The Best American Poetry

"The Banquet Years" (in 1998) [by David Lehman]

from "The Bennington Five-Day Diary" (January 1998) by David Lehman

 

Roger Shattuck, author of The Banquet Years, is here [at Bennington College] giving lectures on Montaigne, Chekhov, and Proust. Shattuck, 72, in white turtleneck under a mint-green V-neck pullover, looks trim and fit, like a genial Jack Palance in mustache and goatee. Shattuck speaks naturally in maxims. I like it when he says that “It’s impossible to paraphrase any successful poem or story, and therefore we must do it.” Our assignment is to write fifty-word summaries of two Chekhov stories. Nashvillean Anne Doolittle summarized “Mire” in fourteen words: “A woman of wit and intelligence makes a living the only way she can.” Competitive as ever, I come up with a twenty-word reduction of Ulysses -- “Every man goes out on an odyssey every day, but not every man has a faithful wife to return to” -- but keep it to myself because Chekhov didn’t write Ulysses.

At lunch Shattuck and I talk about how much we abhor the displacement of literature by critical theory. I must have made some crack or pun, because Shattuck turned to me and said, “Has anyone ever told you you resemble Woody Allen?” “No,” I lied. “You’re the first.” This prompted two other people to compare me to Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story, adding, once they saw the stricken look on my face, that they meant it as a compliment.

Inspired by Shattuck, who would outlaw “text” as a term for poem or story, George Packer thinks we ought to make up an index of forbidden words. He would ban “place” (as in “I’m coming from a different place”) and “voice” (“she has found her authentic voice”) in workshops. Tom Ellis despises “issues” (“there are issues of homophobia here”). As for me, the words I most hate hearing at a poetry reading include the verbs “cupped” and “cradled,” the noun “scrim,” and the three-poem-warning: “I’ll just read three more poems.” Tonight is my turn to read. I’ll be reading a bunch of short poems. I relish the moment when I can say, “Just thirty-three more.”

Last night I had to introduce the readers. This is always an odd assignment, since the persons to be “introduced” are already well-known to us. I like doing it in verse. “If I were a consonant looking for a vowel, / or Allen Ginsberg on the day he wrote `Howl,’ / or an employee of Bell & Howell, / tempted by the spoonerism Hell and Bowel, / I’d have exhausted nearly all the rhymes for Robert McDowell. / But I’ll not throw in the towel.”

Had meetings with two of the students I’m going to work with over the next six months. Very excited about some ideas for poems that Sloane Miller and I came up with together: a poem about forks; a prose poem called “Aida,” narrating the plot of the opera as imagined by a teenager watching a performance without preconception, preparation, or Italian; a poem beginning with the line, “This is the most serious poem I have ever written.”

For the time I’m here I’m using an office belonging to a faculty member on leave, who fearlessly annotates his books. About Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler”: “very weak book.” Much of “Ulysses” he considers confused, but at one point he interrupted his reading of “Dubliners” to exclaim with evident surprise, “three good stories in a row!”

PS The picture chosen to illustrate this piece has no evident relationship to the text. What does this prove?

-- David Lehman (January 1998; first published by Slate)

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/10/the-slate-diary-4-bennington-college-jan-14-1998-by-david-lehman.html

and https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/the-benington-diary-1-january-1998-by-david-lehman-.html

 

Willis Reed, Legendary Center of the World Champion N. Y. Knicks, RIP [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Basketball great Willis Reed spoke about his literacy project. David was eager to get his predictions for the upcoming Knicks season.

In 2003, then chairman of the NEA Dana Gioia, invited David to join him in Washington for the annual Washington Book Festival, hosted by Laura Bush. It was a great event. Dana had even arranged for David's mom Anne to come along and for all of us to join him at the White House for the breakfast ceremony preceding the Festival. 

Just as the guests were taking their seats for Bush's opening remarks, David saw former Knicks great Willis Reed enter the room. He was impossible to miss, of course; at 6'10" he towered over just about everyone in the room, with the exception of former Detroit Pistons center Bob Lanier (6'11"), also in attendance. 

Reed was on hand to talk about his literacy project. 

I watched David from across the room (he was seated among the day's speakers; I was elsewhere, with Anne). He lit up when Reed took the podium. When the proceedings adjourned and guests made their way to the exits, David practically lept over seats with the finesse of a point-guard making a layup shot with two seconds on the clock. I've seen him focus on an objective, but this was masterly. 

He reached Reed and I snapped the photo, above. 

As it so happened, my office in New York City was at One Penn Plaza, across the street from Madison Square Garden. On a whim, I phoned the Knick's publicity department with the request that Reed sign the photo, which he graciously agreed to do. I've given David many gifts over the years, but I think this signed photo of the basketball great ranks among his favorites.

-- sdl

The moment no Knicks fan will ever forget: when Willis Reed hobbled onto the court in the deciding game of the 1970 championship series with the LA Lakers. When Reed came out, the crowd roared. Reed, injured, played well. The great unselfish Knicks of Reed and Walt Frazier, Dave DeBuschere, Bill Bradley, and Dick Barnett, coached by Red Holtzman, won the game, the series, and the hearts of New Yorkers.

-- DL

Happy Birthday Ern Malley! [With an introduction by Thomas Moody taken from David Lehman]

Yesterday marked the 105th birthday of Ern Malley, who remains one of Australia’s most internationally renowned poets and our greatest ever literary hoax. After I disclosed that I'm Australian in our first ever email exchange, David immediately wanted to know where I stood on the whole Malley affair. While the hoax overall has legions of fans, many people feel that the poems themselves cannot possibly possess any quality due to the nature of their genesis. In his review of The Complete Poems of Ern Malley published in Jacket in 2002, David offers a comprehensive introduction to Ern’s formative years and a lucid and insightful commentary on his poetry, arguing that Ern’s oeuvre has merit beyond the hoax, no matter the dubious motivations behind the poems’ creation. You can read David’s review here. Happy birthday Ern!

The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax by David Lehman

"THE greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the twenty-two-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.

In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding ‘preface and statement,’ outfitted Malley with a tearjerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley’s posthumous opus, ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother’s bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry."

 

 

Petit Testament

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weeps gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.

Slow down, and put on your "Panama Hat": Major Jackson's Pick for March 10

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

After I finished my MFA at University of Oregon, I packed up my worldly possessions (some clothes, a lotta books) in my beat-up minivan and was off to New Orleans. A week prior I was called with an offer to teach at Xavier University, an HBCU there. The job didn’t pay much, but I could mostly make rent. I was teaching five courses of composition writing each semester to remedial students. In my idealism, I was doing more than passing along the mechanics of writing. By teaching my students to express their realities and opinions, I was teaching a pathway for them to control their future.

The job didn’t leave room for much else. I thought about the students’ papers in the morning over bowls of oatmeal, and while brushing my teeth at night. And yet, when anyone asked what I did for work, I never mentioned the job that paid the bills. I pretentiously announced that I was a poet, often to quizzical looks.

Even though I desired to be seen as an artist, truth be told, I wasn’t writing. I hadn’t published a book yet; I just had a few poems in journals. I was posing. I told myself the intensity of grading crushed my creativity. When I showed up to write a poem at my local coffee shop with its rows of tables and green lamps, I sipped my latte, fiddled, and looked around at all the Tulane law students studiously buried in their law books.

Then, one of those students walked by and noticed a volume of poems by June Jordan. She stopped abruptly and said, “I love her! You must be a poet.” and I said, “Yes, well, indeed I am.” and she said, “What kind of poetry do you write?” And it was like my brain slammed into a wall of air. Nothing. I had become that disconnected from my writing life.

The next morning, at a crossroads, I woke up early and began to write down, with as much detail as possible, the previous day’s activities, a log of living. I abandoned the notion of poetic language, profound metaphors, and philosophical musing. I simply let myself go into myself, deeper and deeper. That process helped me find the real writer. Maybe he was somewhere in those depths, but maybe he was in the routine itself.

Today’s instructive poem realizes that sometimes, simply saying what happened with accuracy is the poem, naming in such a way that we become enchanting to ourselves.

