The Best American Poetry

What is Postmodernism? No one knows but David Lehman hazards a guess

D a v i d   L e h m a n The Questions of Postmodernism What do the following have in common? A poem about the characters in a book, and about the reader of that book, and about what they are doing when the book is not being read. [The poem, "Reading in Place," is in Mark Strand's collection The Continuous Life (1990).] An American television series combining the elements of a murder mystery, a soap opera, a parody of a murder mystery, and a parody of a soap opera, in which the expected generic conventions occur but ironically, everything happening as if between invisible quotation marks. [The series is Twin Peaks by David Lynch (1990).] A British television series in which a hardboiled detective plot -- long on wisecracks, tough talk, trenchcoats, and mean streets -- is systematically punctuated by the crooning of romantic tunes from the 1940s. The incongruousness of the juxtaposition is calculated, dramatizing that the cynical detective is in fact a disillusioned romantic in the Sinatra manner. [The series is The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter (1986).] A story whose characters include the pieces on a board game as well as the people who manipulate them. What is the inner life of Colonel Mustard? Miss Scarlet? Professor Plum? [The story is "A Game of Clue" from Steven Millhauser's book The Barnum Museum (1990).] A book of sestinas about Perry Mason, Della Street, Paul Drake, Hamilton Burger, and Lieutenant Tragg. [The book is The Whole Truth by James Cummins (1986).] A novel about the adventures of a feline character from a once beloved, now defunct comic strip, who gets to be psychoanalyzed, witnesses the development of the atomic bomb, and speaks in a punning idiolect in which "capitalism" becomes "keepitallism," psychoanalysis "sighcowandallis," nuclear physics "newclear fizzsticks," and virus "whyrus." [The novel, based on George Herriman's comic strip of the same name, is Krazy Kat by Jay Cantor (1988).] A novel about the lives of movie protagonists before and after the Hollywood films in which they figure. What happens to Rick Blaine after he and Captain Renault toast the beginning of their beautiful friendship at the end of Casablanca? What does George Bailey do with all the money he gets at the close of It's a Wonderful Life? What was Kay Corleone's childhood like, and how does she get along with her estranged son after her husband exiles her from the family in The Godfather, part II? [The novel that answers these and other such questions is Suspects by David Thompson (1985).]

A deliberate mistranslation of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem, "Aus Einem April" ("From an April") beginning with the line "We dust the walls"; Rilke's poem begins with the line "Wieder duftet der Wald," which means "Again the forest is fragrant." [The poem is Frank O'Hara's "Aus Einem April" (1954).] A sestina that contains the name of a flower, a tree, a fruit, a game, and a famous old lady, as well as the word bathtub, in every line, e.g., "In the apple tree Queen Mary of the Chrysanthemums shared a grape rook bathtub with her insect lamp." [The poem, written collaboratively by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, is entitled "Crone Rhapsody" (c. 1956).] A poem in which the parts of speech turn into human characters springing into action, e.g.: "A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, 'And! But!' / But the Adjective did not emerge." [The poem, "Permanently," is in Kenneth Koch's collection Thank You (1962).] Kenneth Koch, New York, April 1985. Photograph copyright © John Tranter, 1985, 1998 A painting of a Dutch Masters cigar box, whose label itself reproduces a famous Rembrandt; also, paintings of the Camel cigarette label, the French hundred franc note, and the menu at the Cedar Tavern. [The paintings were done in the 1950s by Larry Rivers.] A novel suggested by the contents of a rich eccentric's will, which directs his would-be heirs to solve three perplexing riddles: "When was a stone not a king? What was La Messe de Sire Fadevant? Who shaved the Old Man's Beard?" [The novel is The Conversions by Harry Mathews (1962).] What all these have in common is that each can be said to embody the spirit of postmodernism . The first seven are relatively recent instances; the works by Ashbery, Koch, Mathews, O'Hara, and Rivers were ahead of the wave.       What is it?       This, the central question of postmodernism, was stated unsurpassingly by T. S. Eliot in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Having introduced the notion of an "overwhelming question," Eliot goes on to forbid the reader from finding out what it is: "Oh, do not ask 'What is it?'"       An accurate paraphrase of the question is "What isn't it?", for in the way of any catch-all term postmodernism has come to comprise all manner of phenomena, some worthwhile, some creepy. Quit stalling. What is postmodernism? Nobody knows for sure, except you're supposed to say that before talking confidently about it. Best not to be too solemn. No one, with the exception of a few academics, really likes the term, but it won't go away, and it does afford a way to make sense of some recent developments in American fiction and poetry. Postmodernism is best understood not as a rigid concept or a coherent ideological stance but as a bundle of shared impulses and tendencies amounting to a kind of common spirit. More than anything else postmodernism is an attitude, and that attitude is definitively ironic. It revels in comedy and exalts the spirit of parody and play. It treats the the monuments of tradition in particular with irreverence. The distinction between artifacts of high and low culture gets leveled. Characters and lives are confused. Poems based on intricate rules are written in a kind of partnership with the language, an attempt to bring out the poetry latent in the language rather than to impose meaning on language. Generic conventions -- particularly those of gangster movies, detective novels, and comic strips -- are cheerfully appropriated, and just as cheerfully deviated from, as the author wishes. Postmodernism is the triumph of irony.       Fragments are postmodernist, as is the act of completing somebody else's unfinished work. Hoaxes by nature are postmodernist. So are pseudonyms. The Portuguese poet Pessoa, who wrote poems under many pseudonyms, each of which he outfitted with a full biography and a distinctive style, was an arch-postmodernist avant la lettre or -- to use a phrase favored by the members of the Oulipo, the French society of mathematically-inclined writers committed to the development of cunning new poetic forms -- a plagiarist by anticipation.       When Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959) tries to die like Humphrey Bogart in a '30s gangster movie, he is announcing the official birth of postmodernism. (Belmondo spends much of that movie posing in front of old Bogart posters.) The patron saints of postmodernism are Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, writers who favor parables, labyrinths, mirror games, riddles and linguistic oddities, false-bottomed narratives, artifice conscious of itself as artifice. The paradigmatic postmodernist gesture is the one performed by Borges's Pierre Menard, who sets out to write a book called Don Quixote that is identical in every particular to the Don Quixote of Cervantes -- word for word -- but is nevertheless superior to that of Cervantes, because it would be harder to write the book in Argentina in the twentieth century than in Spain in the sixteenth when, presumably, the medieval chivalrous ideal was closer to hand. Repetition is postmodernism in action. Everything happens twice, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce": Karl Marx's famous remark about history repeating itself is obligatory in any discussion of postmodernism.       Games are postmodernist: the board game Clue, for one example, and the sestina verse form, for another. David Trinidad combines the two in his sestina entitled "Detective Notes," which begins with this stanza --     Mrs. White with the Candlestick in the Hall     Prof. Plum with the Lead Pipe in the Lounge     Col. Mustard with the Rope in the Dining Room     Mrs. Peacock with the Wrench in the Kitchen     Mr. Green with the Revolver in the Conservatory     Miss Scarlett with the Knife in the Study -- and works variants on the formula for the next 33 lines.

Poets Elaine Equi and David Trinidad, New York, circa 1990. Photograph copyright © John Tranter, 1998

