The Best American Poetry

“Schmaltz Alert” [by Amy Gerstler]

Schmaltz Alert

One whole loaf of bread, a baguette
sliced lengthwise in half though of course
they never say baguette in Vienna, they had
other words in that slightly grimy dark bar
where I first saw it displayed in a poorly lit
glass case next to a plate of what I mistook
for burnt chocolate cookies but which turned
out to be thin, crisp slices of blood sausage.
A jar of rubbery pickled eggs, blurred
in murky liquid sat on top of the case.
But I was mesmerized by the sandwich.
What in God's name is smeared on that bread--
I almost said--that translucent goo the color
of pus?!  For politeness sake I asked in my
creaky German What's that sandwich in
the window? Which probably came out
something like: "What is window-bread?"
but aided by my pointing, the guy behind
the bar received the meaning. He looked
as if I'd asked what beer was. That's a chicken
fat sandwich, he replied, as though to a dim
child. Yes, those were chopped raw
onions sprinkled on top of the schmaltz
which was spread thick like peanut butter.
Like so many things my mother cooked
that I gave her grief for and wouldn't eat:
liver, tongue, parts of the animal I couldn't
bear to recognize, let alone ingest--
suffice it to say I was utterly repulsed
by the python-like sandwich sold in sections
at that tavern in the land of my ancestors,
and with my friends at the table, I laughed
at it. Yet, eating to keep warm--what did I
know of that in my privileged existence? What
did I know of pogroms, Russian winters, forced
immigration, of the value of fat, its anti-
starvation richness, of using every bit of a bird,
my pickyeaterhippievegetariancollegeeducated
self refusing to acknowledge any such necessities,
wrinkling my nose at the stink of cabbage cooking,
squinting at Russian writing on the backs
of forebearers' multi-stamped passports slipped
into a photo album, their set, defenseless, nameless
faces peering at me hungrily. Once an uncle
at the wedding of his son, a skinny, hairy kid
who was marrying a Rubenesque beauty said,
"He always did go for those little fatties" as though
this was a delightful remark. Actually, he
used the term "little fatties," as a second try.
First, he said zaftig, but based on what he read
as incomprehension on my face, he figured
he needed to translate for the poor dumb
Jewish girl who didn't know her own language.
But, though I know little Yiddish, I was familiar
with zaftig, lobbed as a compliment among my
relatives to mean a well-padded, curvaceous cutie--
nobody's stomach rumbling here! An aunt took me
aside one afternoon when I was 20, advising,
you should eat more, dear, if you want to catch a husband.
I didn't bother to respond or keep the contempt
off my punim. Anyway, old friend, what I
wanted to say is that on the phone the other day,
when you said Schmaltz Alert!  to warn me
you were about to say something affectionate,
I remembered that gross, noble sandwich
for the first time in years. I thought about how
we both come from Russian Jews who fled first
to Europe, where they perfected that sandwich
as well as an ability to simultaneously embrace
and mock the excessively sentimental, and
for no good reason I found myself in tears.

-- Amy Gerstler
from the Mississippi Review (Vol. 51, issue 3)

Nov 2, 2023, at 7:30 PM: The Best American Poetry 2023 launch reading

The Best American Poetry 2023 launch reading will take place via ZOOM on Thursday, November 2, 2023, at 7:30.

 

Elaine Equi (left), who edited the volume, will moderate. These are the poets who will read their poem in the volume:

 

Rae Armantrout

Martine Bellen

Charles Bernstein

Lee Ann Brown

Maxine Chernoff

Boris Dralyuk

Amy Gerstler

Paul Hoover

Patricia Spears Jones

Vincent Katz

Miho Kinnas

Wayne Koestenbaum

Michael Lally

David Lehman

Katha Pollitt

Jerome Sala

Tim Seibles

Diane Seuss

Mitch Sisskind

Jack Skelley

Amanda Smeltz

Terence Winch

 

The website page for complete information:

https://www.greenlightbookstore.com/event/best-american-poetry-2023

 

The registration link to sign up for the event:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Dp80gab8TZaBfSTSmLNdkg#/registration

 

The book buy link:

https://www.greenlightbookstore.com/book/9781982186753

Three Poems by Amy Gerstler

My Ego

is a dented suit of armor, a designer gown
with grimy lining. She's the cause of false beliefs.
She fucks up my ability to love. She's prickly
and tender as an artichoke heart. She proposes
to me so frequently I can't hear other people
speak. She's a self-annointed guide who materializes
at my side with a flourish of trumpets and a bullhorn.
She's a forged love letter, a jailer impersonating a
friend. She's a series of flashbacks in which I'm
both victim and hero. I try to bribe her into exile,
but she calls herself my servant and falls weeping
at my feet. I'm forever banishing her, this mistress
of disguises, even as she clamors back into my lap,
begging my pardon and getting all kissy with me,
grabbing my hand and jamming it down her blouse.

 

Horizontal Women

Women free-falling, fainted, or overcome, arms raised
or flung. Women mostly young and unsung. Women
diving for pearls. A girl tossing her curls, or out cold
mid-clinch. One muddy gal asleep in a ditch. Women
leaping or snoring. Prone women imploring. A babe
brainy as any female could get. A woman who doesn't
know she's pregnant yet, lying on dry grass awaiting
hard rain. Women in pain. A twist with braceleted
wrists. A chick who insists she can't stand up till
you say yes. A lady you'd never guess would get
herself murdered. A woman unheard who just
lies there and cries. A femme who mightily sighs.  
Woman as some kind of horizon, another woman's hand
on the back of her head. Or, instead, each she is the line
at the farthest place you can see, if you squint your eyes,
where the sky seems to descend to touch land or sea.

Virginity

Lying down on the rug with someone and getting dust
bunnies in your hair. The eloquence of long pauses.
Passing notes rather than speaking. A basement fogged
with pot smoke. Trying to read another body via its breathing.
The idea that if you kiss someone you can taste what they
just ate. Refusing to eat what your mother cooks anymore,
which hurts her feelings. But you can't stand dead sautéed
animal inside your mouth now, so you have to spit it out.
The myth that innocence is protective. The idea of not
being able to stop. Reading secret magazines a cousin stuffed
in the bottom of his sleeping bag. The idea that someone
curious about your body isn't interested in the private theatre
of your mind. Theories that there might be a kind of
violence about it. How mother insists that without true love
it's just worthless humping, and the idea that for the life
you aspire to, she's probably wrong. What your body has
promised for so long. The idea of your disastrous premiere.
The idea of someone laughing at you after. The idea of
hoofprints, stampede damage, stuff crushed underfoot.
The idea of keeping all this hidden as you slowly lotus open.

From Index of Women by Amy Gerstler (Penguin)
See, too, https://ashberyland.com/2017/01/13/six-questions-interview-with-amy-gerstler/

Happy Birthday, Boy George [by Nin Andrews]

I heard on NPR this morning that it’s Boy George's birthday today, which made me think of one of my favorite poems by Amy Gerstler from her collection, The True Bride, published in 1986. I can still remember reading this poem at the New Dominion bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia, ages ago. I burst out laughing, and the owner of the shop came over and read the poem aloud. A few shoppers came over and listened. Afterwards, we all clapped.  

 

Dear Boy George

Only three things on earth seem useful or soothing to me.
One: wearing stolen shoes. Two: photos of exquisitely
dressed redheads. Three: your voice on the radio. Those songs
fall smack-dab into my range! Not to embarrass you with my
raw American awe, or let you think I’m the kinda girl who
bends over for any guy who plucks his eyebrows and can make
tight braids – but you’re the plump bisexual cherub of the
eighties: clusters of Rubens’ painted angels, plus a dollop of the
Pillsbury dough boy, all rolled into one! We could go skating,
or just lie around my house eating pineapple. I could pierce
your ears: I know how to freeze the lobes with ice so it doesn’t
hurt. When I misunderstand your lyrics, they get even better.
I thought the line I’M YOUR LOVER, NOT YOUR RIVAL, was I’M
ANOTHER, NOTHE BIBLE, or PRIME YOUR MOTHER, NOT A LIBEL,
or UNDERCOVER BOUGHT ARRIVAL. Great, huh? See, we’re of like
minds. I almost died when I read in the Times how you saved
that girl from drowning . . . dived down and pulled the blub-
bering sissy up. I’d give anything to be the limp, dripping
form you stumbled from the lake with, wrapped over your pale,
motherly arms, in a grateful faint, as your mascara ran and ran.

