ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

The local weather is bleak, the sky looks nauseated and the cultural and celestial atmosphere rife with unrest, unpredictability, and ominousness. So perhaps to simulate these conditions, it is best this Tuesday to concentrate on gripes, what irritants to my system particularly gall or induce bile-building discontents. I'll keep it literary, though not necessarily literate--perhaps form here should be an extension of the content, a bad, broken state of affairs. I'll put the inventory in a list form to make the sequence more of an algorithm of despair and frustration:

1. The lack of vital book reviews in The New York Times Book Review for the past twenty years.

2. The lack of any quality fiction (with perhaps three exceptions) in The New Yorker for the past twenty-five years.

3. How small press journals now tend to mimic their more well-heeled counterparts--the The Paris Review, for example-- in publishing the same authors over and over, coteries, cabals, and interdependent collectives over a diversification of content.

4. The sheer dearth of literature in translation in this country. Is English the only language? America the only country?

5. The damn sectarianism of many readers, critics, and writers, either siding with lyrical Realism or Postmodernism but not embracing both. Yes, how awful to express a love for both James and Foster Wallace, Cheever and Pynchon. Even worse to conceptualize middle-spaces between the realistic and the postmodern.

6. The divisiveness of poets and some poetry critics, neatly ascribing avant-gardism or symptoms of quietude and seeing the pure good in theorizing poetry into more camps than we have firewood for.

7. The general parochialism of academic readers of literature.

8. The general insularity and idiocy of non-academic, non-readers, in terms of literature, popular or obscure.

9. The canonization of literary critics, and so selectively, one might think that Saint James Wood is the only conjurer of serious literary criticism.

10. You, the Reader, for not challenging any of these bombastic claims and comments, as if they had real weight.

Postscript: The weather just changed, sun brightening the expanse. This change either gives credence to my remarks above, how they illuminate the general trend and bend of things literary, or perhaps how the literary weather isn't as bad as I indicate. You decide.

J/C

Monday news

Luchy

Napa is all around you

On the first day, we never know the way anywhere –
surprised when the road doglegs left
and takes us over a white stone bridge,
letting the car idle at the crossroads to unfold our map,
vineyards all around, those twisted black stumps
spread over the far fields, like an army
of the halt and lame marching back home
in defeat after a winter's campaign.

At dinner we'll brag about the town
we discovered, made entirely of white houses and places to sit
with a newspaper and coffee, the stores so full
of things to buy that the shelves creak with the weight,
just like that village in Maine, ten years ago,
whose name we always argue about.

Here, in the shadow of mountains so rich
it seems you can smell them like warm coffee beans
in a bag; here, where every car brings another blonde wife
to her dinner date, where dark men stand in the fields
burning things in barrels for reasons
we'll never ask or understand; here
we finally arrive at the secret
at the heart of all travel,
that everyone needs to believe they've ducked
beneath the sword forever turning outside Eden,
found El Dorado, here in their own private Napa,
where no one is poor, or limps, or drives
a dirty car, and nothing dies
without us willing it to be brought to us
garnished and served on a warm plate.


Mark Aiello

A Rogue's Gallery

If you are wondering who these three unappealing men are, and why they merit your brief attention, here is the answer: they are Mr. Wagoner of GM, Mr. Nardelli of Chrysler and Mr. Mulally of Ford, all come a-begging for your tax dollars at a hearing in Washington this week. They claim that without billions in immediate aid, their automobile companies will wilt like Mayflies in early June and disappear altogether.

Having arrived each in his own corporate jet, and each fortified by a paycheck that earns him in a week what many will never see in their best-paid years, they put aside their competitive differences, set out their tin cups before them and proceeded to disgrace themselves and their companies in ways that could never have been imagined.

Had anyone attempted to concoct a world's-worst script for beggary, it certainly would have included arrival at the begging location by personal jet. It would also have included very recent assurances from the board of GM that "nothing has shaken" the confidence they have in the fine gentleman now overseeing their disaster; in response to which no less a friend-of-business than George Will wondered: "not even the destruction of nearly all shareholder value"?