---

Panama Hat
by David Lehman

“What kind of poems do you write?”
the interviewer asked and I said occasional poems
each day is an occasion take today

The sun shone on my face
shielded by a Panama hat
made in Ecuador

and the fate of a leaf in a hurricane
was the day’s best simile for financial markets
where the value of green keeps going up.

The trees and the grass are vying
in the green competition
because “good is as visible as green”

and the lawns are emerald
like the eyes of my beloved
when she saw the ring with two hearts

and an emerald crescent
in the jeweler’s case.
The food tasted good

and simple: beans and rice, chicken,
coconut sorbet, white cherries, lemonade,
and Matthew’s concoction with Cynar and jalapeno-infused gin.

The ice cubes in the glass
sounded like nothing 
but themselves.

The sky was blue
The shirt fit
I washed the car.

The newspaper reported
that Cambridge is catching up to Oxford
in real-estate prices

and my thousand words on “To His Coy Mistress”
were nicely illustrated
as I sat and sipped in the sun.

And then I read the new bio of Duke Ellington
and Helen Forrest’s own story
and tilted my hat as I walked

celebrating the day the occasion for
taking a walk enjoying the light
and my new Panama Hat.

           7/11/14

“Panama Hat” by David Lehman from THE MORNING LINE © 2021 David Lehman. Used by permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press.

https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2023/03/10/831-panama-hat

"The Wild Bunch": Last of the Great Westerns [by David Lehman]

My latest "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar (February 23, 2023) is titled "Brilliant Carnage: Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion bullet ballet"

I have seen The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece, many times. The film marks the definitive end of the truly Western Western, a farewell to the time when desperadoes played poker in frontier saloons, gunfighters fought legendary battles, and the cavalry saved the day or died with their boots on. A righteous man could be John Wayne romancing Claire Trevor in Stagecoach or Gary Cooper taking on three killers in High Noon, and a little boy could end the movie by begging “Shane! Shane! Come back!” Once, when my son Joe, then twelve, and I watched The Wild Bunch together, he came up with the perfect two-word description of the movie: “brilliant carnage.”

Myths die not all at once but in stages, and the Western always owed something of its appeal to the knowledge that the era it depicted—and, to some extent, invented—was long since gone by the time talking pictures filled movie screens. With each year, the cowboy-as-hero, whether lawman or bandit, grew more distant. Of the horsemen making up The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen are the only two who ride off into the sunset. Though they have defeated the bad guys who terrorized Mexican farmers, they know their days are numbered. “Only the farmers won,” Brynner says. “We lost. We always lose.”

In The Wild Bunch, Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads the eponymous outlaws with Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) as his right-hand man. Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle (Warren Oates) are brothers with bad tempers and a healthy lust for liquor and ladies. Angel (Jaime Sanchez) is the one Mexican among them, passionate and brave, while Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), a good-natured elder statesman, remains behind the scenes, because he can no longer meet the physical demands of a hold-up job. The bunch would have had one extra fellow, but Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), Pike’s closest friend, was arrested, flogged mercilessly, and blackmailed by a vicious railway baron (Albert Dekker) into leading a team of “peckerwood” trash to hunt down the gang. The actors up and down the line give sterling performances.

The movie begins on the outskirts of San Rafael, a small Texas town, with children gleefully burning straw atop a battle of ants and scorpions. It is a powerful image, conveying the idea that cruelty and an impulse to destroy may be innate in even the youngest and most innocent human beings. In sharp contrast, a salvation salesman leads an open-air temperance meeting in the center of town, where a pathetic crowd swears off alcohol and sings “Shall We Gather at the River?”

It is then that Pike and his men, dressed in U.S. army uniforms, ride in to rob the railway’s offices. Their plans have been anticipated, however, and an ambush organized against them. In the ensuing crossfire, only Pike and five others ride their horses to safety. One of them will die of his wounds minutes later. And their bags of stolen treasure turn out to contain no treasure—just dime-store metal washers.

from The American Scholar https://theamericanscholar.org/brilliant-carnage/
for more click here

The Bennington Diary #3 [by David Lehman]

Bennington diary #3 / Jan 16, 1998

       Anne McCarty and I hold our “exit meeting”–the one that faculty members are supposed to have with the five students they’ve worked with during the last six months–at the Blue Benn Diner, Bennington’s best. Anne (Greek omelet and home fries) tells me (short stack of multigrain pancakes with berries and Vermont maple syrup) about the lecture she plans to give in June. (All graduating students are required to give a public lecture and a reading during their final residency.) Anne wants to address the subject of humor in the works of Emily Dickinson, Jane Kenyon, and Anna Ahkmatova, three poets who are not famous for their comic side. There seem to be two directions Anne can pursue. She can argue that subtle humor may enhance tragic pathos. Or she can present somber lines and, with Borgesian poker face, demonstrate that they are secretly hilarious. I doubt that she’ll do the latter, though the possibilities delight me. One could argue, for example, that much of Wordsworth is merciless self-parody but that it requires the advanced reading techniques of Stanley Fish, another self-parodist, to discover this. [Jane Kenyon is pictured above with her husband Donald Hall. The two of them attended the very first session of Bennington low-residency MFA program in January 1994. Jane and I were on the fasculty; Don was a visiitng lecturer.]
       Two more “entrance meetings” today. Unlike some writing instructors, I favor the use of specific assignments. For the packet of work due at the end of January, my students must choose the best and worst poems of The Best American Poetry 1997. They are then to write two poems, one better than the best, the other worse than the worst. The deliberately bad ones are invariably the most surprising. Because our ideas of “good” and “bad” are, and perhaps ought to be, in flux, setting out to write a bad poem seems to give one the permission needed to try an adventurous gambit one would ordinarily intercept. The assignment for February: Write at least one poem in a received form (sonnet, villanelle, sestina, prose poem) and at least one in an ad hoc form such as a menu or TV listings.
       Am cutting Rick Moody’s lecture on John Cheever to write these notes. I wonder if Susan Cheever is in the audience. I’ve been writing a poem a day as an experiment, and when Susan and I gave back-to-back readings the other evening, I read my poem of Nov. 13, which was inspired by her father’s journals. “I have a date/ with a certain great novelist/ in my apartment/ whose idea of heaven is the men’s room/ of Grand Central Station/ and hell a prison in a posh suburb/ with a swimming pool where/ you can feel like a fly in a highball,” I wrote. After the reading Susan said, “I don’t believe I know you,” words that sound ambiguous on the page but conveyed ardor in person. That’s when Jill McCorkle turned up. “Are you still writing your poem a day?” she asked. Before I could answer, she said, “I wrote two novels this afternoon.”

posted by Slate; January 16, 1998. This was the first of five posts written during the January 1998 residency at Bennington College.

-- David Lehman

Schopenhauer & "The Will to Live" (on the day he was born, Feb. 22, 1788)

The Will to Live

“They say that Schopenhauer is pessimistic. That is not saying very much. [His] is a grandiose and tragic vision which, unfortunately, coincides perfectly with reality.”

– Witold Gombrowicz, A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes

1. Arthur Schopenhauer was a competitive man
   who felt nothing but scorn for Hegel.
   So he scheduled his philosophy lectures
   on the same day and at the same time
   and therefore Hegel had a packed auditorium
   while only a handful of us – a Polish writer,
   an ex-girlfriend, a few wayward apostles
   and I – heard Schopenhauer’s lectures
   on Descartes, doubt, and the will to live.

2. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Everything proceeds from this proposition.

3. Many philosophers, professional sad sacks,
   make merry with women and whiskey at night.
   Not Schopenhauer. He was logical. Eating
   a delicacy like pressed goose livers with
   a good Sauterne proved only that nothing
   exists except the temporary satisfaction
   of a hunger that will return and a thirst
   without which no liquid tastes good.
   Pleasure is merely the absence of pain,
   not a thing in itself, and the same may be said
   of peace in relation to war. And yet –

4. Look at all the things we need to endure –
   death and pain, struggle and fear –
   in order for the species to survive,
   and so great is our determination to live
   that endure these hardships we do, putting
   a good face on things, hurricanes
   and suicide bombers, the death of adulthood
   and the abandonment of the beautiful
   English language. And yet –

5. One of the apostles asked about suicides.
   What about them, Schopenhauer replied.
   “Don’t they invalidate your theory
   of the will to live?” “Not at all,”
   he smiled for once. “In suicide they prove
   the will to live is greater than they are.”