"Virginity" [by Amy Gerstler]

Virginity 

Lying down on the rug with someone and getting dust
bunnies in your hair. The eloquence of long pauses.
Passing notes rather than speaking. A basement fogged
with pot smoke. Trying to read another body via its breathing.
The idea that if you kiss someone you can taste what they
just ate. Refusing to eat what your mother cooks anymore,
which hurts her feelings. But you can't stand dead sautéed\
animal inside your mouth now, so you have to spit it out.
The myth that innocence is protective. The idea of not
being able to stop. Reading secret magazines a cousin stuffed
in the bottom of his sleeping bag. The idea that someone
curious about your body isn't interested in the private theatre
of your mind. Theories that there might be a kind of
violence about it. How mother insists that without true love
it's just worthless humping, and the idea that for the life
you aspire to, she's probably wrong. What your body has
promised for so long. The idea of your disastrous premiere.
The idea of someone laughing at you after. The idea of
hoofprints, stampede damage, stuff crushed underfoot.
The idea of keeping all this hidden as you slowly lotus open.

From Index of Women by Amy Gerstler (Penguin)

See also this interview with Amy Gerstler
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/roll-call-a-conversation-with-amy-gerstler/

and this poem by Amy Gerstler selected and discussed by Angela Ball
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/11/the-new-york-school-diaspora-part-nineteen-amy-gerstler-by-angela-ball.html

"Horizontal Women" [by Amy Gerstler]

from Amy's new book, Index of Women (Penguin)

Horizontal Women

Women free-falling, fainted, or overcome, arms raised
or flung. Women mostly young and unsung. Women
diving for pearls. A girl tossing her curls, or out cold
mid-clinch. One muddy gal asleep in a ditch. Women
leaping or snoring. Prone women imploring. A babe
brainy as any female could get. A woman who doesn't
know she's pregnant yet, lying on dry grass awaiting
hard rain. Women in pain. A twist with braceleted
wrists. A chick who insists she can't stand up till
you say yes. A lady you'd never guess would get
herself murdered. A woman unheard who just
lies there and cries. A femme who mightily sighs.  
Woman as some kind of horizon, another woman's hand
on the back of her head. Or, instead, each she is the line
at the farthest place you can see, if you squint your eyes,
where the sky seems to descend to touch land or sea.

"My Ego" [by Amy Gerstler]

This week we are showcasing poems by Amy Gerstler from her new book INDEX OF WOMEN (Penguin). Three poems will appear, each at 10 AM, in honor of the college course catalogue's "MWF at 10:00 AM." Today's poem is "My Ego."-- DL

My Ego

is a dented suit of armor, a designer gown
with grimy lining. She's the cause of false beliefs.
She fucks up my ability to love. She's prickly
and tender as an artichoke heart. She proposes
to me so frequently I can't hear other people
speak. She's a self-annointed guide who materializes
at my side with a flourish of trumpets and a bullhorn.
She's a forged love letter, a jailer impersonating a
friend. She's a series of flashbacks in which I'm
both victim and hero. I try to bribe her into exile,
but she calls herself my servant and falls weeping
at my feet. I'm forever banishing her, this mistress
of disguises, even as she clamors back into my lap,
begging my pardon and getting all kissy with me,
grabbing my hand and jamming it down her blouse.

from Index of Women by Amy Gerstler (Penguin).

Po-Biz and Letters to Nancy Mitchell and Amy Gerstler [by Nin Andrews]

Sometimes as poets, we need to get together and bitch, my friend, S., says. So last week we got together to bitch about po-biz. Her complaints are familiar ones. Like many poets and writers today, she feels overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated. She’s published a lot, has a few books out, and has had teaching stints here and there, usually as adjunct faculty. But she says, I 'm almost never invited to give readings or speak at conferences. I don’t sell many books, and I'm beginning to ask myself, What the hell am I doing? She points out that the literary world mirrors the economic world. 1% of us are rock stars, and the rest are street musicians.

I tell her my latest absurd idea: I think we should start helping each other, maybe writing each other fan letters. We could get pompoms and have pep rallies for fellow poets. I say it as a joke, of course, but the truth is, I love writing fan letters. Sometimes when I can’t write, I imagine myself as a gum-chewing, unstable, teenage  groupie who is in awe of  poets, and who writes them fan mail.  In fact, right now I am in the middle of writing a silly fan letter to Nancy Mitchell because I just started reading her latest book, The Out-of-Body Shop, and it's terrific.  My letter begins: 

Dear Nancy,

Do you have a southern drawl? I swear I can almost hear the lilt when I read your lines. I love a good drawl, and I love your poems even more. Maybe one day I'll get to hear you read them out loud! 

I wanted to tell you how the other day when I was getting my hair done, I read your poem, "Work," the one about working a late-shift at the factory.  I burst out laughing when I got to the parts where the you talk about a woman who kept her man in line by weaving her hair around his zipper. "What's so funny?"  my beautician, Kylie, asked, so I read the poem out loud to all the ladies at the salon. We laughed so hard, one woman said she almost got perm fluid in her eye. Kylie said to tell you that if you want to keep a man, you just put a little salt on his tail. I don't know what she means, and I'm not sure I want to know. Do you?

I also loved and laughed at the poem “Praise.” 

Praise

You be my Sunday

morning hot

butter-swirled

syrup-drizzled

whipped-cream-

dollop-topped

hand-scratch-made

pancake.

I be your coffee cup,

Star-bucked.

But when I tell S. about my fan letter-idea, she's not enthused. She's not in the mood to laugh. Instead she tells me about the literary magazines that accept her submissions and collect fees, but never respond to her work. Years go by, she says, and I hear nothing. Sometimes she writes query notes, and they, too, go unanswered. I know exactly what she means. Oh, the unfairness of it all!  

I tell her about a rejection note I received years ago that read: Dear Poet, Your poems have been in our office for ten years now. The editor still has not read them and he never will.  He doesn’t give a shit about your poems or anyone else’s.  (I learned later at AWP that the note was probably written by a grad student who despised the professor/editor. The review is no longer in existence.)

I'm also reminded of my first editorial job. I was in eighth grade, and my friend, Ginny, and I were given the job of editing The Bell Ringer, the eighth literary magazine. After spending a recess reading submissions, we decided that only our own poems deserved publication. We had just ten poems between us, so over the next few days we happily wrote many more, penning our poems in loopy script on stencils before taking them to the office to be mimeographed.    

In high school, when I reread The Bell Ringer, I was overcome with embarrassment—not only by my egotism but also by the poems. In eighth grade, as it turns out, I had a fondness for words like prettily, merrily, verily, and frolicsome.

Also in high school I began working at the New Dominion Bookshop and buying poetry books. There were always a lot of poetry books on the sale table, and C.C.Wells, the bookshop owner gave them to me for a song. C.C. once said he never understood why anyone would want to be a poet because no one wants to buy poetry, much less read it.  Would anyone write a poet a fan letter? he asked once. (Why we were discussing fan mail, I don't remember.) That’s when the idea for writing fan letters to poets began.

One afternoon, while working at the shop, I read Some Trees by John Ashbery, and I fell in love with his poem, “The Instruction Manual.” I wrote Ashbery my first fan letter:

Dear John,

Do you mind if I call you John?  

I am sitting in the New Dominion Bookshop and reading “The Instruction Manual,” and there’s only one customer here, a bald man who called me Missy and asked me, "Ain’t you a pretty little thang?" Have you ever been called a thang, John? Mr. Wells, the bookshop owner, says I should never let on when a customer gives me the creeps, so I am reading your poem, “The Instruction Manual,” and not looking at him and not thinking of the word, thang. I’m saying to myself it’s no big thang. Not like this poem, which I like so much, I am trying to do what it does—resting my elbows on the table and staring out the window so I can be someplace else . . .

That's just an edited form of my original letter to Ashbery that went on and on about "thangs" and my favorite song back then, "Wild Thang." Over the years spanning from high school to college and after, I kept a literary journal in which I continued to compose inane and embarrassing fan letters to the likes of Henri Michaux, Denise Duhamel, Robert Bly, Tim Seibles, James Tate, Yannis Ritsos, and Amy Gerstler. I was particularly smitten by Amy Gerstler (whose last name spellcheck always changes to Gerstner).

Over the years, I have written a few fan letters to Amy Gerstler. In one early letter I imagined I was sending her The Bell Ringer. I said I had a suspicion that we were kindred, frolicsome souls.  In another I wrote that I had had a vision that she was the reincarnation of Emily Dickinson. I was certain that if she had her druthers, she would lead a cloistered existence. I asked if she, like Emily, had a large white dog, and if she, like me, was the kind of gal who prefers dogs to men.

