by the precision of his investigative focus on both the inner world of memory and desire and the outer realm’s thrilling ornithological kaleidoscope.
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<i>Net Needle</i>, his newest book, is a work of extraordinary vibrancy. A mixture of autobiographical recollections from Adamson’s youth – moments from prison, learning the craft of net making from the local fishermen – along with powerful “versions” of celebrated European masters like Trakl, Reverdy, and Rimbaud, and a continuation of his life-long attentions to the fantastic birds of Australia, these poems hum with a precise music. I don’t think I’ve read another poet so intimately attuned to the ways of the avian. There’s absolutely nothing sentimental in these highly detailed accounts of birds, no reducing them to symbols of human ambition and failure. They live their own enigmatic lives in Net Needle, as in “Harsh Song”:
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Afternoon’s <br>
pulse,<br>
a feathery <br>
sussuration –<br>
half song,<br>
soft <br>
leather<br>
ratchet, or<br>
breath <br>
forced<br>
through <br>
a snake’s<br>
throat<br>
across <br>
the roof<br>
of its<br>
raked <br>
mouth –<br>
whispered <br>
sounds,<br>
a smoker’s<br>
thick<br>
exhalation –<br>
bowerbirds<br>
in the grapevine.<br>
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The delicacy here, the astonishing discretion, owes something to William Carlos Williams, perhaps, but is entirely its own, fully realized and miraculous. Because discretion lies at the heart of witnessing, as the poet knows. And in Adamson’s poems, nature’s mysteries are never forced into the open, never uncovered by a pile-on of qualifiers; rather, they come into being through a form of intense attention. To enter into, rather than unmask, the flight of the kingfisher, or the kookaburra catching snakes, is the poem’s desire. These acts of poetic restoration occur on a small scale, but generate an enormous and enlivening eco-poetic charge, one that places Adamson squarely in the company of John Clare, Lorine Niedecker, and W.S. Graham.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU_vfpx7H5PVrDJZeP0hcZPXO8oe2ihmCeN0qAK1D4FBgB7ouhlcvju9XvZFJcgKWMOU1hVGC0RSu2OSDPh49dT_qO8ZFehy_OOLnRhdUJjpkg1u_QYuhzEc8nPLmOt1e6oSsz_r7o660/s1600/Adamson.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU_vfpx7H5PVrDJZeP0hcZPXO8oe2ihmCeN0qAK1D4FBgB7ouhlcvju9XvZFJcgKWMOU1hVGC0RSu2OSDPh49dT_qO8ZFehy_OOLnRhdUJjpkg1u_QYuhzEc8nPLmOt1e6oSsz_r7o660/s320/Adamson.jpeg" /></a></div>
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Adamson is never vatic, though. His concentrated gaze condenses from myriad details an uncanny and beautifully faithful image of how all these things vibrate and flow. Not mere images then, but the procession itself, these poems offer a marvelous lightness and ease of perception. They seem to float alongside as well as within their subjects, joining language to vision.
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<i>Net Needle</i> weaves together a luminous directness with a hard won simplicity. It gives us the very grain of the English language, its exacting measures, its eschewal of adornment, its rhythm that is also a way of seeing, as Zukofsky knew. For longtime readers of Adamson’s work, the re-lineation of “The Kingfisher’s Soul” will delight and move. The poem has opened out. Can a kingfisher have a soul? Or rather, is the soul a kind of kingfisher, diving fiercely above the river, a missile of incarnate desire, a ravenous muscle that drives bright plumage into flight, into love?
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In the old days I used to think art <br>
That was purely imagined could fly higher <br>
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Than anything real. Now I feel a small fluttering <br>
Bird in my own pulse, a connection to the sky.<br>
Back then a part of me was only half alive:<br>
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The poems in Net Needle are so fully alive they fly off the page. And some of them, like “Net Maker” and “Spinoza,” are as perfect as any I have ever read. What is a “net needle’? Simply a device for repairing a fishing net.