6. There were two proofs:
   (a) God must exist
   if we can conceive of god
   (b) God must but cannot exist
   if we can conceive of that
   than which nothing greater
   can be or be conceived.
   Therefore,
   God has to exist
   as a logical possibility
   impossible to disprove
   or credit.
   That’s what he said.
   I wrote it down.
   You may think he was
   a world-class pessimist
   but then you didn’t know him
   as I did in Berlin
   a hundred years before Hitler.

– David Lehman (first published in Michigan Quarterly Review)

Lunch with Tim McCarver in February 1987 [by David Lehman]

Tim McCarver died yesterday at age 81.

Back in spring 1987, McCarver, a terrific catcher who caught Bob Gibson with the Cardinals and Steve Carlton with the Phillies, was calling plays for the New York Mets. He made the cover of Esquire and had a book coming out (wotking with professional sportswriter Ray Ropbinson). I wasn't crazy about the book's title: Oh, Baby, I Love It! but the book confirmed that McCarver was as good a baseball analyst as there was. The Mets had won the 1986 World Series in the most exciting post-season of the decade, and a piece on the book made sense. At Newsweek the editors always preferred a feature to a straight book review, so I proposed flying to Philadelphia, taking Tim to lunch, and writing it up. I got the okay. 

McCarver, who lived in Gladwin, Pennsylvania,  proposed Le Bec Fin, the best French restaurant in Philadephia, for our lunch, and they gave us a private room. It was probably the most expensive lunch I ever charged to the magazine, with wonderful wines, and it lasted three or more hours, with Tim's wife stopping by for a few minutes and a cigar delivered to the room when it was time for espresso. According to my notes I wore a gray blazer with a knit tie and he wore a cashmere sport coat with a blue silk patterned tie and navy trousers.

With unforced pleasure Tim answered my questions and appraised various players and prospects. Tim, who had a lot of opinions and wasn't shy about sharing them, felt that a good sinking fastball made the batter feel as if he were "striking an anvil with sugar cane." Bob Gibson regarded the pitcher's mound "as his prIvate office." Spitballs should be made legal, because "nearly all pitchers throw them."  The "scuff" ball thrown by Mike Scott of the Astros, who gave the '86 Mets a fit, was "more illegal," but the Mets made a mistake in obsessing over it. "Of course if I'd been on the team, I would have probably done the same thing." What was the biggest psychological problem confronting a professional baliplayer? "Fear of failure." Also, "the hell of being alone." Tim agreed with Joe DiMaggio about opening day: "It's like a birthday party when you were a kid."

There was a rumor at the time that the Mets were offering Ron Darling and Mookie Wilson in a trade for the Dodgers' Orel Hershiser. "Ain't ever gonna happen," Tim said. "Hershiser is one of the great pitchers in the game." (This was before Hershiser's Cy Young year when he threw nearly sixty straight innings aithout a run and beat Oakland twice in the World Series, once by shutout.) As a traditionalist, he said "I hate the designated hitter," because it changes the very nature of the game. 

Tim loved Gerswin, Berlin, Cole Porter. When the Mets, tired of being loveable losers, started winning games in 1984, Tim hummed Duke Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" on the air. Who was the best ptcher he ever faced? For sheer talent, no souithpaw could compare with Sandy Koufax. Keith Hernandez was "the most artistic fielding first-baseman" Tim had ever seen. Solidly built, six feet tall, Tim may have been the most artistic play-by-play man this side of Vin Scully.   -- DL

The Bennington Diary #2 (January 1998) [by David Lehman]

Bennington Diary January 14, 1998

Ed. Note: Back when the Inernet was a new toy, Slate had a five-day diary feature where writers reported on their activities in the field. In January 1998 I signed on to write about the experience of teaching in the low-residency program MFA at Bennington College. 

Wake up to dismal rain, dropping temperatures, and Sinatra singing “I’ve Got the World on a String.”
       Everyone says this has been a quiet residency so far. Nothing yet has happened as dramatic as the fistfight that broke out last June between two women vying for the attentions of playwright Mac Wellman, who was doing a pole dance at the time. (The women fought to a draw.) There is also the fabled Bennington moment when Gretchen (not her real name) stood naked in an uncurtained window for an hour, absolutely immobile.
       Tim O’Brien, who was supposed to arrive tomorrow to deliver three lectures and a reading, has canceled. Liam Rector, our director, asks if I’ll fill in for one of the lectures. I can choose the topic. A second substitute lecture will be given by Rick Moody, following a screening of The Ice Storm, the Ang Lee movie adapted from Moody’s novel. We’re renting the local movie house for the morning. Which morning? Like everyone else here, I’ve lost my time sense, punchy from too little sleep and too many sestinas.
       The time has come to think up acts for Saturday night’s Varsity Show. Amy Hempel proposes a “bad metaphor” contest, with a prize for the worst. Similes are eligible. Classics of the genre include “as tall as a 6’3” tree” and “Bob and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds, who had also never met.” Sven Birkerts has agreed to judge the “pithy summary” contest, with prizes both for the best and for the most authentically bogus summaries of great novels. Lynn Freed will do her Julia Child imitation, and Jill McCorkle will produce, script, and direct something she is calling the Novel SWAT Team. I am in charge of writing a skit satirizing a workshop in which people take turns abusing a sensitive poet until all see the light and burst into the “Hallelujah Chorus” or Johnny Mercer’s “Accentuate the Positive.”

first posted by Slate
Se also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/the-benington-diary-1-january-1998-by-david-lehman-.html

 

The Bennington Diary #1 (January 1998) [by David Lehman]

Back when the Inernet was a new toy, Slate had a five-day diary feature where writers reported on their activities in the field. In January 1998 I signed on to write about the experience of teaching in the low-residency program MFA at Bennington College. This is installment #1, dated January 12, 1998

<<<

Today is day four of my semi-annual sojourn at Bennington College, where I teach in the “low residency” graduate program in writing. We -- 88 students, 20 faculty, and assorted staff --  convene here for ten days in January and ten in June; the rest of the work gets done by correspondence, with each writer on the faculty supervising five students in his or her genre.

These residencies are a cross between summer camp and boot camp, saturation experiences. Every hour of every day is filled with lectures, readings, workshops, conferences, and parties. We eat communally. The food sucks. Last June, in the Varsity Show the faculty puts on, the novelist Douglas Bauer took the Duke Ellington standard, “I Got it Bad, and That Ain’t Good,” turned it into “The Food is Shit, and That Ain’t Good,” and sang the new lyrics in the relaxed, sweater-clad Perry Como manner. I doubt that I shall ever be able to hear the words “artichoke bake” and “walnut cheddar loaf” without a shudder in my deep heart’s core. [That's Duke Ellington in a top hat on the left.]

Our isolation on this Vermont campus with its storied past (Malamud taught here, Bret Easton Ellis went to college here, and Donna Tarrt’s “The Secret History” is a roman-a-clay-feet set here) makes it the perfect setting for a murder mystery. There is never a shortage of motives, suspects, and candidates for victimhood. One year, the victim was played by Bob Hornbuckle, a good-natured St. Louis schoolteacher and aspiring fiction writer, who interrupted a lecture by visiting poet Robert Pinsky [pictured right, with David Lehman, in 2013] to argue a point about William Carlos Williams. Hornbuckle maintained that a certain Williams poem would be improved if the lining were changed. “That’s because you don’t know shit about Williams,” Pinsky replied. From then on, the “don’t know shit” locution was in constant use. Hornbuckle didn’t mind; he basked in the attention.

In workshops, the standard M.O. is to dissect a student’s story or poem, heedless of Wordsworth’s warning, “We murder to dissect.” People talk as they do nowhere else: “One thing I kind of objected to and then I fell in love with was the repetition of the word `hood’ in the second paragraph. But then I wondered about the prostitute. What if she were a nun?” Yeats’s “The Second Coming” might fare badly in a workshop. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre”: needless repetition, willful obscurity. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer”: show, don’t tell!