  One of my favorite Gerstler books was the out-of-print book, Past Lives, which looks like a grade school composition book and has a few pages that replicate first grade penmanship exercises, other pages with photographs stuck to them, and others are abecedaries and  others that I can’t describe. You have to see the book to believe it. Past Lives might not be Gerstler’s best book, but if you have a slightly perverse sense of humor, this is a book for you.

Of course, I didn’t just write fan letters in my journal. I also complained bitterly about po-biz.  I’ve always hated the process of entering the literary lottery. And like S., I like to bitch. In a one entry, written when I was taking a class in Cleveland with Alberta Turner, I wrote:

Alberta says I should start sending my work out, but I HATE submitting poems!! Just last month I sent 5 poems to New American Writing. I figure I am new to writing and American. So I qualify, right? Wrong. Paul, the editor, wrote back that I didn’t meet his “editorial needs.” What does the term, “editorial needs” mean? Can Paul’s needs be pinpointed?  Defined? Met? I am feeling miffed.

 Miffed was one of Alberta Turner’s words. She said all poets feel miffed. Like me Alberta Turner admired Amy Gerstler.  I remember once when she spent the night at our house in Cleveland, we talked into the night, and I showed her Gestler's fan letter to Boy George from her book, The True Bride.  Clearly, no one writes a fan letter like Amy Gerstler.

Dear Boy George,

Only three things on earth seem useful or soothing to me. One: wearing stolen clothes. Two: photos of exquisitely dressed redheads. Three, your voice on the radio. Those songs fall smack-dab into my range! Not to embarrass you with my raw American awe, or let you think I’m the kinda girl who bends over for any guy who plucks his eyebrows and can make tight braids—but you’re the plump bisexual cherub of the eighties: clusters of Rubens’ painted angels, plus a dollop of the Pillsbury dough boy, all rolled into one! We could go skating, or just lie around my house eating pineapple. I could pierce your ears: I know how to freeze the lobes with ice so it doesn’t hurt. When I misunderstand your lyrics, they get even better. I thought the line I’M YOUR LOVER, NOT YOUR RIVAL, WAS I’M ANOTHER, NOT THE BIBLE, OR PRIME YOUR MOTHER, NOT A LIBEL, OR UNDERCOVER BOUGHT ARRIVAL. Great, huh? See, we’re of like minds. I almost died when I read in the Times how you saved that girl from drowning . . . dived down and pulled the blubbering sissy up. I’d give anything to be the limp, dripping form you stumbled from the lake with, draped over your pale, motherly arms, in a grateful faint, as your mascara ran and ran.

from the archive: first posted July 9,  2018

Amy Gerstler in Conversation about "Index of Woman" [Sunday, April 18, 2021]

Chevalier bookstore:
L.A.'S Oldest Independent Bookstore, Est. 1940 

Virtual Event

Monday, April 19, 2021 at 7:00PM

INDEX OF WOMEN
by AMY GERSTLER

the author in conversation with LOUISE STEINMAN

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO JOIN: 

https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/amy-gerstler

 

From a maestra of invention (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood

Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. Women's voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

AMY GERSTLER

Author

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor and arranger Steve Gunderson on a musical play. She is also collaborating with comics artist, author and scholar Trina Robbins on a comic about women comic book artists from the 1940s. 

LOUISE STEINMAN

in conversation

Louise Steinman is a writer, artist, and literary curator. Her work frequently deals with memory, history, and reconciliation. Her three books include: The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation; The Knowing Body: The Artist As Storyteller in Contemporary Performance and The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War.  Steinman founded-- and was for twenty-five years the curator—of the celebrated ALOUD literary series at the Los Angeles Public Library. Her essays have been published widely, most recently in Los Angeles Review of Books.   She is the editor of the 2018 anthology: Country Gone Missing: Nightmares in the Time of Trump. Her installation, “Welcome the Stranger: An Urban Installation for Social Engagement” (with Dorit Cypis), was featured at the 2019 Lublin (Poland) Open City Festival. She is co-director of  The Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at the University of Southern California.  Her lead essay, “The Questions We Ask,” appears in the forthcoming volume A History for the Future: The Museum of Contemporary Art 1979-2000. www.louisesteinman.com

Join us here | 04/19 at 7PM PT on Zoom

Amy Gerstler: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________

Lost in the Forest

 

I'd given up hope. Hadn't eaten in three

days. Resigned to being wolf meat...

when, unbelievably, I found myself  in

a clearing. Two goats with bells

round their necks stared at me:

their pupils like coin slots

in piggy banks. I could have gotten

the truth out of those two,

if goats spoke. I saw leeks

and radishes planted in rows;

wash billowing on a clothesline...

and the innocuous-looking cottage

in the woods with its lapping tongue

of a welcome mat slurped me in.

 

In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex

is barely discernible pours a glass

of fraudulent milk. I'm so hungry

my hand shakes. But what is this liquid?

"Drink up, sweetheart," she says,

and as I wipe the white mustache

off with the back of my hand:

"Atta girl." Have I stumbled

into the clutches of St. Somebody?

Who can tell. "You'll find I prevail here

in my own little kingdom," she says as

she leads me upstairs--her bony grip

on my arm a proclamation of ownership,

as though I've always been hers.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Gerstler is a writer living in Los Angeles. Index of Women, a book of her poems, will be published in April by Penguin Random House. She is currently collaborating with Steve Gunderson on a musical play. 

________________________________________________________________________________________

An Interview with Amy Gerstler [by Aspen Matis]

Amy Gerstler is a critically acclaimed writer of fiction, poetry, and journalism whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Paris Review and The Best American Poetry. Her 1990 book Bitter Angel won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her newest collection of poems, Index of Women, is forthcoming from Penguin in April of 2021. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Gerstler via email about her newest book of poetry, her perspective on poetry’s role in our present society, the themes that most fascinate and inspire her, her current work, and her experience of and feelings about editing The Best American Poetry 2010.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Joan Didion, in her essay, “Why I Write,” said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” That sums it up! I also write poems to have an excuse to wallow in subjects I’m compelled by, to attempt to get inside other characters / minds (in order to better understand them), to speak to about the dead and the vanished, and to commune with and stretch my imagination.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

Great list! All those things and more! Poetry can delight and comfort. Unsettle and expand consciousness. Help us comprehend/contend with being human. Allow us to pay little visits to each other’s wild minds. Keep us alert to the possibilities of language and how it differentiates and binds us together.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

She can devote herself to following her own course, as writer, thinker, and emotional animal—whatever that may mean at different times in her life. She can cultivate and explore her own obsessions without letting anything or anybody stop her.

Your forthcoming poetry collection, Index of Women (Penguin, April 2021), showcases exclusively female speakers in poems that wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and the nature of humanity. What inspired this new collection on womanhood and the magic, meaning, humor, sorrow, and struggles of our days that create the hidden meaning of our lives?

Dramatic monologues thrill me. Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology stunned me when I was young. All those vivid voices spouting dark truth from the grave! I love the poet Ai’s dramatic monologues. My interest in women’s voices, spoken or sung, and their stories and experiences was also generative. Coming across the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s book Catalogue of Women was a fortunate and influential accident. Such an odd, compelling idea to compile a catalogue of women! I wondered why one would do that and what it would be like if a female attempted such a project.

Your book of poems Scattered at Sea explores hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, imagination, drug highs, memory loss, bereavement, spirituality, and the nature of prayer—many distinct arenas and inquiries! What unifies the pieces in this collection? How did Scattered at Sea find its form?

Since the book invokes scattering via its title and poems, I felt released from pressure to make the book “unified.” Instead, I tried to pursue the opposite: making it scattery, dispersed, a bit all over the place (which is reflective of the way my brain works, anyway).

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Having very little formal education in poetry makes me a dubious source of intel about 17th and 18th century poets, sadly. Among the few I know I love Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, each for different reasons that I fear there is not nearly enough space to enumerate here.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his/her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

This is a fascinating notion, the idea of a “reliable” critic. I suppose it would depend on what you wish to rely on a critic for. Sharp, inventive writing? Humor? Interesting opinions? Erudition? Open-mindedness? Fairness? Ability to appreciate and describe the letter and spirit of a work? Historical context? Links to other works? Analysis? In other words, I think the idea of a “reliable” critic involves very individual judgements on the part of each reader, who determines for herself what she’s seeking when reading literary criticism, what she needs from it at that moment, and whether she gets that or not.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Emotion is key for me. Sex, gender, love, mortality, animals, science, pseudo-science, spiritual longing, loss, and the occult are all abiding fascinations.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

I’m collaborating on a musical play with composer/actor Steve Gunderson. There’s a possible comix project on the horizon that’s in the earliest stage of discussion. I really hope that will work out as I find graphic novels and comix an amazing medium.