Experiments in discontinuous narration are postmodernist, as is the attempt to incorporate the texture of multiplicity into fiction. Robert Coover does both at once in his famous story "The Babysitter." He constantly interrupts his narrative, scrambling the order of events, and he provides different outcomes for the same fictional predicament. You will find the ideal of multiplicity in its purest form in a novel entitled April March by the Borgesian character Herbert Quain. A purely conceptual novel by a non-existent author, April March branches out backwards: an event is described in chapter one; each of the following three chapters lays out a plausible prior event leading up to the one described in chapter one; for each of these three, three subsequent chapters detail prior events that could have led to it. Borges explains: "The entire work, thus, constitutes nine novels; each novel contains three long chapters. (The first chapter, naturally, is common to all.) The temper of one of these novels is symbolic; that of another, psychological; of another, communist; of still another, anti-communist; and so on." It is an experiment in multiplicity and at the same time a quizzing of causality, and it proffers itself in the course of several paragraphs. "The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance," Borges wrote in defense of his procedures. "To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary." ¶ [see endnote 1] Jorge Luis Borges In some ways the postmodernist writer is in the position of the schoolteacher -- in an anecdote told by the great critic Walter Benjamin -- who gradually acquired a library by writing all the works whose titles interested him in booksellers' catalogues. It is as if all the titles were already in existence and it remains for the writer to choose among them. ¶ [see endnote 2]       The spirit of postmodernism is fundamentally aesthetic in the sense propounded by Kierkegaard in Either / Or. For the aesthete, Kierkegaard writes, "boredom is a root of all evil." To overcome it, he recommends what he calls the "rotation method": "The whole secret lies in arbitrariness. People usually think it easy to be arbitrary, but it requires much study to succeed in being arbitrary so as not to lose oneself in it, but so as to derive satisfaction from it. One does not enjoy the immediate but something quite different which he arbitrarily imports into it. You go to see the middle of a play, you read the third part of a book. By this means you insure yourself a very different kind of enjoyment from that which the author has been so kind as to plan for you. You enjoys something entirely accidental; you consider the whole of existence from this standpoint; let its reality be stranded thereon." Drawing of Kierkegaard by his cousin The example Kierkegaard gives cannot be bettered: "There was a man whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue. Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking. I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body. From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed; I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe the perspiration on his brow and at the end of his nose." ¶ [see endnote 3] What Kiekegaard calls the "rotation method," we may call irony. What time is it? The postmodernist answer is, "Later than it's ever been." The prefix post announces the anxiety of belatedness -- of living in the shadow of some greater event, having arrived too late to affect things. (Shelley, the poet of aftermath, names the condition when he describes "the awful shadow of some unseen power" in his great "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." The spirit Shelley addresses is evanescent, "like memory of music fled" or like a vision that refuses to stay.) The implication of that post is that the present exists less in its own right than as a sequel -- just as the phrase postwar era applied to the years 1945 to 1960, suggests a domestic sequel to World War II. The present is felt to be somehow inferior to, or less consequential than, the immediate past.       There is a simple historical explanation for this general condition. The public events and personalities of the first half of the century, and in particular the period from 1914 to 1945, overshadow their counterparts since. The period in question encompassed two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, Hitler and the Nazis, Stalin and Stalinism, Mussolini and Fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, and the making and dropping of the atomic bomb. All you need do is compare today's world leaders -- in stature, in dramatic interest, and in world historical importance -- with Churchill, Roosevelt, Gandhi, et al. to become instantly aware of a great discrepancy. For people born after 1945, there is the sense that the key events defining our collective imaginations took place back then, before we were born, the sense that the events that provide the terms and touchstones of our moral beliefs and philosophical doubts date to this earlier period.       This historical inferiority complex helps to account for the mood of nostalgia that pervades the worlds of art and entertainment today. The creative life of our period is haunted by that of the immediate past, as postmodernism is haunted by modernism. This gets fetishized by, for example, Roy Lichtenstein in his ironic homages to Mondrian and Matisse, or by Woody Allen in movies that constantly compare themselves to earlier, more heroic treatments of the same theme. Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), for example, deliberately reminds viewers of Double Indemnity, Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho. In desperation some artists may affect a self-consciously original manner, but that is whistling in the dark. The governing feeling is that originality is impossible. Reality is a matter of repetition. As the popular solecism has it, "It's déjà-vu all over again." The poet Andrei Codrescu has summed up one major difference between modernism and postmodernism: "The modernist command was Pound's 'Make It New'. The postmodern imperative is 'Get It Used'." Say you wanted to write a postmodernist novel. Where would you begin? With the plot. For example: A man identifying himself as David Kaminsky, 32, hires a private investigator, who looks like Danny Kaye in a trenchoat, to find his father. It turns out that Danny Kaye's real name is David Kaminsky. Kaye keeps a diary in which he writes things like, "David Kaminsky is a meaningless term, and so is 'David Kaminsky.'" Days pass. The phone rings. The voice on the other end tells him that the corpse of a man answering his client's description has turned up in the East River. Why all this irony?       Because as Philip Roth observed thirty years ago, reality in the United States so far outstrips the inventive capacity of any satirist. Because in our society knowledge tends to equal disillusionment, and any affirmation of belief must therefore be made in the very teeth of disbelief. Because the legacy of Vietnam, and the continuing saga of racial hatred and rage, have made the old patriotic pieties seem as redolent of childhood as Tinkerbell. Or because there is something fundamentally unserious about our culture. Because you can't write a love scene the same way when the divorce rate approaches 50 percent. And you can't write a well-made morality play, whose idea is that you can't be happy unless you're good, or an old-fashioned detective novel, whose moral is that crime doesn't pay, when the benefits of an insider trading scam or a crude physical attack on a competitor far outweigh the penalties. Where did postmodernism come from? From architecture. While there is only a limited amount of overlap between architectural modernism and literary modernism, there is a strong sense of affinity between architectural postmodernism and literary postmodernism. Implicit in both is an emphasis on parody and pastiche. A prime example of postmodernist architecture is Philip Johnson's AT&T building in midtown Manhattan with its famous Chippendale top. The incongruity is deliberate: it is held to be a positive value to use the styles associated with different movements or periods without fear of incoherence. Literary postmodernism is similarly eclectic, inconsistent. The postmodernist author tends to blur genres, stealing from all over, conflating kinds of diction, moving from the funny pages to the classics with the speed of a distracted newspaper reader in the subway, who jumps from the budgetary standstill on Capitol Hill to the tight race in the American League East without necessarily finishing either story.       Postmodernist architecture is not the same thing as deconstructive architecture, whose apotheosis to date was a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1988. The objective of this movement seems to be the perpetration of ugliness. The deconstructive architect wants to locate, and to emphasize, the contaminating flaw in an architectural structure. Like a literary text scrutinized in a deconstructive seminar, the structure must be seen to collapse from within. The whole movement can be summed up as a perverse effort to refute Abraham Lincoln's statement that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Can you give an example of postmodernism that you wholeheartedly endorse?

Cat: "Postmodernism? Endorse? Donnez moi une break!"   Rover: "Hey, pal,take it easy, will ya?"   Paris, 1992. Photograph copyright © John Tranter, 1992, 1997

I admire many of the works I've already mentioned, but let me give an example from modern music. In his Sinfonia (1968) the composer Luciano Berio lifts the Scherzo movement from Gustav Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, treating it, in his words, "like a container within whose framework a large number of references is proliferated, interrelated and integrated into the flowing structure of the original work itself." There are allusions to Bach, Schoenberg, Debussy, Ravel, Strauss, Berlioz, Brahms, Berg, Hindemith, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, Ives, and others. Berio superimposes a chorus speaking lines taken from various sources, Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable among them. The music is rich and passionate, full of flights of elation and despair, and the juxtaposition with the text creates some remarkable explosions. With the music rushing toward a climax a male voice says, "And all this can't stop the wars, can't make the old younger or lower the price of bread," a female voice says, "say it again, louder," and he says it again, louder, and the music seems to crash like a wave against the rocks. The effect is sublime, and it doesn't diminish the Mahler; on the contrary, Sinfonia renews one's appreciation of Mahler's Scherzo at the same time as it creates something quite new out of it. How about an example of postmodernism that you utterly despise? Postmodernism at its creepiest is the Chambers Brothers singing "The Time Has Come Today" in a commercial for Fidelity Investments, and the Kinks singing "All Day and All of the Night" in a commercial for Jolly Rancher fruit drink, and Janis Joplin singing "Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?" in a commercial for Mercedes-Benz. Presumably with irony, Salman Rushdie summarizes the worst in postmodernism. "The very concept of meaning is now outdated, nerdy, pre-ironic," Rushdie writes. "Welcome to the New Incomprehensibility: gibberish with attitude." ¶ [see endnote 4] Did You Ever Hear "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?" You did if you saw Michelangelo Antonioni's movie Blow-Up (1965), which has the Lovin' Spoonful's song "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?" on its soundtrack. Blow-Up is the postmodernist apotheosis of the murder mystery. The nameless photographer played by David Hemmings in the movie is an allegorical stand-in for both the filmmaker and the viewer. He has witnessed a murder inadvertently and unconsciously. The only evidence that there has been a murder is the enlargment of a photograph he had taken thinking he was merely photographing a parkscape. The murder mystery as a genre asks, whodunnit? Blow-Up asks, what happened? And leaves the answer enshrouded in ambiguity. At the end of the movie a game of tennis is played without a ball. And as the camera pulls back, the hero watching the imaginary tennis game becomes smaller and smaller and suddenly disappears.       The poignant indecisiveness of the photographer in Blow-Up makes him a postmodernist hero. It is not so much that he lacks conviction as that he suffers from a surfeit of epistemological uncertainty. There is another kind of postmodernist hero for whom it may be said, as Delmore Schwartz said of his Partisan Review colleague Philip Rahv, that he has plenty of convictions but doesn't let them stand in the way. If Bill Clinton is the first postmodernist president, that is because he seems prepared to embrace all initiatives, including contradictory ones, with no lasting allegiance to any, in a spirit of pragmatic eclecticism. The president is frequently accused of flip-flops in policy matters, but these can be seen in postmodernist terms as a ready example of what John Ashbery calls "fence-sitting raised to an esthetic ideal." What's hot and what's not? In Marshall McLuhan's terms, the Abstract Expressionists (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, et al) were "hot" in the sense that radio as a medium is hot or that the personalities of Roosevelt and Churchill and Hitler were hot. An Abstract Expressionist painting was the product of great difficulty and struggle, even when that painting consisted of a single vertical stripe on a massive red canvas. The avatars of Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, who supplanted the Abstract Expressionists as the stars of the art world, were "cool" in the sense that television is cool. "You have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you're going to be a good abstract expressionist," said Rauschenberg, for whom art meant never having to say you're sorry. As for Warhol, his soup cans and soap pads were insolently easy, nonchalant, no sweat. Other cool personalities of the early 1960s include John F. Kennedy, James Bond, Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Carson, and the Project Mercury astronauts. Modernism in this particular sense was a hot phenomenon; postmodernism, a cool one. William Butler Yeats: very hot. Robert Lowell: hot. John Ashbery: cool as a cucumber.       The best way to capture McLuhan's sense of hot and cool is to compare a radio announcer's play-by-play account of a baseball game (hot) with an airy TV commentator's take on the same action (cool). Radio requires the listener's imaginative involvement; TV turns the viewer into a passive spectator. Only in the movies does a mad TV newscaster incite people to open their windows and scream their frustrations out into the street. What is the relation of postmodernism to television and the movies? Postmodernism is equally the product of disillusionment and of its opposite: the enchantment of illusions. The disillusionment is expressed through irony. The enchantment is celebrated through the movies -- through cinematic metaphors and images, narrative devices associated with the movies, or references to specific films. It is possible that T. S. Eliot introduced the cinema into poetry when he wrote of "a magic lantern throwing the nerves in patterns on a screen," but it was Frank O'Hara who put the movies into poems: "How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime / and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left." In an early poem O'Hara likened the avid moviegoer to Leda ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan: "Our / limbs quicken even / to disgrace under / this white eye as / if there were real / pleasure in loving / a shadow and caress- / ing a disguise!"

Frank O'Hara on WNDT-TV, 1964, talking with Barnett Newman.

Film is hot. Videotape is cool. In contrast with the movies, which are associated with the glamour of nostalgia, television is identified with the present, with childhood and adolescence, and with mediocrity -- a mediocrity so perfect you'd think that TV producers and directors had consciously set their sights on it.       Because television dominates the living room there is the strong sense that our reality, our public reality, is mediated: we know that the "news" is not what happens but what is reported by "the media." "Yet it is all offered as 'today's news,' as if we somehow had a right to it, as though it were a part of our lives / That we'd be silly to refuse. Here, have another -- crime or revolution? Take your pick." These lines from John Ashbery's long poem "The Skaters" (in Rivers and Mountains, 1966) imply that one way of dealing with the "news" is to refuse it. A determined effort to ignore the news or to include current events with a kind of neutral conviviality is a mark of the New York School. James Schuyler's "The Morning of the Poem" begins on "July 8 or July 9 the eighth surely, certainly 1976 that I know" and goes on to chronicle the poet's days until the end of August. Look for any mention of the televised news of that summer, which included the Republican and Democratic national conventions and the Montreal Olympic games, and you'd look in vain.       The "news" enters recent American fiction in a twisted form: where plot was, conspiracy shall be. A sense of perplexity about what is real goes together with a fascination with what is fake, simulated, spurious, constructed. A couple of years ago I read a news story about a man who manufactured replicas of the Maltese Falcon -- a fake of a fake, since the supposedly priceless, gem-encrusted piece of black avian statuary in both Dashiell Hammett's novel and John Huston's movie is a fake. The man's mail-order business was thriving.