Today’s a rarity in a Vermont winter: a sky of unbroken blue and no snow on the ground, which is, however, soggy from the freezing rain that pelted us for our first forty-eight hours. No heat in my apartment the first night, so I gathered myself into three layers of clothes, my winter coat, and five blankets. There’s a red light in the window, which is supposed to go on when the temperature drops below fifty. The temperarure did and the red light didn't. Not that it matters. On the most sub-arctic of my five winters here, I shared a house with Doug Bauer and the poet Jason Shinder, and the furnace failed on the coldest night. The security man, making his three a.m. rounds, noticed that the red light had gone on, but decided to do nothing about it, reasoning that we were asleep inside and would resent the intrusion.

-- David Lehman

click here for the diary entry of January 18, 1998
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/10/the-slate-diary-4-bennington-college-jan-14-1998-by-david-lehman.html

Great Books and the Abyss [by David Lehman]

When education and consumerism merge, students get what they want, and one thing they appartently want is all A’s – as striking students at the New School in New York City demanded in November. They also want an igloo of protection from the weather of reality. But the very virtue of great books is not that they protect and reassure us, but that they disturb us and make us confront those elements of actuality that are hardest to endure. Literature is not comfort food, even if there do exist good books that one can consume with the ardor of a teenager eyeing a box of chocolates.

A faculty committee formed to devise a safe, harmless great books course would realize pretty quickly that, with the possible exception of Jane Austen, almost every item on the list is vulnerable to objection. The Iliad glorifies war. The Odyssey perpetrates a double standard in which Odysseus is allowed the pleasures of Calypso while Penelope must resist the attention of her suitors. Genesis propounds creationism. Dogmatic Dante audaciously puts Mohammad in a low circle of the Inferno. Infidelity is good for a belly laugh in Chaucer. Rabelais is ribald. King Lear demonizes daughters. Swift’s Gulliver puts out a fire in Lilliput by urinating in it. The Oedipus cycle of Sophocles and the Oresteia of Aeschylus confront readers with parricide and matricide, respectively, which may trigger a mental upheaval if Freud was on to something. Freud’s work is itself verboten because he is out of intellectual fashion. Alexander Pope’s satirical masterpiece “The Rape of the Lock” has to go on the grounds that the very conceit of the poem trivializes rape.

In each case the protesters miss both the forest and the trees by focusing on a single fallen leaf. This is deliberate. The formula, derived from the acolytes of the arch-deacon of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, is to focus on the periphery, not the center, of the object of criticism. But the secret of The Odyssey is not that the hero favored by the gods belongs to the ruling class. The secret of The Inferno is not that it helped its author get back at his enemies. The point of Anna Karenina is not that her husband is a symbol of Russian Imperialism.

Hamlet engages us not because the prince’s treatment of Ophelia is caddish but because the prince raises the most pressing questions facing all of us. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Ernest Hemingway said. Yet you’ll not find the book on required reading lists, despite the appeal it has always made to young minds in formation. One complaint: the use of racist lingo, accurately reflective of the time of composition.  More recent protests center on the notion that the author, a white man, dared to write about slavery, as if that were a province reserved only for slaves and their descendants. Consider the harm this kind of thinking does to our idea of imaginative liberty. Now that you’ve heard the score of Porgy and Bess, would you really want to travel back in time and discourage the Gershwins from giving voice to denizens of Catfish Row? 

The censoring of bawdy works is a little like airbrushing the cigarette out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hand in a postage stamp. It puts the past sous rature (“under erasure”), as deconstructionists put it. The erasure robs the past of its pastness, its right to exist on its own terms, whether we approve of them or not, even if they strike some of us as either a dangerous precedent or a premonition.

Having twice mentioned deconstruction as a culprit that has bought us to, if not to the edge of the abyss, the unfortunate state of affairs that exists in our universities and colleges, I feel I should add a third example. Easy to do, because a basic tactic is to divide the world into binary oppositions, pick one out, and then flip the power status in the pairing.  Thus, traditionally the teacher rather than the student was “privileged.” Now, however, the student holds the face cards. A complaint from an enraged college kid, bogus or real, could cost the instructor his or her job. Teachers used to give grades. Now they are expected to give all A’s, while students get to evaluate their instructors with anonymity and without risk. A topsy-turvy world: the world of deconstruction.

In the 1960s at Columbia, the desire of students to confront the modern literature most likely to prove upsetting was intense. It led Lionel Trilling to devise such a course and then to reflect on the experience in a fascinating essay. Trilling writes that he had given his students a taste of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Nietzsche, Conrad, Thomas Mann and William Blake. “I have asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serous study, saying: ‘Interesting, am I not? And exciting if you consider how deep I am and what dead beasts lie at my bottom.” Trilling could question the maturity of students who moved “through the terrors and mysteries of modern literature like so many Parsifals, asking no questions at the behest of wonder and fear.” But the Columbia professor had no doubt that the teaching of modern literature -- including that which may be said to bear an adversarial relationship to the prevailing culture -- was worth doing well and with a full consciousness of what the enterprise entailed.

          In 1965, Trilling observed tartly that the “progressive educational prescription to ‘think for yourself’ . . . means to think in the progressive pieties rather than the conservative pieties (if any of the latter do still exist).” He could see that in the postwar era liberalism had for all intents and purposes emerged triumphant in the clash of ideas in the academy. The author of The Liberal Imagination might be expected to applaud the development, but Trilling valued the dialectic of ideas, where thesis meets worthy antithesis, and he foresaw danger in the hegemony of an ideology.

Of one thing there is little doubt. Reading the great books -- whether Plato or Machiavelli, Ovid or Milton, Montaigne or Lady Murasaki, Augustine or Emily Dickinson , Aristiphanes or Swift -- will continue to trigger an intense response and may even lead us to the terrors and mysteries of the Abyss.

-- For eleven years, David Lehman taught a course uncompromisingly called “Great Poems” at New York University.

Copyright © 2023 by David Lehman. All rights reserved.

The Tears of Antigone: An Astrological Profile [by David Lehman]

Antigone, a classic Aries with Sagittarius rising and a fair amount of Leo and Gemini in her chart, epitomized the feminine powers extolled by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. She was very beautiful, with a profile like that of Greer Garson in Pride of Prejudice,and  a force of personality that overshadowed that of her  worthy husband, Walter Pidgeon, the perfect number two man, in Mrs. Miniver. He could cross the Channel in his little skiff to keep the evacuation of Dunkirk; she beat that by single-handedly disarming a German soldier.

In Chinese astrology, Antigone was born in the year of the rat, a sign that explains her quality of eagerness and readiness. The rat is the first of the twelve Chinese signs, representing industry, not disgusting vermin. As a matter of honor, a female rat will not procrastinate but will use trickery if need be to achieve her ends. In the competition to cross the river, the rat jumped on the back of the ox, and got off before the shore, winning the race over the tiger, the snake, etc. What she didn't realize was that she  (as a water sign) would need to unite with a cheerful, extroverted goat (earth). The goast doesn't always communicate his needs, but if he is able to keep up with the charismatic rat, the relationship will endure.

Antigone rates very high in intensity of sex appeal, the passion she arouses varying directly with the likelihood of no consummation. Her Capricorn asleep in midheaven January and her Mars victorious in April are usually cited as reasons for this particular enchantress's eternal fate, making her a symbol of resolve and heroic resistance, who would live to an grand old age if she werren't willing to die for the sake of a principle.

Antigone lived centuries before the Gregorian calendar regularized things. Consequently, the exact date of her birth is the subject of controversy, with some favoring April 9 and others April 12.

Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, was also his sister. As Sophocles recounts in the third play in his Oedipus cycle, . She rebelled against the tyrannical rule of Creon, who didn’t let her bury the dead body of her brother Polyneices.  In a fierce display of hubris Creon ignored the contradiction between his son Haemon’s love for Antigone and his own authority to boss his son around.  Everyone died in the Greek manner, Haemon killing Antigone and then taking his own life.