You edited the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. What was that experience like for you? How, if all, did editing the anthology affect you? Are you proud of the book? How do you feel about the process—and the product of your labor—in retrospect?

Editing that anthology taught me tons and was profoundly inspiring. I will always be so grateful to the series editor, David Lehman, for trusting me and gifting me with that opportunity. The process brought home to me what a thriving, vital, various field American poetry is. Narrowing the book down to the requisite 75 poems was the hardest part.

Dream Pairing: Amy Gerstler and Matthew Zapruder at Beyond Baroque January 17

Fri, January 17, 2020
8:00 PM – 10:00 PM PST

Location

Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90291

Nationally acclaimed poet and former New York Times Magazine Poetry Column editor Matthew Zapruder reads from his latest book, Father’s Day. He’s joined by legendary Los Angeles poet Amy Gerstler.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day, from Copper Canyon in Fall 2019, as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose. He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. He teaches in the MFA and English Department at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poetry. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015, was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She currently teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Irvine.

-- sdl

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Series Finale. What will you do tonight now that it's over?

Dear Amy,

The finale: Is Om the answer?

            Let’s start with the montage of images at the end. There’s Don standing before the mighty Pacific Ocean, a smile on his face, possibly devilish, possibly just a smile. Then there’s Don in a group of a dozen men and women in lotus position receiving the blessings of the morning sunlight and chanting Om. The trinity of images is completed with what is arguably the greatest TV commercial of all time: a chorus of multinational kids singing “I’d like to teach the world to sing / in prefect harmony” and “I’d like to give the world a Coke” and then the tag line, “It’s the real thing!” The commercial made its TV debut in 1971.

            The ambiguity of the ending is perfect for our hero, who may, reverting to his character as we’ve come to know it, return to Madison Ave. armed with a new vernacular derived from his experience at Esalen in Big Sur, or wherever Don and Anna Draper’s niece Stephanie have gone for spiritual healing and group therapy. On this view, Don gets to work on the Coke account after all and this is what he comes up with – a good idea made great by the composer and writer of the jingle. (As it happens, McCann Erickson produced the commercial.)

            But it is also possible, as no causality is given, that doing such work for Coca-Cola is precisely what our rootless wanderer has renounced in his journey westward – first to Racine (which means “root” in French), Wisconsin, and then to various locales in the Midwest and finally to California, up the coast from LA -- as he discards his property, his clothes, his car, and reaches the ideal nothingness of Existentialism or King Lear from the Fool’s point of view.

            Is Om the answer? In that case, as Gertrude Stein would say, what is the question?

            I have to interrupt myself. When the commercial came out I was living in Paris. At the time there were commercials before the feature film in Paris movie theaters, and it is was in its French translation, in a Left Bank theater, that I first heard the Coke jingle – “Soif d’aujourd’hui” (“Thirst today” or “Today’s Thirst”) to the tune of “it’s the real thing.” That same year I read Henry James’s story “The Real Thing.” I had the idea of writing a piece comparing the two things, the Coke “real thing” commercial and the James story. I still think it’s a good idea, though I never brought it to fruition.

 

            It was, by the way, a Coke machine that Don fixed in last week’s episode, showing off his mechanical prowess.

            A second digression but quicker: how well do I recall the obnoxious encounter groups of the period! Phony, embarrassing, fascistic in their drive toward conformity, power struggles concealed beneath a veneer of gentleness and concern, nasty revelations (“I kidnapped my girlfriend's son and drove past state boundaries”) papered over and always concluding with a plea masked as a query: “Has anyone’s opinion of me gone down?” Ugh.

    Back to the finale. I’m glad that happy endings were arranged for some of our favorite folk – Joan, who is sure to make a huge success of her production company that was born in her crowded one-bedroom; Roger, who marries Marie, Megan’s indomitable mother, and who, despite his native xenophobia, orders lobster and champagne in French and jokes that Marie is his Mama; Pete and Trudy, wowed by their new status as Kansas plutocrats as they step into the company plane;  and Peg, who gets not just one proposal but two in the course of the episode.

            First it is Joan who bends Peggy’s ear with a career-changing offer: a partnership in Harris-Olson, the production company Joan is launching. This must have come as Mannah to the Israelites in the desert who envisioned a sequel to Mad Men focusing on Peggy and Joan in a decade during which the feminist rebellion won its victory.

        But Peggy says no to Joan because of an argument made by Stan, the art director who seemed obnoxious when he joined cast and crew but has developed character and complexity over the years. The argument – in the second sense – spurs Stan to declare his love, and come to think of it, they have spent a lot of intimate time together, though mainly on the phone, so why not? Peggy declares right back and it seems a better match for our gal than anyone since Abe before he grew hirsute and self-important and she bought that awful Upper West Side brownstone, which would doubtlessly be worth a large fortune today.

        In the very first episode of Mad Men, some of the fellows are going drinking and celebrating with Pete, who is about to get hitched. The well-wishers are Harry Crane, Ken Cosgrove, Paul (the pipe-smoking Princetonian whose lack of talent and charm lead him into the clutches of Hare Krishna), and Sal (the closeted art director who is punished for his homosexuality). This time around it’s a valedictory drink, but only Harry is left of the old guard, and Peggy turns them down when they ask her to join them.

            It is not easy to forecast what will happen in the next five to ten years with Peggy, Joan, Pete, and Roger. There are no guarantees that the happy endings just announced will last even a year. As for Betty, doomed though she may be to an early demise, serene though she may be, she remains who she is, smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table.

        But with Don the task of making a forecast is impossible. Don is unpredictable by nature, an enigmatic stranger in the cloak and fedora of ordinary if sophisticated urban life. Don’s destiny remains unfixed, though it does seem as though he has come closest to zero in California, at Esalen or its facsimile, and therefore, by this reasoning, he might just be capable of totally revolutionizing his life.

        There was a season that began with Don reading The Inferno (John Ciardi’s translation). He has gone to hell and come back many times. There was the time when he lived alone, got drunk nightly, fucked his secretary. There was the time when he fucked his secretary, married her, and cheated on her with the woman who lives downstairs, whose husband is also his friend. And now this. . .two divorces down . . . the merger with McCann. . .the absence of a love life. . . the conviction that he has made a mess of the opportunity he had seized when the explosion went off in Korea.

        At Esalen Don reaches the state of aloneness that may precede any life change. Don is deserted and rejected by his faux-niece, Stephanie, who brought him there – and who points out that he is fooling himself if he thinks that she is “family.” There is no exit for him – no car, no way of getting out. He has felt the sting of rejection, or of self-imposed anomie (as the sociologists used to say). He has children but they will not be in his custody. He has had two wives but one is dying and the other may be marvelous but she’s not right for our boy, either because of the age difference between them or because he expected their boss-secretary relationship to persist in their marriage.

            What we know about Don is that he is handy, a strong swimmer, good to have in an emergency, favored by fortune in looks, capable of holding his liquor, and liable to act and react to events in thoroughly unpredictable ways. He doesn’t know who he is, but that s because he is a product of his own invention. Like Gatsby he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. Like William Holden in The Bridge on the River Kwai, he has traded places with an officer during a battle scene – an act of impersonation that is profoundly interesting beyond its intense dramatic function. He sits in a corner of the lounge, orders an old-fashioned, and wouldn't be surprised if either Daisy Buchanan or the stiff-lipped British polymath played by Jack Hawkins should take the seat across from him. 

            What we didn’t know before Mad Men is that the existential hero existed not only in army jeeps on foreign soil or Montparnasse cafes but in suites of midtown Manhattan offices where, in some cases, as much intelligence went into the making of a TV commercial as into a song or a poem.

            I’ll miss him, I’ll miss the show, and I’ll miss the chance to trade insights and observations with you, Amy. I can’t wait to read what you made of episode the last!

            Love, your buddy in Madness,         

            David 

Dear David,

     Oh, the moment has come. I am sad the show's over, and a bit forlorn our collaboration has therefore run its course. I'm thankful Matt Weiner took the helm at the end and was solo writer/director for his last episode. That felt exactly right, and I think all in all, he acquitted himself excellently. His 7-year novel ended with momentous events/peak emotional moments in the lives of his characters, yet events that, as you observed, contain rich ambiguities. Decisive plot developments aplenty take place, which you enumerate, yet all story lines are left wide open, in great or small ways.

Anything could happen:

--to Peggy and Stan's new love relationship (and what of Stan's cute, redheaded, ultra cool, joint puffing, nude modeling nurse wife? was she kidnapped by aliens? accidentally vaporized by an experiment in nuclear medicine at the hospital where she was  employed? did she run off with one of the doctors on M*A*S*H? )

--to the freshly, tenuously reunited Pete and Trudy (Trudy looking like Jackie O. with long hair, in her pink Chanel suit and hat in the last shot we see of her...)