Editor's note:                     . . . and is thriving still, on the Internet, at http://members.aol.com/maltlc/page1.htm. Let me quote: "Your own Maltese Falcon statuette . . . cast from original molds, in bonded marble, and finished in a black/bronze patina . . . The same bird that Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre held in their quivering hands . . . A beautiful and unique addition to any home . . . send a certified check or postal money order in the amount of $49.95 plus $7.50 s/h,(in the U.S.)." The same gentleman offers a replica set of steel balls, with reference to "Captain Quigg" [sic] of The Caine Mutiny.

It is possible that reality never existed in unmediated form. But it is certainly the case that never before have so many people held the conviction that this is so. The emphasis shifts from the what to the how of any statement: the means and medium of communication, the telling as opposed to the tale. This was announced with deadly accuracy by McLuhan thirty years ago.       But television's flattening of reality goes further. There is this paradox: nothing is real except what's on television, yet television makes everything unreal. In addition to turning viewers into laid-back voyeurs, television affords the most advanced technological means to divorce image from substance. Paranoia, a resonable response, becomes the characteristic mental condition of both the reader and the characters in postmodernist fiction. Since TV culture is the culture of the commercial and the paid political advertisement, there is always the lingering suspicion that what you see on the news was paid for, inauthentic, cooked up by some media specialist employed to fool some of the people all the time. It is not an accident that paranoia is a favorite postmodernist predicament: you get a strong dose of it in the novels of Don De Lillo and Thomas Pynchon, in the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and in the movies of Brian de Palma in his homage-to-Hitchcock period.       An outstanding TV skit from the 1980s shows us a comic impersonator of Ronald Reagan bumbling amiably outside the White House, befuddled and out of touch -- but once the reporters have left and he is safely behind closed doors, we see him clearly on top of the situation, giving orders, in complete control, a veritable tiger. In an age of irony, paranoia can have a comic edge. On the other hand, there was that memorable moment in 1983 when the editors of Newsweek decided to put the so-called Hitler diaries on the cover of the magazine. The hoax had not yet been exposed, but the writer of the cover story was taking no chances. Just in case his bosses had been conned, he wrote a perfect Newsweek sentence declaring that "it almost doesn't matter in the end" whether the diaries (for which the magazine had paid a great deal of money) turn out to be real or fake. There you have it in a nutshell, postmodernist paranoia: no way to distinguish truth from simulacrum, and in the end, someone reliably to say that it doesn't matter. "Real Television", New York, 1997, photo copyright © John Tranter, 1998 Television gave us white noise. In trailer parks, in motels, in apartments, in the lounge areas of college dormitories, in fitness centers and bars and public spaces of all kinds, the television is always on in the background, invading the place, heard though not listened to. It is only fair that the space of the postmodernist novel should be similarly invaded by second-hand language: canned laughter, the manic huckster's voice, the voice on the tape of a recorded telephone message, the memorized speech of the airplane flight attendant, and so forth. A good idea for a postmodernist story: a tale told exclusively through white noise and second-hand language.       The one really powerful episode in Oliver Stone's movie Natural Born Killers (1994) is that of the girl molested by her father, which Stone presents as if it were a situation comedy, laugh track and all. The incongruity produces a fine disturbance; in effect, Stone shows us what the paradigmatic TV family sitcom is busy repressing. That is one manifestation of the postmodernist attitude toward television. A more joyous one informs David Trinidad's poem "Reruns," which consists of seventeen haiku, each of which strictly observes the haiku's syllabic requirements, about television programs from the sixties.       Postmodernism and feminism seem to have converged in the figure of the Barbie doll. Barbie is the subject of a book by M. G. Lord (Forever Barbie, 1994) and of a virtual mini-genre of poems, including "Barbie's Ferrari" by Lynne McMahon and an entire sequence entitled It's My Body by Denise Duhamel.       Postmodernist hell is a comic nightmare: to be trapped inside the television, bouncing between channels, from quiz show to horse opera, as happens to Mr. and Mrs. Couch Potato in the comedy film Stay Tuned.       Does the postmodernist obsession with two-dimensionality -- as if our reality lacked a dimension -- come from a steady diet of television? No, from comic books. Even before Roy Lichtenstein's "true romance" paintings of the early 1960s, with their clinching couples and thought bubbles, bright colors and Benday dots, comic strips provided infectious imagery. Cartoon characters, escaping from the cartoonist's sketch pad, are featured in big-budget Hollywood films (Superman, Batman, Dick Tracy), but they also turn up regularly in highbrow writing. John Ashbery has a poem chonicling the adventures of "Daffy Duck in Hollwood." Art Spiegelman has won major book prizes for his two-volume comic book Maus, about his parents' experience of the Holocaust, in which the Jews are mice and the Nazis cats; Spiegelman doesn't diminish the gravity of his narrative, he just translates it into a demotic idiom. Steven Millhauser has a story called "Klassik Komix #1," which renders "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as if it were a comic book, with a paragraph of prose devoted to each panel. Nearly all of panel thirty-nine is taken up by a gigantic orange and red fruit against a black background: "The fruit has eyes and two thick black frowning eyebrows. In the lower left-hand-corner a tiny Alfred looks up at the fruit in alarm. In the thought balloon beside his head are the words: DO I DARE TO EAT A PEACH?"       Millhauser's story appeared in The Barnum Museum (1990). A few months after that book appeared in print, a freelance English cartoonist named Martin Rowson published The Waste Land in the form of a comic book. Translating Eliot's poem into comic-book imagery, Rowson added a hard-boiled detective idiom; in effect he showed The Waste Land through the lens of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. The Holy Grail becomes the Maltese Falcon, the figure of Tiresias is a drag queen, and the writing is full of sarcastic similes that are just slightly off: "At dusk the buzzards started screaming like a mother whose son has blown the week's drinking money on college fees." Who put the mustache on the Mona Lisa?

"Proust? Don't quote Proust at me! This isn't Deauville, you fuckwit!"

We live not in the era when a painter put a mustache on the Mona Lisa but in the era when that famous gesture became a cliche -- a time when such "shocks" are routine. "But today there is no point in looking to imaginative new methods / Since all of them are in constant use," wrote John Ashbery in "Definition of Blue" (in The Double Dream of Spring, 1970). Today the spirit of irony and parody must involve our own sacred objects. That is one of the brilliant strokes in Kenneth Koch's book One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (1988). The 112 short plays in the book exemplify the avant-garde impulse and mock it at the same time. There is an aura of cultural sexiness about being "avant-garde," though the term itself remains as slippery as ever. You can't define it, but you can demonstrate its possibilities over and over -- and that is Koch's mandate. Koch proposes, for example, six ways of turning Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy into an exemplary act of avant-garde theatre; he presents the same speech with six different sets of stage directions. In one case, the hero interrupts himself after the "sea of troubles" sentence -- he lights a cigarette, inhales, exhales, and walks offstage ("Smoking Hamlet"). In another, two actors go through the motions of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale while reciting Hamlet's speech ("Little Red Riding Hamlet"). In a third, a team of readers recites the speech one syllable at a time, changing their posture after every six syllables ("Team Hamlet"). The irreverence is not in regard to Hamlet but in regard to the avant-garde ideal that is seemingly embodied in these miniature verse dramas. My favorite play in the book is "After the Return of the Avant-Garde," which ends with this exchange:   "Which is more avant-garde -- a giraffe or an elephant?"   "A giraffe is more avant-garde, but an elephant is more surreal."   Why is there so much self-conscious artifice in postmodernist writing? Because you can't escape it. Once Pirandello let everyone in on the secret, the temptation to interrupt the play and introduce the author was irresistible. The modernist epiphany is the characters' recognition that they are in the end merely characters in a play. The postmodernist epiphany is the playwright's determination to provide two mutually exclusive endings to the drama, as Ashbery does in his play "The Compromise" (1955). In a modernist universe, the traveler penetrates to the heart of darkness and tells a lie to keep the reality of that darkness from a person whose illusions he does not want to shatter. In a postmodernist universe, the traveler arrives in Marlon Brando's hut where the great man has been reading Borges. Artifice doesn't bother to disguise itself. In Ashbery's one-act play "The Heroes" (1950), Theseus explains that he had penetrated to the heart of the maze only to find that the fabled Minotaur he came to conquer was nothing but a rusted unambitious piece of stage-machinery. What accounts for the popularity of the sestina in the postmodernist era? It is an article of the postmodernist faith that language has a mind and a will of its own, an autonomous existence full of meaning and mystery. Unwilling to wait for lightning to strike, the poet manufactures inspiration by linguistic invention -- by playing with words rather than by trying to exercise mastery and control over them. Writing a sestina is an excellent example. You write a sestina for the same reason you try a Surrealist procedure (e.g., "Death: Male or Female" as an automatic-writing assignment). The object in each case is to discover what you know (or what you don't know that you know). A word game tricked out as a mathematical structure, or vice versa, the sestina consists of thirty-nine lines, distributed over six six-line stanzas and a final triplet; six words, occurring in a prescribed order, conclude all thirty-nine lines of the poem. The poet has to spend so much time solving the formal puzzle -- how to get the six end-words (or teleutons) to occur and recur in the exact order required -- that there is little time left to worry about the coherence of the imagery or the logic of the argument. The censorious ego, being otherwise occupied, steps aside and lets the poet's unconscious shoot directly onto the page. That is one important reason this medieval form is more popular in the English speaking world today than anywhere ever before. In that case, how do you account for the popularity of the prose poem, which lacks line-breaks, let alone the complicated rules of composition in the sestina form? The prose poem was born of rebellion. Charles Baudelaire, who created the genre, overthrew at a stroke the tyranny of the Alexandrine line, which was more dominant in France than blank verse ever was in England. Baudelaire's prose poems are energized by the subversive spirit of infernal laughter. Charles Baudelaire, 1854, by Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon). [Rimbaud was born in 1854. J.T.] For poets ever since, the prose poem has afforded an opportunity to perpetrate a dark joke. This alone would endear the prose poem to the postmodernist poet. There is a level of self-conscious irony in many recent American examples. "In order to free poetry of its mannerism and ticks, the prose poem must not take itself too seriously," writes Charles Simic, an exponent of the form. "Impossible to write, illegitimate in the view of so many poets and critics, it must remain a pariah and an object of ridicule to survive." ¶ [see endnote 5] What makes laughter infernal? Samuel Beckett in Watt explained that there are three distinctive types of laughter. There is the bitter laugh, the hollow laugh, and the mirthless laugh. The bitter laugh is the ethical laugh; it laughs at that which is not good. The hollow laugh is the intellectual laugh; it laughs at that which is not true. But the supreme laugh is the mirthless laugh, for it dares to laugh at that which is unhappy. Guess which of the three is the laugh of postmodernism. Where will it end? A postmodernist trick is to pull the rug out from under the reader. The speaker at the close of his presentation, sneaking a look at his wristwatch, smiles enigmatically and says, "What I've just said isn't true." I am tempted to do something like that. To say that postmodernism, so useful in giving academics something to talk about, is a fiction. To argue that we are not post-anything. We are, miserably or splendidly, ourselves, living now, living here. What I've been calling postmodernism is really an extension of modernism, not a repudiation of it. "Postmodernism is a misnomer," writes Janet Malcolm. "The architects and urban planners laboring under its rubric haven't abandoned modernism but have continued to work serenely in its idiom." You could make the same argument with regard to art and literature. It could be that nothing in postmodernism is new: all the tendencies of postmodernism were already there, if only embryonically, in modernism. In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot, the high priest of modernism, introduced the techniques of collage and fragmentation so dear to postmodernism. Even the tendency to pull the rug out from under the reader goes back to modernist works by Henry James and Joseph Conrad in which a lie or a belated revelation throws everything into doubt. Well, maybe. But when I look at my own enduring critical preoccupations -- my fascination with hoaxes and fragments, with hard-boiled murder mysteries and forties flicks, with parodies and paranoia, and most of all with the poets of the New York School and their painter pals -- I know they suggest so strong an affinity with the postmodernist spirit that to deny it as a potent force could only seem disingenuous. The real question, as I see it, is whether the aesthetic point of view embodied in postmodernism can coexist with the moral point of view that makes ethical behavior possible. Kiekegaard in Either / Or suggests that the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical is absolute -- one must decide between them. But good pre-postmodernist that he is, Kierkegaard cloaks himself behind no fewer than three pseudonyms in Either / Or, and it is entirely possible for a reader of that book to convert "either / or" into "both / and." I would like to think that the devices, the attitude and tone of postmodernism can be used -- and used with a vengeance -- for moral as well as aesthetic ends. Susan Sontag in her "Notes on Camp" said that the artistic temper of our century is composed of homosexual aestheticism and Jewish moral earnestness in concert. That is well said. It remains a challenge to bring these forces together in some way that preserves their individual functions and transcends them in the lasting form of art. Endnotes: ¶ 1 Jorge Luis Borges, "Prologue," The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), in Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove, 1962), p. 15. ¶ 2 Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 61. ¶ 3 Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 295. ¶ 4 Salman Rushdie, "Reservoir Frogs (Or Places Called Mama's)," The New Yorker, September 23, 1996, p. 104. ¶ 5 Charles Simic, "The Poetry of Village Idiots," in Verse, vol. 13, no. 1 (1996) p. 8. This piece first appeared, in a different form, in the collection of essays The Big Question, published by the University of Michigan Press, ISBN 0-472-06583-1 (paperback).   David Lehman is a poet and critic, and the series editor of the annual anthology The Best American Poetry. He divides his time between Ithaca, N.Y., and New York City. His latest book of poems is Valentine Place (Scribner). You can read his account of the famous Ern Malley Hoax in