This arrogant, unimaginative, unsuccessful triumvirate deserves no quarter. They have built wretched vehicles for over thirty years--squandering the devotion of a willing consumer base that would have bought their cars out of patriotism if only they weren't expensive, poorly-constructed, poorly-serviced, poor on gas mileage, and especially if they only stopped looking like the tail ends of donkeys compared to the trim, attractive offerings from overseas.

When asked if they would reduce or eliminate their own salaries as part of the "plan" for eventual success should they get bailed out, they demurred. When asked if they had done anything wrong, they said they had not. When asked to describe how they would use the money to transform their companies, they could not.

All of the above notwithstanding, I actually do believe their companies should, somehow, be rescued--or at least their workers' jobs should be.

My question to Congress is: why ask these guys to tell you anything at all? They clearly know nothing about running, and especially rescuing, a car company.

How about getting someone else up on the hill to testify? How about getting testimony from, say, two or three men and women from the production line? Doesn't it seem like the taxpayer would be a thousand times more willing to give these companies a shot if, instead of sending in these pampered clowns to beg for stuff they cannot genuinely care about (their fortunes already assured), the companies sent in (or Congress called in) some folks whose livelihoods actually depended on, and who might actually deserve, a helping hand from the electorate?

I am waiting.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

As this Friday extinguishes itself like a cigarette (having just quit smoking the simile is no longer apt, I suppose), I feel a flick of ash catch my metaphorical scarf that doubles potentially as a metaphysical noose when I think of the contemporary world in all its awfulness, idiocy, cruelty, and shame. This ash, in fact, signifies the burnt-out brains of our intellectuals and policy makers who mislead us, whose missteps have all of us falling down the stairs, who mistake power for justice and make us pay in body bags, cash, confusion, or our dignity. Yes, when I think of the political landscape, I think of finding a tree to test the durability of my neck hanged by, crushed by, a less-than-metaphysical noose. (At my weight it would take a drop of six feet, according to my hangman's guide).

So when I hear about political unity in this country, I can almost smell the pungency of the rope below my head. For matters literary, one should be partisan but not so much as to be a snob and sectarian. Camps and schools are fine, but one should be ecumenical when thinking about the sheer breadth and variegated beauty of the plenitude of poetry and fiction. (I'm inclined to agree with Ron Silliman's notion of the School of Quietude, how so much contemporary literature is middling, sentimental pap but, that said, I see conflicting and contrasting tastes disturbing my palate in wonderful ways).

In any case--in all cases, actually--I am for the unity of diversity in literature and in politics I approve of people staying in their corners and smashing the opposition's arguments when need be. If Obama wants to go beyond the blue and red state paradigm, fine; I'll stay in my green field dreaming of more radical transformations and possibilities than the centrist rhetoric of his Democratic party. There are some values you'll have to beat me to death to compromise on (or you can hang me, I've got the noose, remember?). I cannot merely renege on my commitments to human rights and social justice to concede the viability of a center-based coalition of right wingers and centrist liberals. I'll stay left. And probably left out. Fine; I'll take some consolation in Roberto Bolano's 2666 or some of the new and old poets who have vision and never burn out.
Bless you, sisters and brothers! J/C

Kubin at the Neue

If you haven't already done so, check out Alfred Kubin at the Neue Galerie in New York City. Kubin was an Austrian artist of Czech origin during the early 20th century. He was part of the expressionist movement for a short time and was also associated with the Blaue Reiter group. He created primarily pen and ink drawings, watercolors and lithographs.

Kubin had a traumatic childhood and young adulthood. As a young child, he witnessed his mother die and then his father carry her dead body around the house while wailing in deep despair. His father beat him regularly and they became estranged. Shortly after they reconciled, his father died. His fiancee died before he was thirty. During his lifetime, he was suicidal and suffered more than one nervous breakdown.

He began drawing as a small child and during his artistic career was deeply influenced by Klinger, Goya, Ensor, Munch and Redon. There are over one hundred works currently on display at the Neue. They're profoundly emotional, mysterious and depict all the irrationality that you're trying to control and can never really get a hold on; a visual journey into your subconscious, the stuff your dreams and nightmares are made of.