--to Don, who has broken down completely, and then arisen into a kind of enlightenment, or at least a surcease of pain, to the tune of finger cymbals

--to Joan who has realized that she loves working, and any man who can't respect that can't really love her. (There is more than one kind of “coke” in this episode: Joan snorts cocaine for the first time and seems to really like it. oh, Joan, this is a slippery, snowy slope! will the white powder be passing fancy or dangerous obsession?)

--to Roger and Marie, who will torture each other, until it stops being fun

--to Betty, making her peace with a suddenly truncated life and trying to do her best by her children, in a way she never has before, attaining an almost holy focus and resolve

--to Sally, compelled now to grow up fast and become capable of adult tenderness. What will comprise Sally's inheritance? Betty’s beauty, skepticism and pragmatism? Don's candor, charm, flexibility, secretiveness, addiction to risk taking and imagination?

 
Three couples or former couples make a sort of peace:

--Pete and Peggy part, surprisingly, on terms of mutual affection and (slightly imbalanced) respect

--Don and Betty, without ever saying so, forgive each other in an almost wordless long distance telephone conversation, where both are weeping silently, choking with grief, trying not to let the other person know how devastated they are

---Roger and Joan have an amazing interaction, intimate and open and real, almost giddy, in which Roger informs Joan he's leaving a good portion of his wealth to their son.

      I'm not a big TV watcher. Never have been. (Not that I'm proud of being so outside the culture. I know it's shameful.) So the Mad Men devotion was a real aberration for me. I started watching it because of you, David. During the first season, when you told me how remarkable you felt it was, how sharp you thought the writing, and that there was a character reading Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems in a bar (did I get that right?) I watched once out of curiosity and was hooked. So I'm not a television expert, but for me this show was as perfectly cast and exquisitely acted as anything I've ever seen in that medium.

Indelible Moments from this last installment:

1. The depiction of how awful encounter groups were in the 60s and 70s! Such a toxic mix of dime store psychology recklessly and blindly applied, mob dynamics, faux innocence, sexual desperation, mistaking cruelty for honesty, and encouraging dangerous levels of vulnerability in a situation that portrayed itself as safe and was actually anything but. I’m old enough and was sufficiently curious and naive to have participated in some of these nasty gatherings when a teen, and I must say Matt Weiner and co. captured it all perfectly: the crying, the hugging, the brain-frying silences, the predators posing as facilitators, the misplaced trust, the narcissism parading as self-exploration or team spirit, the perversity, the terror, the pretend empathy, the outrageousness, the inadvertent comedy. I squirmed watching those passages in the show, which were so spot on: when the hostile old lady shoves Don; when the depressed, nebbishy guy says, in trying to describe his agonizing feelings of alienation, “I had a dream I was on a shelf in the refrigerator,” which is at once pathetic and hilarious; when hippie-ish, necklace wearing, facilitators keep intoning, ad nauseum, in fake-serene voices “how did that make you feel?”

2. Sally and Bobby's conversation about their mother's impending death, containing just the right notes of age appropriateness, exigency and forced sudden maturity. At the end of the scene, Sally gives her younger brother a cooking lesson, because he's going to need to learn.

3.  The phone conversation between Sally and Don in which Sally tells Don Betty is dying. How Sally takes charge, not with hostility, but pure urgency.

4. The phone conversation between Peggy and Don when Don calls from “Esalen.” I didn't love all the writing in this scene, but the acting was searing.

5. I loved that the last word of the show was “Om.” Beautiful. Perfect. And exactly what does Om mean? Like zillions of people, I have been repeating that round sound before and after yoga classes for years now, without ever inquiring into its meaning very deeply. The almighty, all knowing Wikipedia declares “Om,” in a lovely bit of slant rhyme, “a mystic syllable.”

Valerie Reiss, in the Huffpost blog, is a little more voluble and enlightening:

The sound appears to have first cropped up in the Upanishads, a collection of sacred texts that inform Hinduism. The Mandukya Upanishad, which is entirely devoted to om, begins like this: "Om is the imperishable word. Om is the universe, and this is the exposition of om. The past, the present, and the future, all that was, all that is, all that will be is om. Likewise, all else that may exist beyond the bounds of time, that too is om."

     Good luck and Godspeed to all the brilliant actors who made Mad Men what it was. I look forward to seeing your future endeavors. All hail Matt Weiner, whose brainchild gave so many such pleasure, even an avowed anti-TV curmudgeon like yours truly. Can’t wait for his next project. Maybe he should consider a “dramedy” set in a creative writing department of an American University, possibly hiring a couple of poets as high paid consultants? David, does that sound good to you?

Love,

Amy

Point Counterpoint Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 13

     
  Dear Amy,

            As we approach the end of the season, end of the series – game, set, and match -- I move that we keep in mind that a “terminal” is a noun as well as an adjective, a bus depot and therefore a place of origin as well as a destination and an end. It’s like the bus stop in the middle of no place where we see Don at episode’s end. You almost expect him to be ready to run across cornfield while a crop-duster attacks, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, another handsome urban advertising man in a perfectly tailored suit. 

            Betty is, alas, terminal in the nasty sense of the word. There will be no new beginnings for her. Joan has lost her job and maybe her career in advertising. But Joan is nothing if not resourceful, and her talents, too good for the paleolithic types at McCann Erickson (ME for short), are such that she may re-launch herself spectacularly. But Betty is through. Lung cancer. Betty will die because of the product that Don’s firm used to service. And oddly enough, Betty – a tireless complainer and natural plaintiff – is OK with the dire forecast. Almost serene. Maybe it’s because of the Freud she’s been reading. Or maybe she is a belated convert to stoicism.

            Pete is an apparent convert to Boy Scout ethics and he seems so boyishly earnest it looks like he’ll get the fabled American second-chance to make a go of it with Trudy. The pair and their toddler will uproot themselves to go where Pete’s new job takes them: Wichita, Kansas. The job comes with great perks – a company jet! – but still. For those of us who cannot forget the disgraceful, or conceited, or bullying, or malignant, or just clueless and gauche way he has behaved, Wichita may seem like punishment enough. The bars close early in Wichita, Pete, and they don’t measure up to the places you’re accustomed to, where you can close a deal over martinis and shrimp cocktails, moving your finger in a circle to signal to the tuxedo-clad waiter that it’s time for another round. “Wichita is beautiful – and wholesome.” Indeed.  But this wholesome new life isn’t necessarily terminal. Would you bet on the marriage of Trudy and Pete in the heart of Kansas?

            Henry, in denial over the death sentence Betty accepts, is not a convert to anything. He remains as sweetly loyal as a retriever and must have something going for him beyond his steadfast attachment to Betty, whom he sincerely worships. He remains an adviser on Rocky’s staff – that’s the governor of New York we’re talking about, and the most consequential man to hold the post in the last century. Henry has influence. He is not stupid. He can see right through Lindsay, who was able to walk through Harlem with his head held high and an amiable grin when other cities (Newark, Detroit) were hosting riots, because he, Lindsay, had had the foresight to bribe certain demagogues. Yet Henry has never had my sympathy, and I cringe a little when he is front and center. I think it’s because he is really so fundamentally different from Don, Sally, even Betty. I have read poems that lampoon Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid in Casablanca) because he is too virtuous. I feel that way about Henry and am not terribly curious about which bus he will board at the terminal when he enters his widower years.

            Who else hasn’t changed?

            Duck (whose real name is Herman) is still drunk, still scheming, still making pie-in-the-sky deals.

             Trudy is still vulnerable to sweet talk and the illusion that Dartmouth-educated (class of ’56)  rich-boy Pete can change.

             Don is still the enigmatic, self-assured stranger who can’t keep his eyes off a likely lady but whose natural state is that of the loner. He is in Kansas, the very state of Pete’s second chance, but life is anything but idyllic.  In his motel room waiting for his car to be repaired, he is reading the novel everyone read that year, The Godfather, two years before the movie. With a bunch of vets who drink too much and are as mean drunk as they appear friendly sober, Don makes the astonishing admission that he killed his C.O. (commanding officer) in Korea. That is not what happened. He may be guilty of impersonating an officer and, well, identity theft. But the real Don Draper died in the same enemy explosion that Dick Whitman survived. Does self-aggrandizement or guilt or some combination of the two stand behind Don’s lie? The Vets turn ugly, resentful, which seems to be middle America’s response to “Don Draper” in his custom-tailored Madison Avenue suit. Don is still as vulnerable to a sucker punch as he was when he was cruising his Ossining neighborhood in search of Suzanne Farrell – remember her? the idealistic teacher with the same name as the great Ballenchine ballerina -- and picked up a couple of hitchhikers who got him stoned unconscious in a motel room and stolen his cash.