This essay was delivered as a lecture in Tokyo in 1990, at Bennington College in January 1994 and at the University of Cincinnati as one of the Taft Lectures in 1994. It was published as a pamphlet by John Lane and appeared in the AWP's "Writer's Chronicle" as well as in Lehman's book of literary essays, "The Big Question," in 1995. John Tranter of "Jacket" magazine posted it here. The essay has since been revised.

Happy birthday to you, Franz Schubert (January 31, 1797)

 

Columbia College 1967 #29 [by Mitch Sisskind]

Carlson Fenwick, Professor

In our years-long correspondence concerning
All things Shakespearian Alan Grosbeck and I
Sometimes amused ourselves by concocting
Hare-brained interpretations and pursuing
Them to their risibly illogical conclusions.
Aware for instance that in Elizabethan times
‘Nothing’ was a crude slang word for the
Female genitalia, we searched past the oft-cited
Double entendre of Much Ado About Nothing
And discovered that "nothing" was possibly
Shakespeare’s favorite word. In King Lear
Nothing appears eighteen times in just
Fourteen speeches including Cordelia’s
First words to Lear – ‘Nothing, my lord’ --
And in Lear as a whole we found "nothing"
Thirty-four times in twenty-nine speeches
While in The Winter’s Tale "nothing" appears
Thirty-four times in twenty-six speeches.
There’s plenty of nothing in Hamlet too.
So what was Shakespeare up to there?
Possibly nothing. But plenty of nothing.
We had some good laughs over it.

I miss Alan, interred now at Mount Auburn,
And he came to mind yesterday as I read
Sonnet 73 and recalled how we used to
Imagine all the possibilities of who is
Speaking to whom in these fourteen lines.
Oh, spare me the dull and obvious banality
That it’s an old man addressing a younger.
It could be an old woman and her cat or
A young girl and her doll. Why the hell not?
But then a rather novel interpretation came
To me which I wholeheartedly welcomed.
Was there really something new to say
About one of the most commented-upon
Poems in the English language? I hurried
To my bookshelves and consulted Dryden,
Johnson, Coleridge, the Marxists, Freudians,
The New Critics, and even old Yeats whose
Remark that Shakespeare is only a mass of
Magnificent fragments expresses not at all a
Denigration but instead suggests an analogy
Between Shakespeare and the post-Newtonian
Description of the whole far-flung Universe.

But it seems that no scholar in any age has
Proposed that the ‘speaker’ in Sonnet 73
Is actually the poem itself, nor that the subject
Of the poem is the experience of reading it.
‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’ --
A coy invitation: If you’ve got a moment to
Engage your imagination, the poem says,
These ink spots on a page can conjure up
A windy fall day, some trees, and a ruined
Church or monastery, perhaps one of those
Closed by Henry VIII. And that’s only the
Beginning of what I, the poem, can disclose
If – and it’s a big if -- you have what it takes
To see it. My coy invitation was also a challenge.
You may ‘behold’ the images, or maybe not,
But the final couplet will offer a congratulation
On what ‘thou perceiv’st’ – with a reminder that
Perception won’t last forever. “This’ in line 13
Refers to the inevitability of conclusion, which
Has been universalized in the poem and is now
Demonstrated by the end of the poem itself.
Is there more? Yes, or maybe not. Oh dear God.

Ed. note: "There’s plenty of nothing in Hamlet, too." True, and the studious reader will note the allusion to this great song from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

No use complainin'. . .

Readers, vote for the best version. -- DL

Paul Berman on Saul Bellow in Jerusalem

from "Bellow in Jerusalem" by Paul Berman (Tablet, January 21, 2020):

<<<
In the single most remarkable passage of Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow frets over his own ability to see and appreciate miracles and supernatural astonishments. He wants to see and appreciate, but he worries that he does not have the capacity to do anything of the sort. In this one respect, he resembles Chateaubriand pretty closely, give or take every conceivable difference. Chateaubriand had an exciting experience in the Jewish Quarter, but that was only because of exceptional qualities that, in his view, adhered to Jerusalem and the Jews. Mostly Chateaubriand considered that, for an intelligent man like himself, attuned to the modern ideas of 1809, it was no longer possible to undergo supernatural astonishments. Tasso in the 16th century could see supernatural creatures flit through the sky. But after Tasso came Isaac Newton and the scientists and the modern age, and, no matter how keenly Chateaubriand wished he could do what Tasso could do, the era of supernatural sightings had come to an end. It was distressing.

Still, Chateaubriand felt that, without showing any disrespect for science and its discoveries, it was still possible to catch glimmers of a more-than-natural truth, if only by gazing with sufficient intensity at ancient ruins and cemeteries, or at treetops, or leaves, or gardens, or at anything at all, where a vibration of eternity might be discovered. He gazed, then. He was good at gazing. He also knew how to sob and tremble at what he saw, and he took his own sobbings and tremblings as scientific confirmation that he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing.

But Bellow’s difficulties were graver. Deeply he yearned to sob and tremble in the Romantic style; and, just as deeply, he knew that science had continued to advance, which made the sobbings and tremblings seem ridiculous. He shuddered in embarrassment at the absurdity of his own yearnings. And, in recording his Jerusalem experiences, he paused to contemplate the Romantic yearnings and the modern embarrassments alike.

The Jerusalem sky reminds him of the psalmist who sings of “God’s garment of light.” He wonders if, in gazing upward at the sky, he isn’t seeing the garment:

You can take this seriously in Jerusalem. A character in one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s extraordinary stories thinks, looking at the sky in Israel, “No, this isn’t just an ordinary khamsin but a flame from Sinai. The sky above is not just atmosphere but a heaven with angels, seraphim, God.” This is Jewish transcendentalism, too, in a very different part of the mind. With Singer it comes out as though a spring were pressed at the appropriate moments in a story. My inclination is to resist the imagination when it operates in this way.

Bellow’s relation to Singer is pretty much Chateaubriand’s relation to Tasso. Bellow is envious. He hopes that, with sufficient effort, maybe he can, in fact, achieve a Jewish transcendentalism, just as Singer did. It is a matter of adopting the right mental state. He needs to give himself permission.

Yet I, too, feel that the light of Jerusalem has purifying powers and filters the blood and the thoughts; I don’t forbid myself the reflection that light may be the outer garment of God.

Bellow in this passage is at his guesthouse in Jerusalem, Mishkenot Sha’ananim, which overlooks Mount Zion. He continues:

I go to the door and look toward the Judean Desert. I see not so much the terrain as the form of some huge being. Its hide is gray. The distant small buildings are gray also. Letting down the barriers of rationality, I feel that I can hear Mount Zion as well as see it.

About Mount Zion:

There is no reason this hill should have a voice, emit a note audible only to a man facing it across the valley. What is there to communicate? It must be that a world from which mystery has been extirpated makes your modern heart ache and increases suggestibility. In poetry you welcome such suggestibility. When it erupts at the wrong time (in a rational context) you send for the police; these psychological police drive out your criminal “animism.” Your respectable aridity is restored. Nevertheless, I will not forget that I was communicated with.

He also does not forget that, scientifically speaking, all of this is nonsense. In order to see the garment of God or hear the rumbling voice of Mount Zion, he has to perform a mental maneuver capable of letting down “the barriers of rationality.” Down go the barriers. And the whole experience leaves him feeling the way the heroes of his novels do—the befuddled professors in Chicago or New York who would like to abandon themselves to wild contemplation of the divine and the miraculous, and who recognize meanwhile how laughable they are: inadequate nobodies who cannot begin to cope with their frightening wives and the big-city gangsters and tycoons, let alone the cosmos and its mystic secrets.