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Their hands<br>
darting through mesh, holding bone<br>
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net needles, maybe a special half-needle<br>
carved from tortoise shell ...<br>
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they wove everything they knew<br>
into the mesh, along with the love they had,<br>
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or had lost<br>
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Whether loved or lost, the net re-gathers it, without judgment. The net is woven to sift everything and cherish it.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-983777099645603659.post-55675415018309518262015-02-20T13:22:00.000-08:002015-02-21T13:43:23.142-08:00What Work Isn't: On Philip Levine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Philip Levine’s death last week has prompted, for a poet, that is, an unusual number of public tributes. I’ve read several in the NY Times and heard two separate eulogies on NPR. My pal Robert Archambeau has written a very eloquent elegy for Levine at his <a href="http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/what-what-work-is-is-importance-of.html">blog</a>. All fine and well, but neither Mark Strand nor Allen Grossman, both of whom died last year and both indisputably finer poets than Levine, received this kind of attention on their passing. Of the three of these, Grossman was the Master. But his work is difficult, full of gnostic intricacies, compared to Levine’s prosaic banality and sentimentality. The poet of work, he’s been called, for mining a brief period of time in his life, before he spent over 30 years teaching.
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Of course teaching is work and hard work, too, if very different. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two I did my share of hard labor on shop floors, on assembly lines, in a shipyard and a paint factory and behind broiling friers. So I know what “work” is. I also know the kind of work that involves long hours spent behind a desk, grading papers, analyzing insurance data, writing code, or reading screenplays. For Levine work seems to take place only in an industrial sphere. It’s the work only men do. Or used to. Is there any mention of the domestic labor women have done for ages in a Levine poem? I’d like to know, sincerely, but I seem to have sold off all his books, alas.
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Radio producers and journalists know a meme when they see one: here’s a poet who wrote about work – the idol before which all Americans bow down to and worship – and he wrote about it in simple, straightforward language. He wrote about it in a way that elevated the worker and praised him for his stoicism and his wounds. He wrote about it in a way that was not too far removed from a WPA or WWII propaganda pamphlet. “Brother, Can You Spare a Rhyme?” He wrote about the alienation and suffering of a certain kind of work – labor in Detroit’s car plants, shop floor environments my father and his friends worked on – and he wrote about it with a certain pathos but without ever managing somehow to offer any powerful criticism of the forces that kept this system in place.
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When Levine’s <i>The Simple Truth</i> came out in 1995, I gave it a glowing review, comparing him, grandiosely, absurdly, to Francois Villon, Cesar Vallejo and Nazim Hikmet. This gaseous praise merited a prickly letter to the editor from Anselm Hollo and marked the beginning of our friendship, along with a transformation of my views about what poetry is. Which became for me a different kind of work than what Levine undertook.
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Marjorie Perloff is still right. Levine represents Exhibit A in how experience gets ground into poetry through
the most simplistic formula. A string of descriptive anecdotes rounded out by an epiphany? At least, that’s how I remember her famous and very accurate put-down, How can a poet claim to write about work and not critique the system that enslaves men and women everywhere? Jeremy Prynne, for all his bristling apostasy and hermeneutical obscurity, is a greater poet of “work” than Phillip Levine ever was. Because Levine, finally, was not a poet of ideas – a notion he would no doubt gladly ascribe too. His own work ethic blinded him to the reality of work.
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His famous poem “What Work Is” is not about work as such, but a valentine to his brother, an aspiring opera singer. There’s some overcooked irony about a Jew wanting to sing Wagner in it, too, but finally it’s a poem about discipline and aspiration rather than work. A poem about wanting to escape the jail of work for the freedom of art. The scandal of Philip Levine – and the reason for his lionization – is that he has no clue what work is. To read a Levine poem about work gives one the impression that workers suffer because of mysterious unnamed forces or mere human malice and caprice. Work degrades the soul, demeans the person, exhausts the body. That’s what work is. Levine gets part of that right -- how work strips a person of their dignity -- but has no idea and has never bothered to ponder <i>why</i> work is. This failure to probe deeper mars his late poetry considerably, yet has managed to endear him to many readers. Still, in his early work, in books like <i>Names of the Lost</i>, for instance, he was capable of striking a powerful and elegaic tone.
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Post-script: after further reflection and reading some thoughtful comments by readers of this post on Facebook I've toned down the rhetoric in this entry, which was needlessly harsh, and revised it somewhat. My overall point is not to castigate Levine for bad poetry -- though his late work does suffer from mannerism -- but rather a kind of bad faith. If the subject of a poem about the travails of work only portrays its sufferers as downtrodden figures deserving of our sympathy, without condemning the system that produces that suffering then these figures become mere fetishes, stand-ins for dishonest emotion.
Patrick Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01838354547451161990noreply@blogger.com0