            Somebody did steal the cash that the Vets had raised – a theft that cost the wrongly accused Don dearly. Don apprehends the thief and makes him fess up. But he doesn’t take revenge, despite the beating he has endured. On the contrary: Don gives his car to the con artist.  Could it be he recognizes something of himself in the younger man? I don’t think he is renouncing property and material values in line with the thirst for radical social change then becoming fashionable. Don never was and never will be an ideologue. If he knows anything it’s that he known nothing for sure. Aside from daughter Sally, whom he faithfully phones, he maintains his distance from everyone, keeps his options open. He is the embodiment of the great male invention of that period, to whom so many names and so much study were given. Dangling man. Irrational man. L’etranger. Alienated man, without direction or affiliation. The anti-type of the organization man, in rebellion against the codes of the one-dimensional man. He’s the guy at the bus depot who would buy a ticket to anywhere – or would if he had no car.

            But Don is still behind the wheel, still the figure in his own dream who is pulled over by a state trooper.

            “What were you doing?” The cop asks.

            “Driving,” Don says.

            The cop is unamused. “You knew we’d catch up with you eventually.”

            Don’s rejoinder (“driving”) is not just a wisecrack. Driving is like drifting -- albeit with an apparent purpose. And “driving” is as good a word as any for what most of us are doing at any given time in our lives.

           That’s my take as we prepare for the finale this coming Sunday.

            Love,

            David

 

Dear David,

 

One of the closing observations in your blog text this week is “Driving is like drifting...” Exactly so. Don has been on the road for weeks now, without a clear destination, propelled into some kind of pilgrimage of self-reinvention. This episode's title “The Milk and Honey Route” is apparently a phrase from hobo slang, dating perhaps from the teens, 1920s and ‘30s. According to the internet, “Often hobos speak of a railroad as a ‘milk and honey route’. . . Any railroad running through a valley of plenty may be called a milk and honey line.” Specifically, the phrase appears in writing by and about a guy named Nels Anderson (aka Dean Stiff, what a great nom de drift) who lived the “bummery” life for years before reinventing himself and attending the University of Chicago. He published a study of hobos, tramps, migratory workers, etc., based on his first-hand experience, entitled “The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man.” Hexagram 56 in the I Ching is called “The Wanderer.” The text says in part, “A wanderer has no fixed abode; his home is the road. Therefore he must take care to remain upright and steadfast, so that he sojourns only [in] the proper places, associating with good people. Then he has good fortune and can go his way unmolested.” I will try to beam this fine ancient advice to Don Draper, via time travel ESP, though I know, whatever his fate, it is already sealed, and will be broadcast, for good or ill, tomorrow night. He's not sitting at the deserted rural bus stop in the middle of nowheresville, grinning, any longer.

 

Lots of people are of course speculating about what the last episode will contain, what the final scenes will be, which characters we will get to glimpse again, what music will play under the last shot, sending us off into a Mad Men-bereft world. Will we see Betty’s funeral? Will Peggy be reunited with the child she gave away? Will more Sterling Cooper employees who were sucked up into the typhoon of the McCann Erikson merger extricate themselves? I was moved by Betty's instructions-to-be-read-after-my-death. Penned on blue monogrammed stationary, she handed them to Sally in the middle of night, slipping into Sally's room with her characteristic mix of grace and brusqueness, asking “Are you awake?” Of course Sally, who'd been told out of the blue that morning that her mother was ill and going to die, was wide awake. Electrified. Of course Sally doesn't wait, but opens the envelope almost immediately. Most of what Betty wrote had to do with how she wished to be buried, in what dress, with what hairdo, even including a color snapshot to indicate the gown and coiff. Exactly in character. Gorgeous Betty, always so perfectly dressed and made up, always so careful about her appearance, with a wide streak of complicated narcissism. She manages a lovely morsel of motherly wisdom for Sally, telling her at the end of the letter that while she'd always had a hard time with Sally’s fiery independence, she’d lately come to realize that it was a good thing. Betty sends her daughter off into her future with this blessing, “I know your life will be an adventure.” I loved Sally’s reaction to being told by Henry during his visit to her boarding school dorm room that her mother was dying. Her face crumpled and she covered her ears. I loved that Henry gave her permission to cry, and immediately began to weep himself, while Sally remained dry-eyed, her hand hovering for a moment above her stepfather’s slumped back, before she could bring herself to touch, to comfort him.

            Other tiny details that stirred me this episode: Pete fingerpainting toothpaste on his little daughter Tammy’s knee as the go-to home remedy for her bee sting. The fucking doctor refusing to give Betty her diagosis, insisting on having her phone Henry so the diagnosis could be given to her husband. As though she were a child or a moron. As you note, David, Betty seems to make her peace with this stunning blow fairly quickly. Henry is panicking, wrecked, heartbroken, of course. I liked Don watching Red Foxx and Flip Wilson on the grainy TV in his crummy hotel room just before the TV went on the fritz. I cannot say that I enjoyed hearing the snippet of Merle Haggard's infamous Okie from Muskogee on Don's car radio, possibly one of the most hideous songs ever penned, but it was deeply appropriate in terms of plot and context. I just learned Haggard wrote it when he was newly out of prison! He said, of the inspiration for writing the song:

“When I was in prison, I knew what it was like to have freedom taken away. Freedom is everything. During Vietnam, there were all kinds of protests. Here were these [servicemen] going over there and dying for a cause — we don’t even know what it was really all about. And here are these young kids, that were free, b—-ing about it. There’s something wrong with that and with [disparaging] those poor guys. We were in a wonderful time in America and music was in a wonderful place. America was at its peak and what the hell did these kids have to complain about? These soldiers were giving up their freedom and lives to make sure others could stay free. I wrote the song to support those soldiers.” So it’s perfect for Don to hear, when he is sprung (whether temporarily or permanently, we don’t yet know) from his former job and life, and hits the road, seeking the holy grail of himself.

A spatula-wielding Betty pulling cookies out of the oven just as Sally arrives home (after having been enlisted by Henry to try to talk her mother into getting treatment) was a nice touch. Pete’s man-to-man chat with his brother at the fancy restaurant about infidelity, opportunity, risk-taking, what wives do and don't know was interesting. Vincent Kartheiser rocks. Betty's strength and quiet dignity when Henry confronts her the morning after her diagnosis, as she’s setting off for school, moved me. “Why are you doing this?” he asks incredulously (or some such expostulation.) He is amazed she’s toting her books, ready to attend class as though nothing has happened. “Why was I ever doing it?” She asks softly, continuing on her way. She seems both matter of fact and wistful, resigned and determined. I take her remark to mean that she was always just going back to school for herself, it was something she'd personally longed for, an end in itself.  Maybe she felt a little foolish doing it initially. Maybe when she learned she likely had a few months to live at most, she felt even more sheepish. And yet...what else is she supposed to do? Her plan seems to be to maintain a facade of normalcy for her two younger children for as long as that's possible. Is this a good plan? Unfair? Is she perpetuating a falsehood that will ultimately rob her two small sons of the opportunity to say goodbye? These are unanswerable questions. That's all for me this week.

Till the final, dear David! 

A.

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 12

Katsushika Hokusai's "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife"

Dear A.,         

            I can’t resist opening with Jenny Factor, who met “Mad Men” show-runner Matt Weiner at a Harvard symposium last week. Jenny was armed with a planted question:  “Given that Don's real name is Whitman, and that Michael Ginsberg has the same name as Allen, was Matt thinking of Harold Hart Crane when giving a name to media maven Harry Crane?” Matt shook his head no; he wasn’t thinking of poets’ names. He said, “Whitman was quite simply “White Man.” He added: “Don’s fundamental questions are ‘Is this it?’ and ‘What’s wrong with me?’”

            Meanwhile, Don Draper’s latest love hails from Racine, Wisconsin – Racine (French for “root”) being the name of one of France’s most honored dramatists. But no doubt this is entirely a coincidence.

            To this observer, the abhorrent treatment of Joan at the hands of the McCann Ericson creeps was the dominant note in episode #5. First there’s Dennis, who fails to read the briefs Joan has prepared, interrupts her phone conversation with her client, and offends him, the Atlanta-based Avon man confined to a wheelchair, by suggesting that they play a few rounds of golf at Augusta. Dennis has ruined the telephonic encounter —and then he has the gall to be testy when Joan calls him on it.

