ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

...And all true poets will steal the artifice of the un-gods and lovers out there, militating against false confections, queasy sentimental attitudes, and Hallmark Holiday tomfoolery. Happy Valentine's Day Massacre! Let the simulated hearts hearkening this day be torn to shreds, pieces, numerous ribbons. Would that all observant Valentiners break up or suffer a night of relationship malaise. To wisely pursue any meaningful development of this 14th of Febuary "occasion," celebrate, no, worship, the Nine Muses and light a sparkler for the White Goddess. You'd at least have the respect of the custodians of the beautiful and well-made. Make art to choke hearts this night and realize it is no coincidence that the co-developer of the Jarvik artificial heart just died just in time for the holiday. I send plaudits and chocolates to his aesthetically astute spirit.... J/C

A Rapid End to Bipartisanship

Am I the only one who feels like the withdrawal of Judd Gregg as Commerce nominee represents the last nail in the tiny, infant coffin of Obama's hope for bipartisanship? Is it really much of a secret that once he was told he would not be able to manipulate the census in order not to count minorities (denying big, liberal cities the additional representatives they deserve in Congress), the Republican from New Hampshire lost his taste for the job?

In my opinion bipartisanship may have been--maybe still is--a dream Obama actually believes in, and it sure helped him get elected (many Americans continue to imagine they are "one").

I am glad he reached out some, if only to prove the GOP is run by dead-enders.

America is not "one". The divides are deep. The general profile of belief and custom in America's Northeast, its West Coast and some better educated places in between are more different from, say, a place like Tennessee (rapid apologies in advance to the educated and reasonable folks therefrom), than Switzerland is from Italy. The differing political and social climates between these regions are not going to permit much bipartisanship, if any (my pet theory is that fundamentalist Christianity is a major culprit, but that is another subject).

The GOP is, by all appearances, determined to see the nation fail under a Democrat. The reason for this is because each elected GOP politician seems to believe that a Democrat-led failure may at some point lead to a re-establishment of the neo-con Caliphate. This quixotic notion has rather more currency than the hopes and dreams of the Bourbons in Spain, but not that much more. The feisty behavior of the Republican party in these opening days of the Obama administration is, using a market term for a stock headed permanently south, nothing more than a dead-cat bounce.

For their part, elected Dems tend to be chickenhearted apologists for the regime (status quo benefits them too).

Who knows--maybe Obama wears everyone down with constant likeability and gets the GOP, still fiercely in denial of its own disgrace, to sing with him 'round the campfire. But I kind of doubt it.

--Renaissance

On the Honey Fitz

Luchy

Yank-roids

Here in New York, in the summer, there is a Great Divide among those of us who follow the American Pastime. On the one side and in the majority are the eternally gloating, black-hatted fans of the team resident in the Bronx with their 26 trophies. On the other are the blue-hatted minority (but a considerable one) with their less-than-lovable wanna-be team trying to stay relevant in a swampy part of of town called (unbecomingly) Flushing.

I mention this in order to point out that the once-mighty Bronx team, manned in its heyday by graceful, iconic figures that held home-run trophies in one hand and hot dogs in the other; that swatted hits in more games running than some players get hits in a season (and later marrying Marilyn Monroe); that played drunk but hit balls way out past the train station anyway; that said "Holy Cow" and somehow managed to be in the middle of every winner; that caught more winning World Series games than anyone, ever, and was maybe more quotable than Walt Whitman; that played in more games consecutive than anyone in his day and then gave an iconic speech (again, as quotable as any of the greats of history) when gravely ill; that, though temperamental, shot World-Series home-runs in preternatural succession and, to be fair and more recent, somehow found ways to jump into the stands or race across foul lines to save games when they mattered--this team (the iconic one from the Bronx, not the pale imitation of a winner from Flushing)--has now become the home of not one or two, but at least four superstars who have admitted or been all-but-convicted of cheating by using a combination of banned substances known as steroids.

Didn't we--the non-Bronx-club-fans--always feel (or anyhow at least in the last few years and certainly since one of the black-hatted, pumped-up 'roidmeisters tried to attack our star catcher with the sharp sliver of a bat) that something was just plain wrong with the Yanks? Didn't it seem like some kind of bad-faith for the gloating gloaters to gloat so gloatingly over the artificially enhanced feats of their mega-wealthy, jack-ass "superstars" (you know who they are); and didn't it seem not just like a fitting let-down when the team couldn't manage to get past the first round of the playoffs, but some kind of cosmic justice?

And can it seem like anything but the final disgrace for it now to be revealed, much as we had all suspected but could not more than insinuate, that even the tiny-man-in-a-big-body called A-Rod has now been revealed as a fake, a sham, a cock-up, a puffed and coiffed and juice-injected rip-off?

Not that the Flushing flops have a lock on dignity. But has it not seemed for quite some time--admit it now--that the team of 26 Championships had, over the past several years, not only lost its mojo, but become, even while "winning", a sorry, shameful, empty fraud?