If it was Creon’s tragedy, it would have been a bore and a box office failure. Just as Shakespeare preferred dealing with Antony and Brutus rather than wasting his genius on Caesar, so Sophocles cast into the starry heavens the vision of Antigone as loyal, faithful, rebellious, loving, self-sacrificing, steadfast. To be a rebel while proving your loyalty is a consummation devoutly be to be wished, and Antigone in Paris emerged as one of France’s most alluring leading ladies, a symbol of resistance against the Nazis during World War II.

As Sophocles maintained, one look at the world would prompt any baby to return instantly to the womb. Making the best of a bad business, Antigone decided to act even at the expense of her own life and love, thus ensuring that she would always be the young attractive woman she was at the time of her death. Did she want children? No one thought to ask. But her treatment of her brother came to a high  erotic climax without violating the tabu on incest.

According to Indian astrology, merely bearing the name Antigone gives you a leg up on the trail to creativity.

When Antigone’s moon is in Jupiter or Neptune, she is willing to engage in moral dilemmas in the public eye. Of average height, with brilliant eyes, a mesmerizing oval face.

Asteroid 129, named after her,  was discovered on February 5, 1873 at Clinton, NY by C. H. F. Peters. It is about 84 miles in diameter.

Happy birthday, Mozart -- and Jerry Kern [by DL]

Spring 68 at Columbia was the season of the strike,
the occupation of the buildings (Low, Hamilton, Avery
Mathematics, and Fayerwether where a righteous
mininster married a young couple), and Mitch and I
went to the West End Bar to talk tactics because
we knew the "tactical patrol force" (TPF) was
going to come and hit hard. The days went by
and the arm bands worn by angry students
went from green (amnesty for protesters)
to black (mourning for Alma Mater). But I still
had my Music Humanities final to face and I
was so ignorant I did the only thing I could do:
bought Bach's "Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott,"
Mozart's Jupiter, Beethoven's 3rd, 5th, and 7th,
and Brahms's 4th. On the final the professor
played something we had not heard in class.
It was the slow movement of the 7th.
And that summer in Oxford
I heard the opening of the last movement
of the Jupiter every hour
on the hour. Years later I learned
Mozart's birthday, the 26th of January,
was also that of Kern, Jerry Kern
of Show Boat and Swing Time,
"The Way You Look Tonight"
and "Long Ago And Far Away." So I will just say
to both of these great composers: happy birthday!

Spring 68 at Columbia was the season of the strike,
the occupation of the buildings (Low, Hamilton, Avery
Mathematics, and Fayerwether where a righteous
mininster married a young couple), and Mitch and I
went to the West End Bar to talk tactics because
we knew the "tactical patrol force" (TPF) was
going to come and hit hard. The days went by
and the arm bands worn by angry students
went from green (amnesty for protesters)
to black (mourning for Alma Mater). But I still
had my Music Humanities final to face and I
was so ignorant I did the only thing I could do:
bought Bach's "Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott,"
Mozart's Jupiter, Beethoven's 3rd, 5th, and 7th,
and Brahms's 4th. On the final the professor
played something we had not heard in class.
It was the slow movement of the 7th.
And that summer in Oxford
I heard the opening of the last movement
of the Jupiter every hour
on the hour. Years later I learned
Mozart's birthday, the 26th of January,
was also that of Kern, Jerry Kern
of Show Boat and Swing Time,
"The Way You Look Tonight"
and "Long Ago And Far Away." So I will just say
to both of these great composers: happy birthday!

My Goal is to go to Mongolia [by David Lehman]

All day yesterday I tried to write a song in the Cole Porter manner beginning "My goal is to go to Mongolia," but the melody of "Columbia, the gem of the ocean" kept getting in the way. Well, I'll see what I can come up with when I'm over there. It's flattering to know they're prepping for my visit, though the cyclones and quakes do seem somewhat excesssive.

Tomorrow Stacey and I fly to Beijing; we will visit that city and two others in China, giving readings and lectures, in the next week. Then comes a week in Mongolia, where I'm hoping to ride a camel and hang out with Mongolia's poet laureate, who has promised to teach me a Mongolian verse form. If I can manage to post from those outposts I will do so, and if not I'm sure we'll have lots to tell when we get back in early June.

My Goal Is to Go to Mongolia.

My goal
Is to go
To Mongolia.

In Mongolia
I shall know
The whole of ya.

“Let me seduce thee,”
Said he.
“Only if I be
The wlling accomplice
Of a kiss,”
Said she.

O let me kiss
Her and win her back,
And ride the back
Of a camel,
An ornery animal
With the smell
Of magnolia, 
In the desert
In Mongolia.

-- DL   from the archive; first posted May 15, 2008

Memories of the BAP 1992 Launch (ed. Charles Simic)

Bill Wadsworth, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, organized the launch readings of the 1992 and 1993 editions at the Alliançe Francaise in New York City.  Bill kept these photos from the 1992 event, including a group portrait of the participants, a portrait of the series editor and one of Lynda Hull with Charles Simic looking over her shoulder.

Is Poetry Kaput? [by Michelle Rochefoucault]

It used to be God whose decomposing corpse made the big stink. Nietszche announced the death. Freud put forth the exposition in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. In its cover story of April 8, 1966, Time made it official in a cover story wisely phrased as a rhetorical question: “Is God Dead?”

If religion had been the opium of the masses, and masses on Sunday mornings were a casualty of deicide, people could turn to the usual alternatives – politics and art – but the youth culture was in full swing in 1966, and the nearest thing to transcendence was an acid trip at a rock festival or blowing yourself up making a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Meanwhile, the subject has receded to the terrorism and fundamentalism pages of the newspaper, and the obituary focus has long since shifted to literature.

The death of the novel had worried all-star panelists for years. Now, with Updike and Roth dead, a new consensus started to form around the notion that the TV serial as exemplified by The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Fauda, House of Cards, and Homeland has displaced and supplanted the novel as a mass entertainment form -- one that can aspire to be both wildly popular and notably artistic, as the novel was at its best. The past tense in that last clause makes me sad, though I have the seen the future and it is even more enthralling than Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga as done BBC-style with Damian Lewis as Soames.

The death-of debate of the moment centers on poetry and takes the form of essays, sometimes jeremiads, in wide circulation monthlies. Last month the NY Times declared that poetry is dead because T. S. Eliot murdered it, which was a novel though not poetic way to note the 100 anniversary of ”The Waste Land.”  If you wonder at magazine editors who run variants of the same article, rehashing the same tired arguments, don’t. Think of the ingenuity that goes into the packaging. This time: poetry as the corpse in a detective story whose culprit was the least-likely suspect.

 “People who are not poets make fools of themselves talking about poetry,” La Rochefoucault said. “It is the one thing they have in common with poets."

-- DL

Claude Rawson on Stanley Fish, Derrida, the Rise and Ruin of Critical Theory (1991)

The more things change, the more they stay the same -- or get worse.
From "Old Literature and Its Enemies" by Claude Rawson, London Review of Books, 25 April 1991.

The identification of theory with a more or less coercive political agenda has been pointed out from time to time, and its more triumphalising publicists are increasingly open and even boastful on the subject. It has merged with the wider issues of ‘political, correctness’, ‘multiculturalism’, and one or two other phenomena which have lately attracted worries of a ‘new McCarthyism’. An article in the Wall Street Journal of 13 November 1990 reported the now notorious affaire in which Stanley Fish, Chairman of the English Department at Duke University and a major national power-broker of the theory trade [below right], wrote to the Provost of the University demanding that local members of the National Association of Scholars should be banned from ‘key committees involving tenure or curriculum decisions’, subsequently affirming that the organisation was ‘racist, sexist and homophobic’. The NAS is said to be dedicated to the preservation of traditional scholarship. The founder of its Duke University branch is James David Barber, a civil rights activist and past president of Amnesty International, which suggests that the association may be something other than a hotbed of reactionary prejudice. At all events, Fish circulated his letter among a handful of ‘trusted colleagues’, one of whom ‘was sufficiently taken aback by its contents to see that it was made public’. When the campus newspaper broke the story, ‘Prof. Fish denied ever saying that NAS members should be excluded from tenure and curricular committees. “It was really strange to hear him say that,” a student editor marvelled. “We had the letter with his own words asking just that, right in front of us.” ’ Fish ‘declared himself unavailable for comment’.