            So Joan brings her problem to Ferg Donnelly. Bad choice. Ferg is only too happy to get Dennis off the case, but he nominated himself instead and leeringly proposes that the and Joan fly to Atlanta together – to apologize to Avon but also to have a good time and get to know each other better. He doesn’t have to spell it out, the fucker; Joan knows exactly what he means, but is disinclined to play the fuckee.

            So now she goes to Jim Hobart, the head of McCann, who cannot be said to be sympathetic and whose most memorable line, in the context of McCann’s clout, is that the New York Times would print Mein Kampf on its front page if McCann ordered it – an interesting figure of speech not only because of what it says about McCann (Hitler Lite!) but because of what it says about the venerable newspaper of record (“comme ils sont putains”). Jim makes it clear that Joan’s accounts are too small for him to care about; that if she expects to succeed at McCann, she had better learn to play ball; and that he’d be happy to be rid of her, and her half a million dollar contract, on a fifty-cent a dollar buyout.

            However repugnant, it’s deal she will have to take, although there’s a part of her that would like to fight it out in a court of law, perhaps with a class action lawsuit.

            The diaspora of Sterling Cooper personnel is at hand. Goodbye, Joan. Goodbye, Shirley, the second African-American secretary to be employed at Sterling Cooper, who is taking a job in insurance and thanks Roger for being so “amusing.” Of the old standbys, the two who might fit right in at McCann are a beaming Pete (a vice–president) and self-congratulating Harry. Stan is making the transition, but what are his options? Ted -- who now projects defeat and resignation, in stark contrast to the go-get-‘em young man who used to compete so fiercely with Don -- may be able to see the silver lining. At McCann he may be able to relax. Or so he thinks.  But the futures of Peggy and Roger and Don are unresolved.

            Peggy and Roger are the two of our regulars who are arguably the most deeply affected by the turbulent 60s. The idea of Roger at the player piano (“Hi-Lily, Ho Lo”) while Peggy glides on roller skates in a deserted office with a half-empty bottle of sweet vermouth on the desk makes for a delightfully surreal scene that no one would have imagined back in 1960 or ’62.  Things are flying apart; the center cannot hold! It is even more surreal than the sight of Betty reading a Collier paperback edition of Freud’s writings.

            And Don, god bless him, pulls an unexpected – and, dare I say it, existential -- stunt in line with going to French movies on company time, reading Frank O’Hara, imprisoning his mistress in a Sherry Netherland hotel suite, etc. At a meeting for a new “diet beer,” a “low-calorie beer” – what we would come to know as Lite Beer from Miller (which occasioned the “Tastes great” versus “Less filling” TV ad campaign of note) – Don looks out the window, sees the Empire State Building, hears a few sentence of the market research  about Milwaukee, and decides to check out. We next see him driving west, thinking of Kerouac’s On the Road, listening to the car radio in downtown Cleveland (“Sealed with a Kiss”), and having a conversation with the ghost of Bert Cooper. Longtime admirer of Robert Morse that I am, I welcome his apparition and his wisdom. “You like to play the stranger,” he tells Don – the stranger in the conventional sense and in that favored by Camus (“L’Etranger” the novel) and Baudelaire (“L’Etranger” the prose poem a century before Camus).

            I confess to maximum puzzlement over Don’s obsession with Diana, the waitress from Racine, Wisconsin, who ditched him and disappeared. Her ex-husband calls her “a tornado,” who had left “a trail of broken bodies” behind her. I don’t see it. But she is at least a pretext for his driving off into the westward night, and when he picks up a scraggly hitchhiker n his way to St. Paul, that is where Don heads, though it is in the opposite direction from Mad Ave.

            What do you make of these developments – and, come to think of it, of Meredith, Don’s secretary, who, having been an army brat, has hidden talents (for interior design), defends the absent Don with a beautiful hilarious ingenuousness when confronted by an exasperated Jim  Hobart, and still gets written off as a “moron”?

            D.

Dear David,

I'm glad you brought up Meredith, Don's sunny dispositioned secretary, who likes to dress in buttercup colors. Perky, efficient Meredith, with the voice of a kindergarten teacher, is running Don's life now, it seems, at least organizationally: which includes decorating his new apartment for him. While Don is simply running away. AWOL and headed vaguely west. Is Meredith on a trajectory out of the advertising business (too?) Ready to jump ship so she doesn't have to endure the work environment at the misogynist, high stakes torture machine known as McCann Erickson? If there's a villain in this show, it's McCann Erickson. Is there a soul working there who doesn't have the ethics of piranha? Will Meredith reinvent herself as a zany, eccentric Manhattan interior decorator, wearing crazy paisley pant suits, elephant bell bottoms, mod print dresses and knee high lace up boots? She jokes with Don about his having to brave "the hardships of the Plaza" (hotel) while he waits for his new digs to be ready.
But will he ever actually live in this apartment now that he's hit the road with no apparent destination? Has he become the proverbial wanderer, albeit one who makes Cary Grant look scruffy and is traveling not in some funky, breakdown prone jalopy but an expensive, elegant set of wheels? Any bets? I wondered briefly if the title of this episode, "Lost Horizon," referencing the utopian novel by James Hilton and movie based upon it, could be a hint that Don will end up renouncing the world and becoming a dropout /devotee of some sort...1970s style. Maybe he'll end up at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, or at its satellite location in San Francisco (which didn't last.) He could hang out with Alan Watts, Carl Rogers, Timothy Leary, BF Skinner. I can see him holding his own with that crowd of cutting edge thinkers, philosophers, life style experimenters, psychologists; Advertising is pure projective psychology, isn't it? And though he looks like a poster dude for "straight square man/establishment guy" he is anything but. What do you think of Don as groovy, 1970s itinerant monk? At least until the wandering bug bites him again and he performs another self-reinvention. Will he become some version of the hitchhiking uber hippie he picks up at the end of the show? How would he look with super long hair? Oh, Photoshop, you must help me envision Don with hair down to his shoulders, arrayed in talismanic necklaces.

I love the Hokusai print that Peggy "inherits" from Bert Cooper, via Roger, as the old office is emptied and possessions are boxed up or thrown away, and Roger unearths it from a closet. My brilliant friend Brian Tucker knew the title of the print: (though it seems to have several names, actually, just like Don Draper himself) "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife." This piece of Japanese erotic art, which Peggy initially recoils from when Roger urges it on her as a gift, is eventually accepted. It travels with her to her new office, when the goons at McCann Erickson finally figure out that she's not a secretary and rustle her up an office. The shot of Peggy sauntering at last into McCann Erickson, walking sassily down the corridor with some of her office belongings, ready to move in, drunk on Vermouth (that being the only imbibe-able left in the cleaned out Sterling Cooper offices in the previous scene with Roger), dark glasses having just slightly slipped down her nose, cigarette dangling louche/sexy from her mouth, octopus-sex print tucked under her arm, is delightful. That femme bravado will last, how long do you think, David? Maybe 6 minutes at most at McCann Erickson? Hokusai lived from 1760-1849, the ever-wise Internet tells me. The print depicts, as Roger neatly puts it "an octopus pleasuring a woman." It prefigures a category of porn erotica in Japan that's currently classified as "tentacle sex" or "tentacle erotica." I leave it up to your imagination what that entails. (I learned the term "tentacle sex" a few weeks ago, listening to a radio show on the erotic manga industry in Japan.) Actually, Roger probably hasn't had time to properly study the print, or he would have said "two octopi pleasuring a woman." The print features not only a huge octopus paying attention to a certain part of the woman's anatomy, but also a much smaller octopus lurking up by her head, (one text I skimmed on the subject said this little guy was the larger octopus' son!!??*&%$!) tentacle tip neatly wrapped around her nipple.

A little hard to watch Joan get pushed around and treated like trash by every man she tries to work with in good faith, going up and up the ladder of command, trying to get a modicum of respect or redress from SOMEONE in charge. When she finally arrives at the top of the sleaze ball food chain with her simple request to be treated like a human being and allowed to do her work properly, she has the dignified, controlled fury of a wounded warrior queen in her stand-off with the evil Jim Hobart in his office. She is an AMAZON! In getting her to accept a 50 cents on the dollar buyout and leave the bubbling cauldron of oppression that is McCann Erickson, is Roger, her old flame, a savior or a betrayer?