And can we now be forgiven for feeling like fans of said fraudulent enterprise perhaps should own up to this fact and at least stop the gloating?

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

Odd correspondences abound in my district of the world, a parcel of a precinct of New Jersey's middle reaches. On my way to school this morning to lecture about W.G. Sebald's hauntingly magnificent novel Austerlitz, I noticed that two other PATH train passengers were reading the same book! And last night, while traveling on the same train but in the opposite direction, two individuals on the Newark Penn Station about ten feet from each other and about fifty feet from me were reading the book of Seamus Heaney interviews I mentioned in my last post. Is this a correspondence or a coincidence, convergence or a new federal government surveillance program for which agents mimic their quarry? Am I being watched or stuck in a literary xerox universe? I might have to start publicly perusing more obscure tomes... J/C

Flammable material

We'll never know the cause - which simple sum

of the factorial weight of all the years of his career -

each themselves laden with numbers; revenue,

(variance to budget), throughput divided by headcount

and then divided again by defect then by fiscal quarter,

was the one that set it off.  Maybe

it was just the way each day's calendar was broken

into fifteen minute notches, each standing

for something someone else needed him to do.

Even the talk in the breakroom seemed to be algebra -

models of cars, their prices and horsepower,

or Sunday point spreads.  Until, in one idle moment

by the vending machine after he had punched the proper buttons,

he reached the number that every solid has

when it must change state - and he ignited.

The security guards never once looked up

from their box scores to see his grew wool suit

flaring brightly as he swiped his badge.

Burning, he'd get in line for his morning coffee,

and, burning, he would watch the elevator numbers

tick up to his floor.  No one said a word

about the smoke at the morning production meeting

or about the column of flame

that rose above the bathroom stall.

The only ones who became suspicious

were the cleaning crew,

but no one ever talks to them

except to say good night.  

They would sweep small piles of ash

from his keyboard and chair each night,

so they were the only ones not surprised

when he was suddenly gone, altogether.

Mark Aiello

Wine

Luchy

Calling Their Bluff

Today the poker game came to an end.

I am talking about the one where failed-company executives kept bluffing there was no way they could accept a mortal's wage and still show up to work in the morning. The one where failed-company executives pretended they had options--that they "might leave" if not paid crazy sums despite their stewardship of spectacular failure. The one where they pretended they were somehow indispensable to their companies' success when in fact they were at best irrelevant to it and more likely inimical to it.

Today, President Obama--buoyed by Senator Claire McCaskill's proposal and a wave of popular revulsion--called their bluff. In the manner of a certain baseball-team owner from long ago who offered less money in a player's contract renewal after the team did rather poorly in the prior season, Obama in essence said to the tarnished titans: "We can finish last without you."

He told them that if they were going to accept government money to keep their companies from going under, they were going to have to cap their salaries at $500,000 per year. He called the offending high pay-rates "bad strategy". I would quibble with that (for instance, strategy for whom?), but I'd rather give him credit for finally saying "Show me your cards." Word is, they don't have a hand among them.

It was always a game of three card monte--without the cops. And while the profits were there, who'd have paid it much mind? We were all getting along okay. As Americans, we don't enjoy looking too closely at the other guy's ledger. But now we're all hurting. And the crafty executives, having arranged to be given billions by taxpayers, noticed no rules governing use of the money! They took it and socked it away in the Cayman Islands, many of them did. Those who took, don't have to give it back. Oops!

But that was then--under a different, long-gone administration (whose was it?--I've forgotten). And now the great leaders of finance have been put on notice: there's such a thing as the marketplace of ideas. And their ideas--the ones where they tank the economy and sock away bonuses as if delivering value--have been exposed as bankrupt. Kind of like their companies.

There's a certain symmetry to it.

Masters of the Universe: welcome to the world.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

Stepping Stones, the collection of interviews with Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney by fellow poet Dennis O'Driscoll, has been deservedly hailed, admired, and gushed over. It is a behemoth of a book, an archival monster of sensitive subjectivity and poetic power. Even if one carries great confidence in a ready knowledge of the poet and his work, this volume will disabuse such a notion. The depth, density, and radiating intelligence on display here complements autobiography, storytelling, recollections of other poets and the act of writing various poems (the sections are mostly organized by the titles of individual volumes). These interviews will help you get into the mind and materials of this Master and compel you to go back to the poems.

The interviews were conducted over the course of several years by email and in writing. Various levels of mediation can be discerned and the time taken to respond to O'Driscoll's queries can be reasonably assumed by the different lengths of the responses. Short or long, the answers are always perceptive and deftly woven into a tapesty of insights.

Just as W.B. Yeats described Oscar Wilde has someone whose casual speech seemed as if it had the perfection of a long-mulled and sculpted thought, Heaney's turns-of-phrase and dazzling descriptions seem to come off with ease and quickness. My expectations of these interviews were high and reading through them my regard of them is even higher, on the highest "crate of air," to use Heaney's phrase. Bravo, Maestro! J/C

The wine of our fathers

Luchy

In Praise of Pork

The New York Times today reports that the Metropolitan Transit Authority expects to receive over four-hundred million dollars from the Obama stimulus package in order to complete one of its moribund holes in the ground: the Fulton Transit Center.