But not for long. Two months later, Fish was being reported in the New Republic (18 February 1991) as having said that he didn’t believe ‘free speech’ was anything ‘more than an expression of power’. A graduate student asked him to elaborate: ‘“I want them,” responds Fish, referring to students and faculty, “to do what I tell them to.” Later, he explains to a small group: “I want to be able to walk into any first-rate faculty anywhere and dominate it, shape it to my will. I’m fascinated by my own will.” ’

At this point, with the issue reduced to the egocentric billowings of an individual, the example would seem to lose its representative status. This is not so, however, for several reasons. One is that coercive egomania on this scale has become an institutional feature of literary studies. It goes with positions of tribal leadership in a discipline not formerly given to the unquestioning worship of intellectual thuggery, and the damage it does to the educational process is something we should be thinking about. A variant case, reported on in Lehman’s book [Signs of the Times], is that of [Jacques] Derrida. An equally soft-spoken authority called Houston Baker, on record as saying that choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck is ‘no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza’, and that his ‘career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards’, can nowadays be elected President of the MLA. It seems evident that such an out-look would not get him very far in the fast food business, which adds countenance to the proposition that people go into English studies because they’re unlikely to make a success of anything else.

Secondly, this style of egomania attracts to itself and to its hangers-on – in the form of salaries, support services, perks, lecture fees and the expensive hoopla of conferences and other promotional circuses – immense sums of money which would be better spent on more urgent educational priorities, including better schools for some of the disadvantaged groups on whose behalf, it seems, Professor Fish and his analogues will only go so far as to limit the free speech of others.

A third feature of this coerciveness is that it has its institutional reflection in codes of behaviour which the university to which Fish belongs is seeking to impose on its members. The New Republic reports, for example, that Duke University has initiated a group with the Committee on Public Safety-like title of ‘Committee to Address Discrimination in the Classroom’. This body, which was given the charge of uncovering faculty racism in the classroom, found very little in the way of overt bias. But in its monitoring of the classroom it did discover examples of ‘disrespectful facial expressions or body language aimed at black students’. The committee has promised to continue its work.

Duke, you may say, is perhaps unusual. Once a traditional and unflamboyant institution, it decided a few years ago to go trendy. With the aid of the entrepreneurial Fish it has collected the biggest and loudest assembly of literature professors dedicated to [Alvin] Kernan’s scenario of doing dirt on literature (a nest of singing turds, as one disaffected wit described them). It is the world’s largest hypermarket of hard theory, as well as of applied multiculturalism, and the launching-pad for more round-the-clock attention-seeking fatuities than there were air sorties in the Gulf War.

But it’s evidently not the only place where a thought police, or body-language police, is getting into gear. A programme at Tulane University in New Orleans is being set up in which ‘faculty and students will be encouraged to report on each other’ for signs of racism and sexism, with every department watched by ‘an “Enrichment Liaison Person” to inform the administration about continuing progress in ... the “Initiatives” ’, according to an anguished letter to the press from the Chairman of the Political Science Department. Many universities have more or less avowedly institutionalised the practice, in making appointments or promotions, of preferential treatment on grounds other than the candidate’s contribution to knowledge or his or her intellectual ability.

These not only include the candidate’s race, sex or sexual preference, but the correctness of his or her opinions. One result of this is that departments which used to make themselves mediocre by preferring white males over better-qualified women or blacks are now making themselves doubly mediocre by the same process in reverse, with many of the original second-raters still in place. This seems bad not only for scholarship but also for race and gender relations.

The American press (Newsweek and the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, regional dailies and the campus papers) have picked this up in recent months, with predictable references to Orwellian nightmare and McCarthyism. David Lehman reports the ‘commonplace wisdom among job-seekers at MLA conventions that ... if you want to make it in the criticism racket, you have to be a deconstructionist or a Marxist or a feminist. Otherwise you don’t stand a chance.’ There is no doubt that this is the advice given to graduate students when they are considering their research topic, by advisers who may be motivated as much by a realistic estimate of the student’s career prospects as by a political agenda of their own.

***

Lehman’s Signs of the Times examines the impact of Deconstruction in the United States. It does not engage in technical debate as John Ellis or Thomas Pavel have done, and is not an academic but a ‘journalistic’ book: journalistic in an honourable sense, which will doubtless not be immune from the sanctimonious sneers of the high priests of the de Man cult, who freely use journalism to decry the journalism of those who reported the Nazi sympathies of their dead leader’s wartime journalism.

What Lehman offers is a survey of the current fortunes of Deconstruction as a professional or ideological routine, and especially as a talismanic or valorising term, in American intellectual life, and of its penetration into other disciplines than literature. He also gives the fullest account I have seen of the known biographical facts about de Man, which apparently include financial irregularities, possible bigamy, a Rousseauistic callousness towards the children of his first marriage, as well as Nazi collaboration and four decades of mendacity or dissimulation on most of these subjects.

Lehman offers good coverage of the gobbledegook and doublethink brought to bear in de Man’s defence: ‘De Man’s entire writing effort is a silent trace of the reality of an event whose very historicity, borne out by the author’s own catastrophic experience, has occurred precisely as the event of the preclusion – the event of the impossibility – of its own witnessing’; ‘only the trivially guilt-ridden pathology of bitter academics who have always resented de Man’s intellectual, i.e. critical, power would want de Man to have inscribed himself in a conversion narrative’; and, especially startling as refutations of alleged anti-semitism go, ‘are not, indeed, Paul de Man and his deconstruction somehow overwhelmingly Jewish – as Jewish as anyone, in our multinational 1980s, can be?’

The fullest coverage is reserved for Derrida’s responses in the journal Critical Inquiry, which assail the assailants with the finesse of Ubu Roi and the conciseness of Castro. The second rejoinder, engagingly entitled ‘Biodegradables’, is longer than all six answers to his first defence put together, and must be the most voluminous mixture of Shandean self-exhibition and vulgar abuse ever to have been allowed into a journal professedly committed to rational discourse. The English text of these pieces incidentally suggests in places that Derrida and his translator do not have between them a sufficient knowledge of both English and French to know that he doesn’t mean what he is sometimes represented as saying. Since Derrida regularly lectures in America, and since his American readers read him in translations from the French, the potential for misprision opens up as an abyss of truly continental proportions.

Derrida’s inordinate polemical scripts are the written counterpart of his lecturing style, an advanced case of galloping logorrhoea. The audiences are vast, but with definite signs of shrinkage as the days go by, and Lehmen wonderfully describes a scene at Cornell in 1988: ‘The undergraduate sitting behind me whispered excitedly to her companion, “He isn’t God,” in the tone of one who is trying to persuade herself of something.’ The subject was ‘The Politics of Friendship’. On the Monday,

                       he commenced his lecture by quoting Montaigne, who was himself citing Aristotle:
                       ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ The two parts of the sentence are incompatible,
                       Derrida observed. If there is no friend, to whom am I speaking? Or, with a shift
                       in the formal emphasis: if I can address you as my friends, how can I say there is
                       no friend?

The following Wednesday, with his audience halved but still running into hundreds, he addressed ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’:

                     ‘Fraternity? Cela suffit!’ he said. Fraternity ... was exclusionary ... True friendship
                      is understood as possible between two men but never between a man and a woman
                      or between two women. ‘The double exclusion privileges the brother, even above
                      the father,’ Derrida said – fighting words in a discourse in which patriarchy is in as
                      much disrepute as, say, phallogocentrism ....

On Friday it was question-time. The scene switches to a ballet of ingratiating interrogations, fielded with deprecatory simpers or oracular condescension. But watch the punchline:

                    A professor of Romance studies tossed him a verbal bouquet, or tried to. He observed
                   that a certain passage in Montaigne’s essay on friendship is ‘the most Derrida-like
                   passage in Montaigne’. (Derrida disagreed.) ... With the air of the star pupil, a literature
                   professor returned to ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ Was the ‘asymmetry’ in
                   the apostrophe not an example of the ‘breakdown between performative and constative
                   language’?