The difference between To Jerusalem and Back and Bellow’s novels is that, in the Jerusalem book, he does not present himself as a daffy professor, comically unequal to the challenges of life. He is, on the contrary, the sort of man who is invited to attend White House receptions, someone for whom Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister, sets aside valuable time. A worldly and successful man. Happily married, too, he and his Romanian mathematician—though, to be sure, anyone who has read the novels knows that marital stability was not Saul Bellow’s strong point.
>>>

For more, click here.

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Met Percent: Week Fifteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Tear Catchers (?)
Swan-Neck Glass Bottle, Iran, 19th c., gallery 462;   Christie’s South catalog.

“It is unclear how bottles of this shape were used, though sometimes they are known as ashkdans and were supposedly for collecting the tears of wives whose husbands were away at war”. - MetText

It seems that the use of a tear catcher or lachrymatory bottle is probably not ancient nor even Victorian. More likely they are a romantic myth based on the “eye shaped” openings: The bottles hold funeral tears, and when they evaporate, the mourning period ends. No science here, but so beloved by enthusiasts of the Victorian art of mourning that they are sold and collected even now. Christie's sold two 18th c. bottles in 2014, very like the 19th c. bottle at the Met. 

For tear enthusiasts, see https://tearcatcher.com/tear-bottles/tear-bottle-history/.  “With each tear bottle, you will receive an elegant organza gift bag and a small story card that explains the intriguing history and meaning behind the tear bottle”. 

 

Pilgrim Flasks

Pilgrim Flasks; Left: India or Deccan, early 17th c., gallery 463, Right: Turkey, early 17th c, gallery 469.

Unlike the tear bottles, these pilgrim flasks have a clear function, and appear in many regions and eras. These Islamic vessels were designed to collect and bring home holy water, sanctuary lamp oil or sand from a sacred site. Sometimes called a Zamzameyyah, because pilgrims took holy water from the famous well in Mecca called Zamzam. The word derives from Zomë Zomë, meaning "stop flowing" - a command repeated by Abraham’s wife Hajar attempting to contain spring water in the desert. 

Pilgrim flasks (not on view): Left, Pasargadae, Iran, ca. 4th–3rd century B.C., Middle, Ctesiphon, Iraq, 8th c., Right, Iran, ca. 3rd c. B.C.–A.D.

These early ceramic versions are found in Islamic, Jewish and Christian cultures and are documented in the Crusades. The twin strap-eyed design has a marvelous continuity over millennia. 

 

Parrots

Top: Finial in the Form of a Parrot, Northern India, 17th–18th century, gallery 464
Bottom and detail: Dagger with Zoomorphic Hilt (India, Deccan, Bijapur or Golconda), 16th c., gallery 463.

In Tutinama (A Parrot’s Tale) the parrot tells 52 stories to his owner Khojasta, to prevent her from having an affair while her husband is away. A mynah and a parrot are her guards. The wife strangles the mynah for advising her not to indulge. The parrot, realizing the gravity of the situation, narrates distracting stories over the next fifty-two nights: a more indirect approach.

I lived under flocks of these fine birds in Pasadena, CA and often woke to their extreme calls. I understand their assigned role as storytellers.

 

Textiles Underfoot

The Emperor's Carpet and detail, Iran, 16th c., gallery 462.

Ushak Medallion Carpet on White Ground and detail, Turkey, 17th c., not on view.

Part of Shah ‘Abbas’ (r. 1587–1629) program for restructuring the economy and attracting European merchants was the expansion of both the production and international trading of carpets. They were traded to Europe and the Far East where, too precious to be placed on the ground, they were used to cover furniture or hung on walls. 

The legend of Sir Walter Raleigh putting his cloak on the ground - to help Queen Elizabeth I over a mud puddle - is part of the mystique of textiles underfoot.

 

Vermeer, Ram’s Horns and Hands on Hips

Full page and detail: A Maid Asleep, Johannes Vermeer, 1656-57, gallery 964.

Many carpets from the Middle East are today called by the names of European painters who depicted them: Lotto, Holbein, Ghirlandaio, Crivelli, and Memling. 

Vermeer’s famous A Maid Asleep depicts two different seventeenth-century Anatolian carpets. Within the patterns, one can find classic Kilim symbols: The Ram's Horn - Kocboynuzu - the symbol of fertility, heroism, power and masculinity and Hands on Hips - Elibelinde - the symbol of motherhood and fertility.

 

 

Pal Johnny, Our Greatest Story Writer [by David Lehman]

John O'Hara, author of "How Can I Tell You?" -- one of the subtlest stories in the language -- among other masterpieces, has one memorable sentence in his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It is said to the movie actor Hubert Ward, the book's protagonist:

<<
There's more people see you in one picture than ever saw all of Shakespeare's actors in his whole lifetime.
>>

I am reading Geoffrey Wolff's admirable biography of  Mr O'Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, and I am inspired to read or re-read O'Hara's short stories. No one, not even Hemingway, can so brilliantly tell a story primarily in dialogue form. I greatly enjoy certain of O'Hara's novels, such as Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, and someday I will get around to reading them all. But in the genre of the short story, O'Hara is the best we have.

John O'Hara's Stories are available in a Library of America edition put together with an introduction by Charles McGrath, formerly the deputy editor of The New Yorker, in which magazine O'Hara published most of his best work. Of O'Hara, Lionel Trilling wrote in the introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara (1956), “The work of no other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.”

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

A Hurricane of Persecuted Stars: Clemente Soto Vélez [translated and introduced by Martín Espada]

One hundred and fifteen years ago this month, Clemente Soto Vélez (1905-1993) was born in Lares, Puerto Rico, the site of an 1868 revolt against Spain. The orphan son of landless peasants, Soto Vélez was a visionary poet, a surrealist, a socialist, an organizer and agitator for the independence of his island.

He was also a political prisoner. In 1936, the colonial government of General Blanton Winship incarcerated the leaders of the militant Nationalist Party and charged them with seditious conspiracy. Soto Vélez was the editor of the party newspaper. The statement on the masthead read: “Puerto Rican, the independence of Puerto Rico depends on the number of bullets in your belt.” This metaphor, in particular, was enough to earn him a six-year sentence, served in the federal penitentiaries at Atlanta and Lewisburg.

In the following poem, Soto Vélez confronts a political and emotional paradox: the fact that he lost his freedom for the love of freedom, cut off from his island for the sake of his island. The poet speaks of himself in the third person, and visualizes himself as a letter of the alphabet, sitting in isolation. This is poem #3 from Caballo de palo, or The Wooden Horse:

I met him
living like an h incarcerated in the honey of his bees,
but the bars of honey were bittersweet,
and because
he lost himself
in love with liberation,
and because he did not abandon
his love nor she her lover,
the earth for him is a hurricane of persecuted stars,
since liberation cannot
love anyone
except whoever loves
the earth, with its sun and sky.

--  Martín Espada

Tim Seibles on Writing in the Trump Era [by Nin Andrews]

NA: In this era of Trump and the Republican stranglehold on truth, I have been having a hard time writing, or even thinking about writing. I feel helpless when I read the news or talk to people who are so politically different from me. Yesterday, I was at the doctor’s office, listening to two elderly white men talk about how great Sean Hannity is, and how our country is, at last, in good hands.  I could feel my blood pressure sky-rocketing. Afterwards, I sat at my desk, and instead of typing, I stared out the window, thinking of Roethke's lines, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,/ I meet my shadow in the deepening shade . . .” 

I began to wonder, how are others coping? I thought I’d ask a few other poets, starting with Tim Seibles. 

NA: How are you coping in the Trump era? Are you writing? 

TS: During these times of Trump—times of idiocy, corruption and the resultant despair—I have found writing to be a place of energizing solace.  Though it is an illusion (at least in part), when I’m working on a poem, I feel like I’m talking back to the horror and cultivating some form of resistance to the infection that this administration represents.  Poetry, whether it be raging, broken-hearted, or ecstatic, is life affirming. It reminds those who are interested that others also suffer and yearn and see the trouble.  In some ways—both obvious and not—poetry itself means that being alert emotionally and intellectually is worthwhile.  In my darkest moments, I still believe that such engagement will help decide what kind of future will follow this insane period.

NA: Please share a couple of poems on the topic.

TS: 

KNOCK-KNOCK

It’s quiet—
like a fly
in a frog’s mouth. 

Say something
loud
but secret
like starlight
banging on a bug’s back,

something
so true
that
just the suggestion

un-hands the clocks—

why pretend
that I’m not
what I am:

a hard-on
held by the head nun,
that rogue fart in the flower shop,
freak branch
on the family tree,
that mad song
in a mum city—I am that
misfit music, that
two-headed Ken,

that Whoopsupsidethehead,
antsinyourpants
whatcanIsay:

I bum-rush the world,
find another world inside:
that last chance,
the lost choir,
that Ghost Dance
come again—

who says

we can’t

be free?

NOT NEARLY ENOUGH          #2
                        for Cesar Vallejo

Yesterday, maybe—tomorrow perhaps,
but today, no one is reading
my poems, no one at all!
It’s as if my whole life
has been covered like a parrot’s cage,
so everybody can get some sleep.

I didn’t mean to shout, to blaspheme,
to interrupt, curse, use slang, obsess?
over women’s thighs.  I did not
mean to cause trouble    did I?
Maybe I did.  Of course, I did—

but for the best possible reasons:

• There’s no pretty way to fight ugliness.
• There’s not nearly enough love going around,
• nowhere near an adequate array of sexual
• collaborations: in fact, a wild lack
• of empathy and daring, especially
• from God who has fallen wildly
• short of my expectations.

Where is the man who sees war on TV
and runs screaming naked down the street
with the head of his johnson flapping
back and forth, thigh to thigh
like a flag in a jock-less wind!?

And, with her marvelously chocolate booberoos
glossed with sunlight and saliva, where is
the woman who bursts into Our Lady of Hope
Cathedral singing Tell me somethin’ good!?

We see children, we were children—
with dolls that peed, with wooden trucks,
with wind-up frogs, and hide & seek—
who knew better than what our parents said.
Tell me: how did we let these fuckheads run the world
off the road?!  We cannot snuggle our brains
up our asses and wonder why morons
come to power with their sad toupees,
their burger-driven breath, their prune-sized
hearts    and wonder why our lives fit like
barbed wire brassieres!  Am I right or am I wrong??

