The Best American Poetry

Is the Avant-Garde Dead? What say ye, Camille?

Is it time to admit that avant-garde is a phenomenon of the 19h and 20th century? Camille Paglia think so:
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It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
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Moreover,
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Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.
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I quote from Camille Paglia's essay "How Capitalism Can Save Art" in the Wall Street Journal, October 6-7, 2012, p. C3.

It may also be "high time" to retire that impoverished term post-modernist, that sad token of belatedness, which has lost any of the descriptive power it may once have had, -- DL

What Made Freud Think of That? [by David Lehman]

A definitive example of the spontaneous aphorism:
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One is irresistibly reminded of an incident in the French Chamber when capital punishment was being debated. A member had been passionately supporting its abolition and his speech was being received with tumultuous applause, when a voice from the hall called out: 'Que messieurs les assassins commencent!' [Let the murderers make the first move.]

-- Freud.Civilization and Its Discontents
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OK, everyone. In the course of writing, Civilization and Its Discontents, what argument or quotation "irresistibly reminded" Freud of this incident?

I wonder whether others will concur when I say that Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the most irresistible titles of the twentieth century. -- DL

O Canada! [by Northrop Frye]

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One of the derivations proposed for the name Canada is a Portuguese phrase meaning 'nobody here.'
-- Northrop Frye (in The Modern Century, 1967)

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Compare to Gertrude Stein, "There's no there there," on Oakland. -- DL

"First I recognized that you were very clever" Eero Saarinen lists Aline Bernstein Louchheim's good qualities

From "Eero Saarinen:Shaping the Future."  Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, 2009
-- sdh

"I'd say a Mass for his soul." Graham Greene's Wish

from Harpers, December 2007
-- sdh

Joseph Conrad on Good Intentions

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"It's always so difficult to know what to do for the best," Fyne assured me. It is. Good intentions stand in their own way so much. Whereas if you want to do harm to any one you needn't hesitate. You have only to go on. No one will reproach you with your mistakes or call you a confounded, clumsy meddler.
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from Chance

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A man who has had his way is seldom happy, for generally he finds that the way does not lead very far on this earth of desires which can never be fully satisfied.
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from Chance

Department of "Hamlet and Lear are gay"

Zoë Wanamaker, Geraldine McEwan and Elaine Paige in A Murder Is Announced

    "What sort of a place is Chipping Cleghorn?" asked Sir Henry.
    "A large, sprawling, picturesque village. Butcher, baker, grocer, quite a good antique shop--two tea shops . . . Cottages formerly lived in by agricultural laborers now converted and lived in by elderly spinsters and retired couples . . . "
    "I know," said Sir Henry. "Nice old pussies and retired colonels. Yes, if they noticed that advertisement they'd all come sniffing round at 6:30 to see what was up. Lord, I wish I had my own particular old pussy here. Wouldn't she like to get her nice ladylike teeth into this? Right up her street it would be."
   " Who's your own particular pussy, Henry? An aunt?"
    "No." Sir Henry sighed. "She's no relation." He said reverently: "She's just the finest detective God ever made. Natural genius cultivated in a suitable soil."
    He turned upon Craddock.
    "Don't you despise the old pussies in this village of yours my boy," he said. "In case this turns out to be a high-powered mystery, which I don't suppose for a moment it will, remember that an elderly unmarried woman who knits and gardens is streets ahead of any detective sergeant . . ."

from A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie, 1950  

Hail to thee, Hal David (1921-2012)

What do you get when you kiss a guy?

You get enough germs to catch pneumonia.

After you do, he'll never phone ya,

I'll never fall in love again.

Quote of the day: Jonathan Gold on writing reviews

"I write mostly positive reviews. I don’t write about places that don’t interest me. I’ve been doing this long enough, and I’ve closed enough restaurants. It’s very strange that forty people can be put out of work because I make an aesthetic judgment."

from Interview with Jonathan Gold, food critic.  The Believer, Sept 2012

The Good, the Bad, and "The New Yorker" [by DL]

The best New Yorker sentences of the summer appeared in John McPhee's piece "Editors & Publisher" (July 2, 2012).

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Editors of every ilk seem to think that titles are their prerogative -- that they can buy a piece, cut the title off the top, and lay on one of their own. When I was young, this turned my skin pink and caused horripilation. I should add that I encountered such editors almost wholly at magazines other than The New Yorker -- Vogue, Holiday, the Saturday Evening Post. The title is an integral part of a piece of writing, and one of the most important parts, and ought not to be written by anyone but the writer of what follows the title. Editors' habit of replacing an author's title with one of their own is like a photo of a tourist's head on the cardboard body of Mao Zedong.
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I chose this passage for the wonderful outlandish simile that nails it down and because I agree with McPhee in principle. He is certainly right about editors' sense of entitlement, to use the apt word. When I wrote for Newsweek, I rarely got to title any of my pieces, though I must admit that my senior editor very often improved on whatever I had proposed. The late Ken Auchincloss was especially gifted at headlines. And these are important. I have called headlines and captions the haiku of journalism, and I remember being pleased (though some associates grumbled) when Ken ordered writers to write the captions under photos illustrating their articles. (I forget what embarrassment provoked this change.) Among my favorite headlines: the sublime "Rose is a Red" (which was on the cover of Sports Illustrated when Pete Rose returned to Cincinnati in the 1980s). The Newsweek caption I enjoyed writing most was "Laurels for Mr. Warren's Profession" when Robert Penn Warren was named the nation's first official poet laureate in 1986 (if memory serves).

That takes care of the good. As for the bad, well, sometimes the bad is so bad it's good ("Though a strapping five-nine today -- closer to five-nine and a half, really -- in the prepubescent days of my love affair with sports I was a shrimp"), or it's bad on purpose ("A little history is always useful"), or it's just bad when stripped out of its context when that context consists of banal word-clusters (e.g., "in a world characterized mainly by mobility, change, and uncertainty"). The quotes come from Louis Menand's pre-Olympics navel-gazer, "Glory Days," in the issue of August 6. The last is followed immediately by this:
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No matter what happens to us next year, there will be a Super Bowl.
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The statement, while not nearly as funny in context as out of it, should have an admonitory effect on writers who value their sentences as much as their paragraphs. Perhaps the magazine might use "there will always be a Super Bowl" as a tag for odd witticisms on the order of "there will always be an England." Was it the same author who, in an earlier piece, characterized his father as a snob on the grounds that he favored good grammar and correct usage?  -- DL