                   This afforded Derrida an opportunity he could seize. ‘The asymmetry of the sentence
                   makes one wonder which half of the equation is subordinate,’ he said, then launched
                   a monologue that concluded with the observation that ‘one of the most interesting features
                   of phallogocentrism’ is that ‘you can’t have an animal as a friend.’ Question: ‘You said that
                   women are excluded [from traditional concepts of friendship], yet Aristotle likens friendship
                   to the mother’s desire to know her child.’ Answer: ‘Mothers are not necessarily women.’

Claude Rawson is the Maynard Mack Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.

Happy birthday, David Shapiro, author of "January"

David Shapiro wrote:

at 8:42pm

David, please take the test I left out in the rain.
Freud's the name, theory's the game, lying on the couch seems inane,
free association is the main, transference too is the cane,
Oedipus walks in the rain.

Take it, I'm an easy marker, for Freudian reasons and some Adlerian.
What is a test but a little joke to make the taker mad? Name the allusion.
Where was the cancer of late Freud? Where did Freud say sex was all and
every squeaking hand could make us say the wished-for words?

Love and work -- where do Freud and Reich say these are big
Responsibilities? Was Delmore Schwartz in analysis by age 23 when he said
Dreams begin Responsibilities with its lip of blue snow? Which Columbia
professor could we assume never went through analysis?
Whom did Lacan call the classically unanalysed writer (here I give in--James Joyce. O)

What was the speciality du jour of the great Lou Andreas Salome?
How long has David Shapiro been in analysis, and why?
How many of his poems are dreams?

(2009)

Titian's "Venus of Urbino" on New Year's Eve [by David Lehman]

New Year’s Eve  

Champagne and a ribeye, that’s the ticket,
Beethoven’s string quartet in C# minor,
and good riddance to the plague year.
The mind can provide, provide,
and theories will continue to propose
themselves in politically incorrect seminars
in which ardent young men declare
the whole study of aesthetics may be
divided between Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”
and the fashion industry.  Nor is it just
a luxury, this taste for delicacies, this
indulgence in beauty for its own sake,
these academic escapades and linguistic
adventures that may eventuate in
a poem of delight, desired and deserved.

-- David Lehman (from Commonweal)

Above: Titian's "Venus of Urbino" at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence

Some Cinematic Suggestions [by David Lehman]

For The American Scholar, I've posted short essays on the movies I've listed here. Here are links to, and brief excerpts from, the articles. To this post, which first  appeared on March 27, 2020, I have since added my piece on The Manchurian Candidate from January 22, 2022. Click here to see other Talking Pictures features.

-- Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear 
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-shadow-of-evil/#.Xn5LrNJKiM8 ("The Shadow of Evil")

<<< Horror is what we feel witnessing the aftermath of a fatal car wreck. Terror is what we feel in anticipation of something terrible that has not yet happened.

What Cape Fear (1962) offers is a pure example of a third kind of sensation, one that attracts even as it repels: menace. Menace is Robert Mitchum as Max Cady, newly released from an eight-year prison sentence, a cigar in his mouth and a Panama hat on his head, into the heat of summer in a small, southern town. Cady embodies evil and Mitchum embodies Cady, a character who is as cunning as he is vicious.

Although he plays an unreformed sex offender who beats up women and has no business gaining control of the viewer’s attention, Cape Fear is Mitchum’s picture from the moment he appears on the scene, confronting the attorney who put him behind bars. “Hello, Counselor. Remember me?” Cady is back with a vengeance. >>

-- William Holden, in two POW films, Stalag 17 and The Bridge on the River Kwai 
https://theamericanscholar.org/william-holden-model-prisoner/#.Xn5LANJKiM8 ("Model Prisoner")

<<< In each movie, Holden says something that communicates his capacity for irony and irreverence, as well as his distaste for the boyish conception of war as a “game.” In The Bridge on the River Kwai, Shears says to Warden: “You and Colonel Nicholson, you’re two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules—when the only important thing is how to live like a human being.” In Stalag 17, he offers this wonderful parting shot: “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let’s pretend we’ve never met before.”

The slam-bang conclusion of The Bridge on the River Kwai is magnificent, and I shall say nothing more about it here except to reveal that the movie’s last word is “madness!” At the end of Stalag 17, Sefton takes wire-cutters to cut through the barbed wire, rescue a lieutenant the Germans want to kill, and guide the two of them to freedom. Duke: “The crud did it.” Harry Shapiro: “I’d like to know what made him do it.” Animal: “Maybe he just wanted to steal our wire cutters. Ever think of that?” >>>

-- The Best Years of Our Lives with Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews

 https://theamericanscholar.org/souvenirs-of-war/#.Xn5LL9JKiM8 ("Souvenirs of War")

<<< A great scene: lovesick Peggy confronts her parents, saying they can’t understand her because they “never had any trouble.” To which Milly responds, turning to Al: “We never had any trouble. How many times have I told you I hated you, and believed it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick and tired of me, that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?”

I am always moved by a scene in which Fred climbs aboard a discarded bomber, his “office” during the war, which is now rusting in an aircraft boneyard. The scene has no words, just music, as Fred sits and stares into his turbulent past and blank future. This may be my favorite moment in the film, but there are others very nearly as affecting, including the one in which, at a formal dinner of bank officers and trustees, Al gulps down too many highballs but manages not to hiccup when he makes a speech that begins unsteadily but ends with eloquence. >>>

-- Gentleman's Agreement with Gregory Peck

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-matter-of-pride/#.Xn5LT9JKiM8  ("A Matter of Pride") 

 

<<< Gentleman’s Agreement is one of two late 1940’s pictures that wrestle with the ugliness of anti-Semitism. The other is Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, also from 1947, a noir featuring three Roberts: Robert Young as an investigator, Robert Mitchum as a friend of a suspect, and Robert Ryan as a demobilized soldier who brutally murders the hospitable Jewish man whom he and his army buddies meet in a bar. But while Crossfire centers on a homicide for which the only motive is drunken anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement deals with the sort of suburban, exclusionary anti-Semitism practiced by those who claim that “some of my best friends are Jews.” >>>

 

 

 

 

The Killing (directed by Stanley Kubrick; with Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr., Vince Edwards, etc)

https://theamericanscholar.org/epitaph-for-a-genre/#.XptjCVxKiM8 ("Epitaph for a Genre")

<<<
The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny (Sterling Hayden) and Fay (Coleen Gray) are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.

The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.
>>>

The Manchurian Candidate
January 22, 2022
Political scientists used to define politics as the art of the possible. If it has morphed into the craft of manipulative paranoia, the change dates back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s report satisfied few skeptics, journalists, or serious historians, and the credibility of politicians (who used to be called “statesmen”) keeps ebbing.

The Manchurian Candidate, which presaged the change, presents a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate by long-range rifle during his party’s nominating convention in Madison Square Garden. The movie’s conceit was so scary that studio executives at United Artists felt the project had to be cleared with the White House. Frank Sinatra dutifully called JFK, who greenlit the film, which Sinatra believed in so strongly that he volunteered the use of his private plane for an early scene in the movie.

Talk about serendipity: On October 22, 1962, only two days before the picture’s release, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he had ordered a naval blockade to repulse Russian ships, equipped with missiles, heading to the Caribbean. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been seen ever since as the tensest moment in the 45-year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and here was a movie advancing the thesis that a Communist assassination plan was in the works.

The Manchurian Candidate is wickedly satirical. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a demagogue in the manner of Joe McCarthy, is revealed to be an imbecile under the thumb of his ambitious, intellectually superior wife, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury at her best). What happened to her first husband? The movie, mum on the point, offers an Oedipal triangle in which Mrs. Iselin controls her war hero son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), and gets him to eliminate her rival, his bride (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of Senator Iselin’s fiercest, most principled opponent (John McGiver). Lansbury was less than three years older than Harvey. In the novel, she seduces him; in the film, just a kiss on the lips, but it’s enough.