This is mostly what I’ve been trying to get at
with poetry, but maybe I overdo, maybe
I pile on, maybe I’m impatient, maybe I’ve lost sight
of what people really want, which is to cuddle
the status quo like a syphilitic teddy bear! 
My mother used to say—before giving me
a good spanking—
You have gotten beside yourself, you
onion-headed little maniac.  In fact,
I am standing beside myself, right now:
staring at myself staring back at myself,
asking—with musty contempt—“Why
aren’t you reading my poems?!”

Tim Seibles is the author of several poetry collections including Hammerlock, Buffalo Head Solos, and Fast Animal, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize. His latest collection, One Turn Around the Sun was released in 2017. He just completed a two-year appointment as Poet laureate of Virginia.

Photo credit: Jennifer Fish

Happy Birthday Mr. B. "I didn't train her, she trained me!"

Born January 22, 1904.

Choreographer George Balanchine with Mourka. Photo © Martha Swope. 

What's Your Favorite Stock? [by Isaac Babylon]

From time to time we get a financial market report from one of our friends on the Street. I asked Ike Babylon whether he thinks the market is overpriced at the moment. I also wondered what his favorite stock is. Here's what he said. -- DL

<<<
Right now we have a market that's almost priced to perfection reflecting the confluence of positive trends: growth that's significant enough to ward off recession fears but not so strong as to invite rate hikes from the Fed, which remains accommodative; a Goldilocks economy, in other words. There is always global risk, the possibility of a black swan -- like, right now, the corona flu, which is a killer and can spread. And of course there's all the uncertainty in the world -- Brexit, Iran, tariffs, China,  North Korea, Putin, Syria, the specter of Socialism, etc. But we always have to climb a wall of worry. 

Right now I wouldn't put new money into Apple. It's the best stock in the market but it has more than doubled in price and it's a good idea to take a little money off the table. You will still own it if you are in an index fund or  growth mutual funds. 

Microsoft is my favorite stock. It is at 166 and change as I write, but it still has room to run. Our firm gives it a PT [price target] of 190 and that's conservative. Long term I like Disney under Bob Iger's leadership. Their streaming service is a winner; they have great franchises like Star Wars; and I like the way everything is integrated -- movies, theme parks, TV, products. ESPN has been a drag on them but that's largely priced into the stock.

JP Morgan is the of the banks, and if you study Warren Buffett's game plan, you'll see he believes in it as well as Bank of America. I always tell people they should buy some Berkshire Hathaway, class B shares, if they admire Buffett's track record. It's a very conservative investment that you can hold forever. They hold a huge amount of cash, which insulates them from market downturns, when he can swoop in and buy stuff on the cheap. They issue no dividend, which makes it totally tax efficient.

Fidelity Select Health Care, managed by Eddie Yoon, is a good way to play a portion of the market that is bound to grow given demographic trends.
>>>

Thank you, Ike. 

The House Guest [by Molly Arden]

House Guest

The sad seamstress

who stays with us this month

is small and thin and bitter.

No one can cheer her up.

Give her a dress, a drink,

roast chicken, or fried fish

it's all the same to her.

 ( from “The House Guest”  by Elizabeth Bishop, 1968)

            Molly’s never been a very accomplished guest.  For me it’s like being lost in a foreign country --disenfranchised, compartmentalized into Samsonite carry-ons, exhausted, dizzy from hunger with an upset tummy.  I am an insatiable know it all who’s every desire is, at all times, to be in tight command of my every presence.   To be a guest is to be lost on a straight driveway at the end of a pleasant cul-de-sac.  Lacking bearings toward home or the airport.  Chances are you came in on directions from a GPS and will leave reliant upon commands procured from this same device.  I’ve often stayed at a place for days without knowing more about where I am than a vague “south” or  “Western Pennsylvania”.  How odd to be directed to a shop or attraction by hosts who use hand signals and begin their instructions with “you’re the end of the driveway”.  You are at their mercy.  A disagreement during dinner might result in misdirection.  What if they refuse to give you directions at all?  Like a baby waiting for its mother at the end of a long day at the sitter’s, you’d sit and weep, calling for someone to pick you up and carry you home to your warm bed, please!

 Speaking of warm, who of us has not spent the night in a bitter guest room unable to locate the extra blanket that was earlier referred to as “in the chest” or “in the closet” and after stormy searching is found to be in neither?  “Who turns off their heat at night,” you’ll mutter, making a mental note to return the favor if these lovely friends ever grace you with a visit.  It’s possible you’ve wondered where the fuck they keep their toothpaste while trying desperately to brush garlic dressing from your tongue with a dry toothbrush.  Ever gotten turned around on an excursion to the bathroom (after a glass of wine or two) and found yourself -- a full-grown adult taxpayer, voter, and driver of a car -- lost in the vast confines of a relative’s house?  How many despicable meals will you eat? How many of you will settle your soft cheeks into cheap poly/cotton sheets, the staple of guest beds the world over?  Why is this same bed’s pillow always older than the host’s dining room table? 

The physical pain of a pleasant visit should make you rethink leaving the comforts of “home” ever again.  An evening with a friend’s well-meaning Chicken Picatta exposes you to the possibility of tenure in a strange bathroom, clutching a roiling gut while cinching your ass in a vain attempt to spare yourself the auditory embarrassment of ill health in the face of cheap construction.  Ever stave off olfactory reflection of the dinner you were served by sealing off the guest room closet with your fetid gas, rather than release it within the appreciation of your host?  Being a guest can mean coming to grips with the awful terror of not knowing where the simplest tools of the house are located; a toilet plunger, for instance (the horrific rising of the tide, the utter relief at its fall).  And we haven’t even touched on the spinal predicament of the hotel room bed. 

Yet we continue to pack the very essence of who we are – a consolidated version of our belongings and clothes -- rolled, tucked, wrapped, stuffed into small bags, cases, and compartments that we wheel, lug, clunk into these “homes away from home."  Our most essential items kept in our clutches, too important a part of our integral selves to be left at home with the rest of the tackle.  This stuff is our concentrate.  Our BRAND of lotion.  Our book.  The perfect jeans with that whiskered creasing we shopped hours for.  Our glasses and prescriptions.  Our  journal ( in case you say something clever).  The gray pebble the dog nosed on that walk last June before he died.  Our signature French perfume.  The thin shawl that looks good with everything, the one with the fringe.  All of this carried into the home at the time of arrival and never further away from you than a room or two.  It is important to maintain a consistency of self when traveling; these pieces we carry help us achieve this.

Maintaining too much of this sense of who you are can be a detriment, though.   For instance, I’ve been chastised in my small circle of friends for serving salad out of the bowl using just my bare hands.  You might gasp, you might assume a lack of proper upbringing, you might shrug.  It depends on your own values.  I come from a long line of bare handed salad slingers.  I didn’t even know what salad tongs were until I went to college.  Once, while teaching at a faraway writing program, I stayed with friends of friends.  These lovely people invited me to a home cooked meal with them on my last night.   I didn’t know it at the time, but I was dining with bread-board, bread-knife, salad tong kind of people.  It wasn’t until mid-way through fisting two handfuls of salad into the delicate wood bowl before me that I spotted the large, silver utensils laid out beside the salad.  Had I even paused to look before plunging my hands into the blend of baby greens?  I hadn’t even attempted to acclimate.  My hosts were desperately trying to make me feel welcome.  Both of them had served themselves out of the bowl with their hands, their brows glazed with sweat, their eyes flickering around the table – me – tongs – salad – tongs –me, but they would not make me feel the outsider.

I learned something about being a guest that night. Despite their stained futon, lack of coffee, and whiney toddler, I was enriched by my visit with them.  To remain pleasantly under the worn lens of my own experiences was comfortable, but would deprive me of a sophistication one would not normally associate with those things.  Good to have my eyes opened by way of visiting as a guest, if only just for a dinner, or a week.

Wonders never cease: François de Brauer’s “La Loi des prodiges”, a performed graphic novel [by Tracy Danison]

François de Brauer, La Loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) © Victor Tonelli 

I heard on the radio that a bartender in New York has proposed clarity & truth as 2020’s watchword. Sounds good to me. You first. Ready. Set. Go!

I am one of those people who smile all the time, even sleeping, even toting a machine gun. In spite of everything; the smile reflects my true feeling; I’m with Isadora Duncan, feeling is all that really counts.

But neither smile nor feeling reflects what I actually think about things in the round.

Once, when I cautiously let her in on one of my thinkings, my late Mother burst into tears, sobbing out, What cynicism! I was 18 then, bless me, already a soldier. My Mother was among the most fully-integrated hypocrites who ever walked Yahweh’s Stony yet Righteous path. Rightly, I believe, I took her outburst for sign and portent; a thinking is mostly better left unspoken.

Lately, my thinking has been affecting my feeling.

I’ve been darkly thinking, for instance, that life might very well be a play – a story, fairy tale, novel, opéra, musical comedy – in which I’ve failed to play my assigned role.

Don’t get me wrong. I love narrative. But narrative is just a tool of art, an interesting wart on the clitoris that is Life. Narrative just ends up; Life becomes.

That’s why the non-narrativeness of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard), an absorbing two-hour one-man show that I saw not long since at La Scala Paris has very nearly brought me around to renewed smilingkeit. La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard, a veritable feat of thespian endurance and mastery, is scenarized and performed by François de Brauer, rather new to the dramatic scene but certainly upcoming.

I am not sure how to translate La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard). I can’t decide whether the prodiges are natural wonders or human prodigies. In France, a certain fetishistic pedantism means that laws get reformed rather than changed or replaced, or even dreamt up or projected. A réforme commonly carries the name of an individual guilty of proposing it, presumably so that he or she may be punished for sticking his or her neck out later, when nobody’s looking.

So, the title’s all very dense, as they say, and so is the piece itself. But good dense: “with depth that entertains”. La Scala has the knack of good dense. As I write, I’m thinking of, last year, among others, Machine de cirque’s breathtaking acrobacy within an entirely different framework of dramatic success or Anne de Mey’s wonderful Cold Blood multimedia piece, also an absorbing meditation on theatrical technology and technique.

François de Brauer’s La loi des prodiges strikes me as a performed graphic novel. Taking on about 20 rôles – amazingly, one never once loses sight of who is who and who’s doing what – de Brauer creates complex situations such as protagonist Rémi Goutard’s birth, his Dad’s myth-scale rassle with the evil psychic twin who prevents his (Dad’s) suicide or young Rémi’s encounter with Duflou, a self-sealing blowhard and contemporary artist as well as an ambiguous friend of or to Dad.