This is great news for any of the millions who pass through this currently warren-like, construction-hobbled, George Tooker-esque gateway to one of the great commercial hubs of the world (I am referring to Lower Manhattan).

Every Republican that can fog a mirror will deride it as "pork".

To the no-tax, bleed-the-government-white crowd, pretty much any item that a tax dollar might be spent on, especially those producing tangible results like buildings, bridges and child care programs are cursed as the political incarnation of something that snorts, rolls in mud and stinks.

It's the Republican way of letting folks know government can't be bothered with doing anything of value. Build a planetarium in Chicago (so kids can see stars)? Pork! Renovate the lawn on the Washington Mall (and employ lots of landscapers)? Pork! Study a debilitating disease by testing a mutation of it on fruit flies (curing thousands of sufferers)? Frivolous, pointy-headed pork!

I want to call an end to Pork-bashing. Sure--let's not spend money on nuisance projects--like, for instance, the NSA domestic spy program (or paying Blackwater's invoice)!--but since we're going to get taxed no matter what, how about we spend the money on some seriously porky stuff. Like libraries, maybe, or transit centers. I can smell the bacon just by thinking about it.

--Renaissance

Before unity, before terror

Luchy

A Predictable Updike Appreciation?

Is it true, as All-Poets-are-Thieves says, that David Foster Wallace took a hatchet to Updike? I confess not to have known.

Sad they are both gone--but having paid full price for the hardcover, I couldn't get through ten pages of "Infinite Jest" without feeling I was being held up like a liquor store in a bad neighborhood.

Updike at his best--Rabbit, Run and and Rabbit Redux--was one of those writers who, if you were also a writer, made you sweat. How did he get verbs to do so much work for him (as in "rain sobbing down") without seeming to work very hard? How did he manage to make soaring prose out of ordinary, even tawdry material? For this reader, Updike, when he was in his element, nailed mid-century America the way a lepidopterist tacks butterflies to a board.

Sure, I couldn't really get through "Brazil" and barely wanted to know who did what in "Couples" and kind of couldn't give a hoot about Bech and his Book: but if you haven't tucked into "Of the Farm" or the Rabbits or the Centaurs, you've missed out on what post-WW2 America really felt like (or at least it seems so to a nearly too-young-to-know boomer).

And yes, I too liked reading his occasional New Yorker essay as long as I was able to keep from picturing him writing from somewhere in Connecticut clad in white shoes.

--Renaissance

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

All poets are thieves, thieves of fire, fugitives of the gods. Some novelists can attain quasi-poetic powers of artistry but such souls are all too uncommon. I am listening to an interview with American novelist John Updike, who passed away yesterday at the age of seventy-six. I've found many of his New Yorker reviews to be quite enlightening and well written, but, boy, I've never been able to finish, have hardly been able to even begin, one of his books. Is there someone in Tempest Land to call me out, call me a philistine, and recommend some really primo Updikeana? I recently read David Foster Wallace's (R.I.P., dear D.) 1997 hatchet piece about Updike (collected in Foster Wallace's wonderful 2006 essay collection, Consider the Lobster) and tend to agree all too much. Foster Wallace sees a generational gap as one of the prime detractions; another being the incessant stylistic excess. Amen, brother. Any Updike-o-philes across the land? Please, teach the way if it is teachable. J/C

Andrew Edwards

A couple of weeks ago, I flew to the opening of Andrew Edwards' show in Norfolk, VA "American Dreams".

Below is an excerpt of a review published in Portfolio magazine:

"Andrew Edwards. . .is an American scene painter. Well, sort of. In his cool, clean-lined world of exaggerated deep space receding at eye level, the influence of film noir is both seen and felt. Through these meticulous acrylic paintings, he explores—with his tongue somewhat in his cheek—how seemingly normal American lives are intersected and mediated by the bizarre and by the vague threat of danger: a fire on a populated hillside, a train bearing down on an automobile or, more peculiarly, a glassy-eyed figure in a top hat and a ferocious tiger in a rusted-out car in a dark field near an amusement park

Improbable juxtapositions of ancient and modern references within a mid-century context are provocatively unsettling, as are the artist’s mask-wearing figures who interact normally with those around them. “Caesar and Pontiac” features Mom, Dad and the kids in the family station wagon driving past a forlorn town and cemetery into a bucolic landscape. However, Mom is wearing a bird mask and a small menagerie of creatures shares the back seats with the children. A somber sculptural bust of Julius Caesar stares with unseeing eyes from the bottom left. And the bare legs and midriff of a striped miniskirt-wearing woman appear about to float out of the scene at the top right like an untethered balloon.

Together, the paintings raise the question of whether there is any such thing as a normal American life. And they make you halfway hope there’s not." -- Betsy DiJulio


Luchy