Don't miss it.

Luchy

By the way, the Neue also has a beautiful giftshop, perfect for some unusual trinkets your mom and sisters will love during the holidays.

NEUE GALERIE NEW YORK

1048 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10028

http://www.neuegalerie.org/

The GO[CMW]P and Evolution

If anyone had wondered whether the Republican Party has taken ill with the political equivalent of double pneumonia, look no further than conservative columnist Kathleen Parker's column today in the Washington Post "The GOP's Problem with G-O-D". In it she says (I paraphrase) the GOP needs to ditch the Christers or forget about electoral success in the foreseeable future. Also paraphrasing, the GOP has become the Grand Old Christian Married White Party.

Few things could make a Secular Humanist more happy than the prospect of dreary, Bible-thumping bigots going the way of the Dodo. Ms. Parker says their ilk was once relegated to standing on wooden crates at busy intersections; the GOP's mistake, it seems, has been to mistake an energized base for electoral strength.

I'll take it a couple of steps further: without the ability to market an al Qaeda-sponsored mass destruction to cow the electorate, the GOCMWP is revealed as a party in thrall to creeps, ideologues, hypocrites, and no-tax bigots. The era of the thoughtful conservative is at low ebb (K. Parker, D. Brooks and G. Will notwithstanding).

Let me caveat the following with this: there's nothing wrong (in my opinion) with a belief in larger, unknowable things. It may even be irrational not to hold some high regard for the unknown and perhaps all-powerful forces that seem to be constantly at work in the world.

That said, religion as we know it is fighting a rear-guard action. It has been doing as much since at least the eighteenth century, when folks began to notice such wonders as "cause and effect". As is typical in bitter retreats, there has been a last, dangerous surge (the Bush years). However, not unlike at the end of World War Two's Battle of the Bulge, the losing side has been stopped in its tracks: the attack has literally run out of fuel.

With capital-R "Religion" branded with defeat in 2008, can we look forward to a day when open-mindedness and enlightened self-interest might flourish as we have never seen before? Might we witness, at last, a turn of the evolutionary page?

May we be lucky enough to see it.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

Today is the official release of 2666, the uncompleted final book by the late and all-too-great, Roberto Bolano, author of By Night in Chile, Distant Star, and The Savage Detectives, among others. It has received raucously winning reviews and I am certain it will be another luminous part of RB's canon. I rarely feel compelled to slouch impulsively toward my nearest bookstore to obtain a tome on its first official day in the world, but Bolano's mischievous meditations on politics, nightmare, literary creation and social disintegration, always merit immediate purchase and poring over.

Bolano's work typically divines the entrails of South American dictators and their apparatchiks. Speaking of which, today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. Don't follow leaders and be Bolano readers...

...and double space and type your manuscripts! At least in this North American country, Mark Twain was the first to do so, roughly one hundred and fifty-two years ago today. JC

What I'm afraid of

Strawberry Fields might be my favorite Beatles song. It illustrates beautifully the attitude towards life that too many people have: refusing to look into the void, bathe themselves in the black ocean of truth because they're afraid to drown in awareness. So their existence is reduced to bodily functions, safe routines and empty entertainment. Some are well educated, some are not. They might ask themselves from time to time "Why do I feel lost?" but that's as far as their effort goes and they give up again and again, continue their arid lives with little curiosity and no imagination.

I'm afraid of ghosts. But the empty expressions, like masks that attempt to hide but never stop revealing how little this chance at awareness is valued, of the indifferent are much more scary.

Luchy


Strawberry Fields - Lennon, McCartney

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.

No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right.
That is I think it's not too bad.

Always no sometimes think it's me, but you know I know when it's a dream.
I think, er No, I mean, er Yes but it's all wrong.
That is I think I disagree.

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.

Setting things in order

Is there anyone you'd like to punch in the face

more than the man who spent the weekend

cleaning his closet?  So smug to be finally free

of the burden of false hope, and

those khakis that fit five years ago.

 

His shirts hang logically, stripes with the stripes,

collar buttons of the oxfords all facing north,

bowling shirts and other weekend trifles

waiting quietly way back in the dark.