The situations of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) swirl around a welter of life emotions. Both situations and emotions belong, and/or not, to the said Rémi Goutard, who, as it turns out, is a future former député whose réforme seeks to stamp out artistic creativity as well as artistic endeavor. All through and into the end, La loi des prodiges makes perfect sense. However, anything you might say about it is your own story.

The sense of having seen it through – rather than, say, having seen through it to some sort of (fundamentally moral) narrative structure – is why I scribbled “performed graphic novel” on my hand as I was leaving.

As in my experience of graphic novels, in La loi des prodiges de Brauer’s word is subject to his image. The image in turn has its finger on the emotion rather than the idea. And that’s how it should be, sometimes.

Wonders never cease – François de Brauer is somebody to watch for.

La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) – Performance • 2019 • François de Brauer • 110 minutes • La Scala Paris • Ω Conception & performance: François de Brauer / Artistic collaboration: Louis Arene, Joséphine Serre / Costuming: Christelle André / Lighting: François Menou / Production: Les Petites Heures – La Scala Paris

Emily Dickinson's Atom Bomb Letters [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Darlingest Bleaders,

How I have missed you. And what obstacles I have had to defeat in order to at last rearrive here, panting, on the grass. Well, but, I’ve had mental adventures of which you will be the beneficiaries, so don’t mug. Or rather do, because I know it means you missed me.

I’ve been buzzy with otter projects, actual agents and actual editors wanting to see pages and rewrites too, but am now released by the holding pattern of stopping and waiting (and waiting), and so am at last writing to you.

Life has time for kids, time for sleeping, time for watching Firefly on Netflix, plus 30 Rock and American Idol, and time for work. Writing to you comes out of time for work, because there’s no other time for it to come out of. Granted I sometimes see Millionaire Matchmaker without having written to you, but rarely. Usually these are the only priorities that supersede you. So sorry you’ve been so long supersed.  I’m trying to save the world with rhetoric. It’s ex/hilarating /hausting.

Dudes, in one of my secret societies (I only have one, but I’m trying to confuse future forensics) (I confess this here because once, someone else in my secret society mentioned that they had other secret societies and it hurt my feelings, and I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of any of my cosocietans, should they happen to read this.) I said something and then some other guy said something obnoxious and so then I said something smartassy and the cosocietans really liked what I said. Want to know it? It was this: “Well what you said stung/k, but…” They liked that I goed stung/k. Isn’t following one thought to the next ex/hilarating /hausting? Anyway, the backslash locution at the end of the above paragraph made me think of that other one, stung/k. They are a shorthand usable by a culture that silent-reads its quips, so they needn’t be pronounceable.

Anyway. Emily Dickinson’s letters. I told you the class I’m teaching at Columbia this term is Poets and Their Letters, which I made up when they asked me what class I’d like to teach but I didn’t think they were going to pick it. All the other choices I gave them were things I’ve taught before. I’m concentrating the course on four poets whose verse I know very well, Keats, Dickinson, Bishop, and Stevens. In turn, in that order, we read their poems, then their letters. Next class we talk about Dickinson’s letters.

I gave them the green book (edited by Johnson), a nice big Selected Letters of ED. To prep, this week I read it straight through. Some journey. I feel like a restrung viola.

Talking about letters in this class has led me to realize that even for those who do not write their blog posts as letters, these days the closest thing to what once were letters, are blog posts. The email has too much brevity, too little gravitas, it compares to the scribble on a visiting card. But the blog, like the letter, is given more than an ounce of thought, and less than a gallon. It has more like a pint of poise and a quart of purpose. Just right for an afternoon’s diversion.

Emily, Emily. It is impertinent to be as I am, pert and in print, but I feel twinny with you. I think we had similar childhoods (talk about jenny from the hood, that’s the hood) in a way – isolated -- and similar strategies for walking it off.

She starts writing these atom bomb letters at 13. It felt strange to read page by page and watch her age. At first the message was the medium’s inadequacy: Her chief theme as a child was to berate the shortage of letters in return. As she got older, she lashed love onto the page with equal passion. Then something cracks leading into the 1860s and she goes nuts just totally saying what she feels like saying even if what she’s using ain’t words. As you all know, I too stood in the long lines at the DPV and took the test and showed my ID and now have a full poetic license, for forms, free verse, language, concrete, rap or pop, there’s nothing with a steering wheel that I don’t got a right to ride. You wanna hear how my girl talks?

Here’s her second letter to Higginson, year is 1862. She'd sent him a few poems and he'd sent back suggested changes:

<<<
MR. HIGGINSON,--Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude, but I was ill, and write to-day from my pillow.

Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask, though they might not differ. While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb.

You asked how old I was? I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter, sir.

I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.

You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he never returned. Soon after my tutor died, and for several years my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more, but he was not contented I be his scholar, so he left the land.

You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious, except me, and address an eclipse, every morning, whom they call their "Father."

But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or witchcraft?

You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.

I read Miss Prescott's Circumstance, but it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.

Two editors of journals came to my father's house this winter, and asked me for my mind, and when I asked them "why" they said I was penurious, and they would use it for the world.

I could not weigh myself, myself. My size felt small to me. I read your chapters in the Atlantic, and experienced honor for you. I was sure you would not reject a confiding question.

Is this, sir, what you asked me to tell you? Your friend,

E. DICKINSON.
>>>

Isn’t she perfect? Don’t you just want to cook her into a pie and eat her? Sorry is that weird? Can we read this part again: “I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.” He had written an article of advice to the young poet that was published in the Atlantic, and that is what made her think to write to him.

Squibs 365-372 [by Alan Ziegler]

365: Late 1950s, Lassie barks for help through the darkness. The T.V. picture has gone kaput.  My father says “I’ll teach you to fix it” and removes the back to reveal a landscape of small tubes. He plucks out several and drops them into a paper bag. We drive to the drug store where, hidden in a back corner, is a scientific-looking object the size of a vending machine.

He instructs me how to plug the tubes in—one at a time, matching the slots with the numbers on the tube—and watch as the gauge points red or green. It reminds me of a game on the boardwalk.

He sets aside the only tube that turned the gauge red, and finds its match in the cabinet. Home, he re-plugs all the tubes except for the new one, which he lets me do. Lassie comes home!

 

366: The ancient writer, told he has hours to live, asks his doctor to bring him his books, and he starts paging through them. “Why didn’t you ask for your wife?” “I’ll have eternity with her in heaven. These are going straight to hell.”

 

367: Now, while the time since your death is still counted in weeks, I’ll be walking along and there, just beyond the ability of my eyes to distinguish faces, I’ll see someone who looks like you, and for a few milliseconds my brain will form your face. At first it was a little unnerving, but I’ve come to look forward to and treasure those milliseconds, and I will mourn them when they are gone.

 

368: The houseguest opens the refrigerator, smiles, and says, “Someone brought home baked goods from Entenmann’s.”

 

369: “Garçon, un bock! I write to please myself, just as I order my dinner…” [George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man]. I don’t need the menu, just bring me whatever looks good today.

 

370: My mother’s critique: “Received your article to-day and for a routine write-up, you sure made it into interesting reading.”

 

371: The evil that men do lives long after them, along with automatic renewals.

 

372: The only priest in the remote village announces he will be moving to a faraway parish in a week. A run on Confessions, future absolutions granted; pray now, sin later. Hail Marys peal from every corner, alley, barroom, bedroom. After the priest departs, it is holy sanctioned hell on earth. Except for a pious few, who eventually set off to find the Garden of Eden and scrounge for seeds.

"The bad guy isn't supposed to win": The Late Nick Tosches' Take on Sonny Liston [by David Lehman]

Legend has it that Sinatra was prepared to bet a bundle on Sonny Liston in the ballyhooed bout against Cassius Clay in Miami. "Save your money, Frank," he was told. The fix was in.

 

Last night I stayed up late to readThe Devil and Sonny Liston (2000), the late Nick Tosches' excellent biography of Sonny Liston, big bad Sonny of the dead eyes and the murderous fists, who said, "The bad guy isn't supposed to win. I change that."

No question that the Clay fight in Miami was fixed by the mob (as Tosches, pictured left, sees it). He astutely points out that that when a fight is fixed, only the fighter taking a dive knows about it.  The opponent can't be in the know. But, says Nick, even Clay, by this time Ali, must have known that the one-round fiasco in the reamatch in Maine was as bogus as the phantom punch. Liston was not a talented actor, and he fell awkwardly, like a building.

 

"Sonny, I had a lot of money on you. Why didn't you tell me?" "Because you have a big mouth."

 

Why did he throw the fights? Because the odds against him were long and he needed the dough. He had tax troubles. The IRS was on his ass. In the American mind as reflected in the work of sports columnists, he was the bad guy, the thug, the jailbird, the ex-con. A charge of rape, if reported, would have ended his career.

 

Meanwhile Clay entertained the white mainstream media. According to Tosches, the words "media" and "mediocrity" spring from the same root.

 

​So "they" told Sonny what to do and how to profit.

 

Most writers idoloze Ali. Not Tosches. He writes with a perfect contempt for the braggart who never met a microphone he didn't like. In Tosches' view, Liston had a much better sense of humor than Ali.​

 

RIP Nick Tosches, 1949-2019, author of a helluva book on Dean Martin. Goes without saying that the opinions in this piece are Nick's. not necessarily mine. -- DL

Pelosi Quotes Longfellow [by Mitch Sisskind]

Yesterday, introducing the impeachment managers,
Nancy Pelosi invoked Longfellow. It was the 
first time I've heard poetry spoken by a politician 
since Bill Clinton in the 1980's quoted Emerson's
baleful line about the future, "When our sons have
gone to where our fathers are...."

Speaking of baleful, here's a Longfellow poem 
perhaps appropriate for these dark times:

Haunted Houses (1858)

All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table, than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.

We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
And hold in mortmain still their old estates.

The spirit-world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapors dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air.

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star,
An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o’er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,–

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

 

"Columbia College 1967, #24" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Columbia College 1967, #24
Ellen Erlanger, Barnard Student

I’m taking a class called Women in the Modern Novel.
Everyone knows that the teacher, Professor Sims,
Is not well so it’s kind of an emotional experience
Twice a week and I try to make an effort in the class
Because it obviously means a lot to Professor Sims,
A really sweet person maybe about sixty years old.
Word gets around that she likes when girls bring
Cupcakes but that’s not my style so I just try 
To make an effort in class and show appreciation.