What most distinguishes The Manchurian Candidate is its opening. If you miss the first five minutes of Hamlet, you can catch up (at the cost of some excellent verse), because the ghost does not appear to Hamlet until act I, scene 4 and doesn’t speak to him until scene 5. But, as the movie’s theatrical release poster accurately proclaimed, “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about.” The film begins in Korea, 1952. Betrayed by a guide, an American army unit is ambushed. After Saul Bass’s marvelous title credits, featuring the queen of diamonds on an oversize political campaign button, we go to an American airport, where Sergeant Shaw, survivor of the ambush, is honored with hoopla for the valor he is said to have displayed under fire.

In the following scene, the camera slowly approaches Shaw’s commanding officer, Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra), asleep beside an insomniac’s paradise of books, among them The Trial, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ulysses. Marco, who nominated Shaw for his medal, slides into a recurring nightmare of what really happened in Korea.

The brainwashing sequence begins with the captive GIs in their army fatigues on a stage. The audience appears to the men, in their trance, to consist of dowagers in sunhats who have gathered to talk about hydrangeas at a suburban garden party in New Jersey. In fact, the ladies in the audience are Russian and Chinese bigwigs, and Frankenheimer switches us back and forth between alternating versions, the harmless old women and the malevolent Communists in suits or uniforms. Then we watch in horror as, under orders, Shaw kills two of his fellow POWs while the other soldiers look on, affectless.

Like Major Marco, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) has recurrent nightmares culminating in a public murder committed by Shaw. And, like Major Marco, he is programmed to say, when asked, that “‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Everyone says so, and it’s odd, because Raymond is a singularly cold, humorless fellow whom the men dislike..

The buried truth—that the recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor, feted with fanfare, is a secret, trigger-ready weapon concocted by the enemy—created a mental shock to anyone who saw The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. (I was 14 years old, and amazed.) The plot: to engineer the nomination of the clownish Senator Iselin for the position of vice president, then to kill the man at the head of the ticket, paving the way for Iselin’s rise to that position. The paranoid paradox: the extreme right-wing John Iselin is really a clueless Communist placeholder. The brains of the operation: Eleanor Iselin, as icily ruthless as Lady MacBeth.

Marco, the veteran suffering from PTSD who tries to save Shaw from his predestined fate, looks like a man having a nervous breakdown, but he must have something going for him, because the glamorous and beautiful Rosie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is willing to break her engagement to her fiancé on the basis of a shared cigarette with Marco on the train between Washington, D. C. and New York City. Although Leigh is extraneous to the plot, I have published a poem contending that the only justification needed for Janet Leigh’s presence in the movie is that she is Janet Leigh. More creatively, Roger Ebert argues that in the paranoid universe of The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh may secretly be Sinatra’s controller.

I will not give away other surprises and speculations except to say that the guises assumed by the queen of diamonds will endow that particular card with a rare significance if you are a part-time poker player. An amusing scene takes place in Jilly’s, Sinatra’s favorite New York hangout. When the bartender, telling a story, says, “Go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake,” Raymond—a solitaire addict who has just encountered the trigger card—does as told. Marco has to fish him out.

The Manchurian Candidate has altered political discourse, and the very word brainwashing has acquired a stink. The evil mesmerist-in-chief, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), crows that Raymond Shaw’s “brain has not only been washed, as they say; it’s been dry-cleaned.” In 1967, George Romney shot his presidential candidacy in the foot when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because US generals had “brainwashed” him. Recently, Donald Trump has been depicted as a “Manchurian candidate,” allegedly willing to favor the Russians in exchange for lucrative real-estate deals.

But The Manchurian Candidate offers more than a linguistic afterlife, thrilling paranoia, and the cunning of Eleanor Iselin. It succeeds as well as it does because of the strong sense of the uncanny that informs it, as if we were watching our own history rendered as a spooky hallucination, delivered with the plausibility of a newsreel.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-prophecy-of-an-assassination/

Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay in Kubrick's "The Killing" [by John Harbourne]

For more  of John Harbourne's pioctures, visit this site:
johnharbourneartist.com
copyright (c) 2022 by John Harbourne

Epitaph for a Genre: On Kubrick's "The Killing" [by David Lehman]

Adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson from the pulp novel by Lionel White, The Killing is classic noir. The plot is about an expertly planned racetrack heist that goes spectacularly wrong because the weak link in the chain of confederates is married to a two-timing frail. A cast of noir stalwarts under Kubrick’s direction brings this story to life. Later Kubrick movies such as 2001 and A Clockwork Orange are more ambitious undertakings, but many of us with noir in our bones have a special affection for The Killing, a taut, black-and-white depiction of futility and failure.

Just out of prison, Johnny Clay is tall, tough, taciturn, and as decent a guy as you could want in a thief—a role Sterling Hayden was born to play. He has planned the robbery with a chess player’s precision. An inside job, it requires the contributions of a pay-window cashier named George (Elisha Cook Jr.) and a track bartender. Johnny has also recruited Randy (Ted de Corsia), a crooked cop, who drives solo in his prowl car; Nikki, a sharpshooter (played with great nastiness by Timothy Carey); and Maurice, a muscle man (Kola Kwariani, a Georgian wrestler with whom Kubrick played chess).

Nikki must shoot Black Lightning, the favorite in the high-stakes race of the day, just before the colt reaches the backstretch of the track. At the same time, Maurice will pick a fight at the bar. You need 10 men to hold Maurice down, and so, amid the chaos, no one notices the cashier when he unlocks the door marked “NO ADMITTANCE,” behind which men count and stash the day’s take. The diversions give Johnny time enough to walk in, don a mask, brandish a submachine gun, and collect the dough in a duffel bag, which he then tosses out the window … for Randy to pick up and drive away in his cop car. A perfect crime.

Kubrick starts and restarts the story, shifting points of view, reverting each time to the track announcer’s call of the $100,000-added Lansdowne Stakes. The marksman’s story features a chilling scene between Nikki and a black racetrack employee played by James Edwards. The narrative throughout is advanced by voiceover, a matter-of-fact male voice of authority, accentuating the suspense.

The criteria of masculinity are presented and questioned in the movie. Elisha Cook, Jr., so memorable as the humiliated gunsel in The Maltese Falcon and as brave, lovesick Harry Jones in The Big Sleep, is outstanding as George the cashier, a man who, in Lionel White’s novel, is said to be “crazy about his wife” but “not completely blind to her character.” He knows, too, that “he himself had failed as a husband and failed as a man.”

In short, he is the archetypal noir loser, married to Sherry (Marie Windsor), who is discontented, fickle, frustrated, and doomed. A true chingona as perhaps only Marie Windsor could render her! When George confides that in the next few days he will have a lot of money, she says, with practiced cruelty, “Did you put the right address on the envelope when you sent it to the North Pole?” Sherry gets George to reveal the gang’s plan.

Everything goes right until the guys gather to split the proceeds. Sherry has spilled the beans to her handsome boyfriend Val (Vince Edwards). Val and a henchman barge in to steal the dough, and in the ensuing shootout all are killed except George, who is badly wounded but has enough vitality left to stumble home and shoot Sherry before he expires. “It isn’t fair,” she says, making the cinematic most of the moment. “I never had anyone but you, not a real husband, not even a man.”

Having transferred the loot to the biggest suitcase he could buy, Johnny Clay arrives at the scene 15 minutes too late. Seeing George stumble down the front stairs, Johnny puts two and two together and drives away with the sound of sirens in his ears. He and girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray) hightail it to the airport.

The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny and Fay are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.

The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.

Johnny Clay does not survive in the novel on which The Killing is based, Lionel White’s Clean Break. On the last page, two bullets from George’s gun make a “peculiar, plopping sound” as they enter Johnny’s stomach. Under his elbow is a folded newspaper, headlined “Race Track Bandit / Makes Clean Break / With Two Million.”

The movie’s ending is even better. Two million bucks in small bills go up in a whirlwind, and the bandit has not only lost the cash but has also unmasked himself as the culprit. Dazed, helpless, Johnny and Fay retreat and try to hail a taxi. They are standing by the airport’s front doors as two armed plainclothes cops walk menacingly toward them. The look on Sterling Hayden’s face is unforgettable.

Fay: “Johnny, you’ve got to run.”

Johnny: “Ah … what’s the difference?”

This exchange, which ends the movie, could stand as an epitaph for all of noir.

Written for and posted by The American Scholar, April 1, 2020.