 

He holds the door open and looks upon it

as an orchard gravid with bright fruit,

a marble city sleeping in the desert night.

 

A pleasing order.  The craft of his own hands.

 

Nowhere is there dust.  You won't find it

even in the corner by his skates.

 

Tonight he will sleep on sheets

that smell as clean as all the church days of his childhood.

The plants on every windowsill are watered

and he will live the life of the monk,

the Spartan, the man who calls his mother every day.

 

Until he wakes up tomorrow.

 

Mark Aiello

Who Won the Culture Wars?

You keep hearing (a little less, now) about how we are a "center-right" country. In 2004, I might have thought we were a "right-wing-nutjob country" having just re-elected a simpleton to four additional years of havoc.

But now that "right"-ness seems to have been just the veneer many of us might have suspected. With a thoroughly new kind of man in the White House and the GOP relegated to hillbilly country, we may be looking at a more accurate picture of a liberal-minded country that had been in hiding.

The Culture Wars was always a right-wing idea. For those on the other side of it, this was just a matter of common sense: should men and women of all colors and creeds actually be taken seriously? What about the evidence that science lays out, making no promises but delivering results over and over? How about the freedom to love and to marry as you see fit (Prop 8 to the contrary) without fear of persecution? And there's music. Funny how even the most reactionary talk-show hosts seem to have a thing for the Devil's Own Noise--rock and roll.

Is there really any question who won the culture wars? Even Sarah Palin felt the need to admit she had a "gay friend" or two. Would this have been remotely thinkable before the 1960s?

Religiosity, bigotry and stupidity--always on the wrong side of the culture wars--are in retreat. The liberals had long ago won, but had not been given credit. The evidence is in, and we are not--and have not been for a long time--a center-right country.

Let's declare the culture wars over. We have more important things to do.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

A writer's relation to locale can run to the claustrophobic and acidly nostalgic-- think of Joyce's Dublin, Faulkner or Welty's U.S. South, Russell Banks's Northern badlands, Philip Roth's Newark. Oh, Newark. New Ark. The other night, travelling from Newark to Manhattan, I sat in an ark otherwise known as a PATH train. Beside me, Amiri Baraka and his wife. If you recall, in late 2001, early 2002, Baraka wrote a controversial poem about September 11, "Somebody Blew Up America." In it, he adverted to Israelis being told to stay home. A pathetic fallacy in a non-poetic sense. But the inventory of U.S. historical and political chicanery and cruelty the poem unveils is pertinent, even if the poem is not formally interesting or rhetorically innovative. Regardless, sitting next to Mr. Baraka, a poet I've long admired, as we approached the World Trade Center PATH station, was touching. He was reading the newspaper and muttering under his breath the phrases, "education" and "health care," and "Obama must..." The man still has the fiery passion of a radical and naysayer, an individual of seventy four years still determined to make art and rant against the powers of improvidence, i.e., the D.C. and Wall Street fat cats, unpoetic and ignoble felines of finance and force. Former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey stripped Baraka--and the state of New Jersey, for that matter-- of the state poet laureatship. I suppose that the title for this column is incorrect for today's subject matter . Perhaps it should read: "ALL POLITICIANS ARE THIEVES!!!" (j curley)

Thoughts for a Thursday: art-making

When I'm not taking care of my family or at work, I struggle to make art. I photograph models and then attempt to see my soul through their portraits. It's an intuitive process and the only reason I do it is because I have to.

I enjoy the process, however, there's nothing I dislike more than having to explain an image. I think that it's a sign of laziness when someone asks me what something I've made "means". I wonder what a writer would think if anyone asked him to illustrate a novel, if someone said: here's pencil and paper, please sketch for me your story. Imagery, unlike words, is open to myriad interpretations so unfortunately symbolic meaning has to be defined. But it's unfortunate that the majority of people are afraid to let go the safety of knowledge and find their own meaning or lose themselves in someone else's unknown.

Even the visually educated few in the artworld want to follow a thread most of the time, a Hansel or Gretel following a trail of words back to the real world. And when they arrive with meaning in hand, proud of their understanding, they refrigerate it along with everything else they've killed along the way.