During a class on Pride and Prejudice Professor Sims
Posed one of her wistful subtly heartbreaking questions:
‘If this is supposed to be a class about the modern novel
‘And Pride and Prejudice was written over 150 years ago
‘What if anything occurs to you as modern about it?’
I spoke up and said, ‘This sentence in the book jumped
‘Off the page at me with its modernism in contrast to
‘Austen’s graceful stylistic locutions. The sentence is:
"Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all."

I was glad to see a spark of amusement if not of hope
In Professor Sims’ eyes as she asked me for my thoughts
About that sentence and I tried hard to fulfill her request.
Poor Professor Sims. Poe’s idea that the fittest subject
For poetry is the death of a beautiful woman suddenly
Came to mind because Professor Sims was very beautiful.
I heard myself saying, ‘In high school I had a boyfriend
‘Who was stupid but he was worth knowing because
‘He loved me in such a pure and unblocked stupid way.

‘He would get this look of slack-jawed stupefaction
‘While he was gazing at my body to the point that
‘I used to wonder what is he actually seeing there?
‘What could possibly bring on such bewilderment?
Eventually I realized that there was no cognitive
‘Interference between what he saw and what he felt
‘So he was like a toaster plugged into a power plant
‘And then when we made love there was also total
‘Disintermediation like a flopping fish out of water.

‘Where did you go to high school?’ This question
From one of the two Columbia guys who joined the
Class for the second semester broke the spell that
Followed my excessively intimate reminiscences.
The girls around the table shared amused glances
And Professor Sims smiled too. ‘A progressive school,’
I said going along with the joke. ‘College preparatory.’
The guy had a little red button pinned on his shirt:
An SDS radical. The other kid was an Orthodox Jew.

As things got back to normal Professor Sims found
The stupid men sentence in Pride and Prejudice and
Read the preceding one as well: ‘I am going tomorrow
'To find a man who has not a single agreeable quality,
‘With neither manner nor sense to recommend him.'
Professor Sims remarked, ‘This is an anarchistic motif
‘In Jane Austen’s work that crops up once in a while’
And the class seemed interested to discuss that. Later
As everyone was leaving the professor took me aside.

She said, ‘Is it intelligence or instinct or just youthful
Precociousness that allows you to express yourself
From unusual angles and with odd combinations of
Archaic orotundity and a well-calibrated diffidence.
See, I can do it too and I find it winning but most
People won’t understand you or will tune you out
As is done with Jane Austen’s secret anarchism.
What do you think?’ ‘Oh, it’s all just stupidity,’ I said
And I couldn’t tell if she was about to laugh or cry.

"William Holden, Model Prisoner" [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar 

<<<
William Holden, arguably the model for American men of his era, plays a prisoner of war in two major motion pictures. The Germans hold him and other American airmen captive in the close confines of Stalag 17 (1953), and in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), he sweats it out in a Japanese POW camp. In both movies, Holden’s character makes a daring, even miraculous, escape. His getaway happens at the very end of Stalag 17, but in The Bridge on the River Kwai, it marks the beginning of our hero’s adventures.

Both films were celebrated. Playing Sefton in Stalag 17, the cynical POW with the smarts to profit by bartering with the camp guards and running gambling schemes to fleece his fellow prisoners, Holden won the Academy Award for best leading actor. The Bridge on the River Kwai won eight Oscars, including those for best picture and best director.

To some extent, the repetition illustrates the success principle: if at first you succeed, try, try again. Nevertheless, if you identify Holden with the masculine ideal of the postwar years, the coincidence is too keen to overlook.

Aside from Holden and the POW camps, the contrast between the two movies is striking. Stalag 17 is a black-and-white studio production directed by Billy Wilder, whose other masterpieces include Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Some Like It Hot. It’s set in late December 1944, and man, is it cold. References to Bastogne make it clear that the Battle of the Bulge is raging, and the Nazis are the enemy. The POW camp commandant (Otto Preminger) tells the prisoners they can forget about having a “White Christmas,” a song written, he says, “by one of your composers who stole his name from our capital” (Berlin). Later we hear “Jingle Bells” and “Adeste Fidelis” in the background.

To balance the surfeit of sentiment, we get the comic antics of two of the prisoners, Harry Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck) and his friend the “Animal” (Robert Strauss). There is essentially one set: the barracks housing the American POWs. It’s easy to tell that a Broadway play preceded the movie.

At one point in Stalag 17, the men improvise a Christmas party by marching around the barracks singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” When a couple of guys in a makeshift band play the old Harlan Thompson and Harry Archer tune, “I Love You,” some of the boys pretend to be girls. As they dance, Harry Shapiro is the stand-in for the Animal’s adored Betty Grable. Once, when I dropped in on my Miami-based mother, then in her 80s, she was watching Stalag 17 on television and we watched that particular scene together. A sweet number, I thought, and wondered if Sinatra had recorded it. When I returned from Miami to New York, I listened to “I Love You” sung by Sinatra on a Capitol Records compilation. That was an amazing moment. I recommend you do the same if you want an object lesson in the difference between a pleasing rendition of a song and a masterly performance.

Clocking in at 161 minutes, 41 minutes longer than Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai was shot in vivid color on location in Sri Lanka. Directed by David Lean, whose other movies, similarly epic in scope and length, include Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, the film follows U.S. Navy Commander Shears (Holden), one of the very few men who have not succumbed to disease or the sadism of the camp commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). It’s beastly hot, which gives the producers multiple chances to show William Holden without his shirt on: sweating as he digs a grave in the POW camp or sipping martinis as a free man on the beach. Here, the Japanese are the enemy and Allied victory does not yet seem inevitable.

In both movies, Holden displays great survival instincts, resourcefulness, guile, and the weary self-interest that Bogart expressed in Casablanca: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” He is very lucky, too, until his luck runs out. As Shears in The Bridge on the River Kwai, he manages to escape from the isolated prison camp that needed no gates or surveillance because there was no place to escape to—the camp is bordered by a steep promontory from which few would survive a jump or a fall.
>>>

Click here for the rest of this essay.

 

Met Percent: Week Fourteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Beauty-Writing (Callos-Graphia)

“Handwriting is jewelry fashioned by the hand from the pure gold of the intellect.” - treatise on the penmanship of Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, 9th century.

The diacritical marks indicate vowels (the alphabet has consonants only). The text is always cursive and has no upper or lower case (although shape variants are used in the beginning, middle or end of a word). Proportions are determined by a pen-stroke dot “grid” system within a circle.

How the Arabic letter “teh” is written: in its positions, and with its “isolated” proportion guides.

 

Chat with a Lampstand

Lampstand, Iran, 1578-79, gallery 462

Inscriptions are often verses of conversations. This lampstand “speaks” to its owner/viewer in a dialog of flame.

“I remember one night as my eyes wouldn’t sleep

I heard a moth speaking with a candle

Said the moth: Because I am a lover it is right that I should burn

[But] why should you weep and burn yourself up?”

Planning, Truth and Happiness

"Planning before work protects you from regret; prosperity and peace.”

“It seems worthless to me, even after all the terrible things we have had to go through, if we writers do not tell each other the truth.”

"To its owner happiness, security and life as long as a dove coos.”

The bowl with Arabic inscription (top left) has an abstract, almost contemporary, minimalist design, inscribed with a proverb on planning. It is stunning. Iran, 10th c., gallery 450.

The plate (top right) 2007, is from the Oskarmaria Brasserie inside Literaturhaus Munich, the cultural institute promoting education and literary events. After the salmon was enjoyed, a writer at our table discovered the phrase on writers and truth on the plate. At the end of the meal, a German colleague went to the kitchen and returned with the plate in a brown paper bag. She forced it from the hands of the staff. The Brasserie’s namesake, Oskar Maria Graf, was a German writer who, when the Nazis did not have his books on the Munich book-burning list, published an article entitled “Burn Me”. He got on the list.

The pen box (Qalamdan) (bottom) sends praise to the “owner”,  fashioned from brass and inlaid with silver and gold. Iran, 16th century, gallery 462. May there always be cooing . . .

 

Amulets and Talismans

This shirt was believed to be imbued with protective powers and may have been meant to be worn under armor in battle. Its surface is decorated with painted squares and medallions and the entire Qur'an written out and bordered by the ninety-nine names of God written in gold against an orange background. Talismanic Shirt and detail, Northern India or Deccan ,15th–early 16th c., not on view.

The power of the names of religious figures (Mohammed’s relatives), the Qur'anic verses, and the Shi'i prayers endow this standard with its amuletic properties. E.g. the “Protective Throne Verse”: “His Throne doth extend/ Over the heavens/ And the earth, and He feeleth/ No fatigue in guarding/ And preserving them . . .”.  Silver Standard, Iran, 18th century, not on view. 

When I was 10, my Great Uncle Harry - in the back of his wholesale underwear store in Galesburg, IL. - gave me amuletic advise on the battle of life: “To attain your natural leadership, bring your ‘lucky marbles’, and play to win.”

 

Invisible Rules

Left: Ornamental ceramic star, Iran, gallery 453. Center: a set of 15 furmah and 3 zillij. Right: M.C. Escher’s study of a Moorish tile pattern, 1936.

One of the technical design languages in Moorish art is the Zillij (or Zellige) set based system. It combines geometric tiles (furmah) with complex rules (no holes, no parts of a furmah permitted, etc.). There are at least 360 known furmah and an uncountable number of Zillij constellations. These Moorish geometries inspired Escher’s interest in tessellations. For me, they recall the set technique of 20th century serial music. Lots of rules all around.

Left: Met Moroccan Court, gallery 456,  inspired by two fourteenth-century madrasas of Fez. Right: Pattern generated by ruler and compass only. 

These patterns, as noted above, are generated by ruler and compass only. The four basic shapes, or “repeat units,” are: circles and interlaced circles; squares or four-sided polygons; the ubiquitous star pattern, derived from squares and triangles inscribed in a circle; and multisided polygons. I have had a recurring dream since high school geometry, in which I alone discover the way to trisect any arbitrary angle with only a ruler and compass. This was proven impossible in 1837. It is still impossible today.

I was against high ornament in my youth (“youth” defined as adolescence). The Baroque, Mannerist and Islamic patterns were ”over the top”. I was at home with Classic, Renaissance, and Modern. Over the years, I understood this as a need for balance and structure. I liked simpler rules. As the complexities of life became comprehensible - I could admit it - the complex, expansive, and decorative became newly appreciated. Tiepolo and Bernini were joys to grow into, and the door to over-stimulating art has stayed open. 

“I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.” - Montaigne