However, I accept that this is the way it is. The power of all work relies on its verbal interpretation. We're no longer living in an age where the image itself is enough and we're never going back. People want definitions, everything explained, so as an artist, I find myself in the world with a dictionary in hand.

Here are some thoughts on the process. Every artist, in my opinion needs to:

- First and foremost: have a thorough knowledge of art history; there's no making art without a deep understanding of what has been done and why. Every artist needs to be visually encyclopedic.

- be fully aware that there's a limited inventory of visual possibilities in the physical world and that the power hidden in those possibilities depends on how authentic the artist's perception is.

- arrange those known elements in order to push boundaries, peer into the unknown, represent hidden mythologies.

- detach herself from facts, from what is already understood and safe and never try to please or enlighten anyone - creating authentic work is hard enough.

Keeping an image alive and powerful despite definitions is half the work. Translations are rarely fully accurate, but the transition from the visual to the verbal is like putting a lion in birdcage. It's not that verbal expression is inferior, but that most artists are not writers.

Luchy

Who is this Man?

I don't really want to know his name, or where he lives, or how much he has contributed to his local church.

Pretty much the only thing we need to know about the guy, we know by looking at this picture: he's at a Palin rally with an Obama-monkey and a self-satisfied smirk.

So, who is he? And of whom does he remind us?

He reminds me of the smirking racists who in the sixties used to sit behind the defendant's table when they were being "tried" by an all-white jury for lynching an unfortunate black man who got caught and mutilated and hanged for no reason except race-hate.

He reminds me of the local prelate who in an earlier age might have ordered the death by burning of heretics and/or folks who'd taken up the wrong end of an argument in a land dispute with a good buddy of the church (often referred to as "witches").

He makes me think of all the hapless, morally bankrupt, incurious so-called "Americans" who shouted "kill him [Obama]" at the urging of the snarky, hapless, morally bankrupt, incurious so-called "Vice Presidential Candidate" now known as Sarah Palin.

That his party is defeated at the polls and his opponent cheered by the entire thoughtful, hopeful world, is a great cause for celebration.

We need to remember, however, that water-bugs still lurk under the tilework. Keep your eye on them. Watch them scurry in the light.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!

MANIFESTO (?)

All artists decry a straw man and all politicians are--come on, face it, even you Obama triumphalists (congratulations, by the way!)--straw people or straw dogs, depending on your species-preference. A hairline crack divides mass culture and art culture especially at the level of gut-level scepticism. Those who endorse any brand of politics outside of aesthetic considerations tend to cheerlead and bark into a megaphone sculpted by (the audacity of?) hope. Artists are hopeful but refuse to reject that voice of doubt, casting cold eyes on the political process, its players, and the windy rhetoric that occasions reflections on that great windblower, Aelous, the Greek god of hot and cold air.

While it may be that artists will be invigorated by the Obama election and wish to represent the potential, the vast possibility, that his presence hearkens in the collective spirit of his supporters, writers, painters, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers of any stripe and style should maintain, if not a cold eye, a clear one. A vigilance of criticism and a modicum of disbelief, of unhope against hope, needs to be the kind of clairvoyant and eternal rite of passage and being for any artist worth her or his weight in gilded page, golden paints, or bronze sculpture.

Artists, poets in particular, are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world (pace Shelley!) nor should they be the lobbyists of received wisdom, public accolade, or social temperament. Some caller on Brian Lehrer's WYNC program today called for a return to political art. Fine: but most examples of political art in the past eight years have been hackneyed and minimally diverting. A political art arising from the optimism of the moment would, most likely, be unworthy of a space on one's personal refrigerator. But we'll see...and the artists will see even better and more deeply.

And of poets in particular and their relation to Presidents: JFK's inaugural choice for inaugural poet was Robert Frost. Not bad. Bill Clinton chose Maya Angelou, one of the worst poets writing in the English language. Who, pray tell, will Obama pick? Hopefully not someone happy to foresake their taste for the banalities of D.C. politics.

Cheers, Curley