Speaking of old flames, there's a tender scene between Don and Betty, I liked, when he comes to pick up the already departed Sally. Betty is reading Freud's An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, a bit nervous about being back in school. Her figure is a bit softer, more matronly now. They tease each other a little about getting older. A sort of easy, nostalgic, wistful intimacy filled the room like a mist, a feeling I'd not seen between them. I can't remember a scene between the two when one of them wasn't angry or desperate or humiliated. So are we to get the message Don has made his peace with Betty? She has a new family, a new direction, stability, and seems content. Sally "found a ride" to wherever Don was supposed to drive her. So she doesn't seem to need him anymore, either. And we fans (sniff! sob!) are going to have to learn to do without him too, soon enough.

I am so sad that Mad Men is ending!!! Guess I'll have to drown my sorrow in a Lite beer. (McCann Erikson creep "When we talk about a low calorie beer, we become feminine.") I didn't know that low calorie beer was full of estrogen, but now I do!

love, 

Amy

 

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 11

Dear Amy, 

Pete’s Turn to Shine?

            He was due. After humiliations at the hands of his father-in-law, a Metro North railway conductor, the late Lane Pryce, Detroit auto executives, irate husbands, and wounded wives, his own among them, Pete surprises the viewer by standing up for Trudy’s honor when their daughter is denied admission to the posh Greenwich Country Day School. For once Pete, who routinely takes it on the chin, literally or not, is the successful aggressor, landing a “sucker punch” on the jaw of the school’s admissions officer, and we applaud. Trudy is, well, impressed, as if to say there was a reason she married him.

It turns out that the decision to deny the Campbells’ daughter has to do with a centuries-old Scottish feud between the MacDonalds and the Campbells. It is one of the curious ethnic jokes to surface in recent episodes – like Ken Cosgrove’s statement, when he is fired by McCann Ericson, that he wouldn’t have fit in there because he is “not Catholic, not Irish, and [he] can read”

McCann makes everyone see red, now more than ever as our Sterling Cooper heroes and heroines learn that their lease has been canceled and they will be moved from the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue to McCann headquarters. Don has a plan, which he develops when Lew Avery phones from California to say he is joining the Tokyo firm that wants his adolescent cartoon strip. But when the partners convene with Jim Hobart of McCann and Don goes into his pitch for retaining his agency’s autonomy by moving its offices to Los Angeles, Hobart cuts him short. Don has failed to save the day. The line of the week is said by Don later that same day, over drinks with Roger at the generic bar the two gents favor. Don is acknowledging that he is in the wrong on the subject under discussion. “For the second time today I surrender,” he says.

Speaking of Lew Avery, the creep fires off one parting shot at Don: “Sayonara. Enjoy the rest of your miserable life.” A friend of mine who worked in a Mad Ave ad agency in the 1970s tells me that the most realistic character in the show – that is, the one most like the people he used to work with – is Lew Avery.

But I’d rather speak of Don. . . who is alone more often than not. . .whose latest girlfriend sneaks out and leaves town with no forwarding address. . .who may soon (as Meredith reminds him) be without either an office or an apartment.  . . and who nevertheless remains the Don Juan de nos jours, though with unexpected twists that will make me want to bring him up the next time I get the chance to teach Byron’s “Don Juan.”

The last scene in this week’s episode has Don and Roger trying to rally the troops. It’s a scene we’ve seen before when the agency is under threat. A gambit is announced to the staff, and Don manages to make the event inspirational. Only here, in the mood of surrender, it doesn’t work. The speeches are not even listened to as staff members talk and scatter.

 I am pretty certain that Acker Bilk’s “Stanger on the Shore” has been heard on a previous episode – probably one set in 1962, the year the song was a big radio hit with delicious clarinet solos and sweet sentimental strings. The song is reprised in the scene in which Peggy and Stan have at each other and Peggy ends up confessing about her child out of wedlock. It’s a great choice, and who can complain about Dean Martin singing the exit music over the credits? In the song, money burns a hole in “my” pocket, and I wish I had a million dollars to buy pretty presents for “you.” Nice to hear it; the mood is like that of the early 60s – very different from the prevailing mood of surrender in 1970.

                Let me leave you with a question. There was a time when Ted and Don seemed to reflect each other, but that hasn’t been true since Ted left for California and began to sulk. Now we learn via the exposition-by-dialogue method that he and his wife are divorced. He left New York to save his marriage and leave behind temptation in the form of Peggy. Now that he is back in the city, he has a new girlfriend: a woman he dated in college. What happened to the torch he had carried for Peggy? Stacey has a feeling that Joan will clear out of the agency and join Richard as his spouse. What thinkest thou?

Love, David

Dear David,

Right you are about its being Pete’s episode to shine! Well-known as a selfish, ruthless, sneaky, entitled little prick, Pete emerges from this episode wearing a halo, albeit a cockeyed one, earned by doing noble deeds, but not quite by the book. As you note, he gives the rude official at the fancy school he and his ex are trying to get their kid admitted to a well-deserved punch in the schnozzle. The guy got nasty about their child, Tammy (who I'd like to see appear on the show before its swan song.)  Kudos to the Mad Men scriptwriters for poking fun at the ridiculous “Draw a Person Test” (called the “Draw a Man Test” in this episode) a highly questionable but still used psychological “test” of personality and intelligence. Initially, the admissions official cites Tammy's poor, rudimentary drawings for this test as a decisive factor in her being denied a place in the school. After dismissing Trudy’s polite pleas for reconsideration coldly, almost viciously, the official admits the little girl was actually denied admission based on her last name! (“No MacDonald will ever mix with a Campbell!”) Pete's reactive, righteous pugilism elicits a moment of starry-eyed admiration from ex wife Trudy. (Trudy’s a character I am always hungry to see, especially now that she appears so infrequently post divorce.) “No MacDonald will ever mix with a Campbell!” I laughed at the reference to an ancient MacDonald/ Campbell clan feud, which seemed archaic and absurd, as though the 1970s combatants in the day-school office should be clad in kilts and smeared with war paint, broadswords on hips, in the style of the movie Braveheart. And yet. One of the many strengths of Mad Men’s writers has been their consistent willingness to deal with racism, head on, and slantwise, and even via humor. Watching the episode made me remember a story my grandfather told me eons ago. He’d tried to check into a hotel in Florida with my grandmother when they were newlyweds, around 1930. His last name sounded Jewish, he was told at the front desk, and the hotel “didn't take Jews.” The couple was turned away, despite there being many available rooms. At that memory, I stopped laughing.

Pete’s second act of heroism in episode four is to leak to Peggy the major plot development of the day, though he has been threateningly sworn to secrecy. This news, as you note, rocked the worlds of all characters associated with Sterling Cooper. S.C. is being merged into voracious adoptive parent company McCann Erikson. Upstart S.C. will have to give up their building, autonomy, and name, and move in with that hated, larger, more heartless entity in an abhorrent forced marriage. There is general mourning, even panic, when the whole office hears the news, as you say.

   I was fascinated by the euphemisms for Sterling Cooper's move into McCann Erickson:

We're being absorbed!

We're being swallowed!

They finally got you: they ate you up!  Like a child's bad dream of being eaten by monsters.

I loved the scene in which Peggy and Stan are supervising market research on children playing with Play Doh. Or are they casting kids for a commercial? Peggy is awkward with the kindergarten-aged tykes. She seems near terrified, at an utter loss. “Just play!” she waves her arms and commands them as they sit at a child sized conference table. “Do what you'd do if we weren't here.” Of course the children freeze. Stan has to step in. “Real kids are shy, you have to talk to them like people,” he gently chides her. He breaks the ice by heaving some Play Doh at the wall, much to the children's surprise and delight. Later, in a private moment, Stan expresses surprise at Peggy’s fear reaction at the horde of youngsters. She as much as admits to him, obliquely, that she had a child out of wedlock when she was younger. He seems sympathetic, takes this in, looks as though he may revise his thinking about her a little.

Peggy, like the rest of her colleagues, is appalled by the prospect of becoming a cog in the McCann Erikson mega-machine and explores her options with a corporate headhunter. As a female, having tasted McCann Erickson's attitude towards women, she may also fear being harassed and demoted. “Who wants me?” she asks him, smiling nervously as they sit down to talk. (That chirpy quote is pure Peggy, a shaken AND over-stirred cocktail of anxiety, drive, sorrow and fierce hope.) He replies that her best bet is to go with McCann Erikson, the behemoth market dominator at the moment. Just what she did not want to hear. She looks sick with disappointment and dread. 

Tiny bibulous footnote:

In the scene that opens the show, Pete obsequiously says to Ken “Look, we got some of your favorite wine.” The wine that Pete (with Don's help) unsuccessfully employs to woo Ken's business at the top of the hour, now that Ken is in charge of advertising for Dow chemical, is a vintage Ken declared he loved in a previous installment: Chateau Margaux ‘53. Pete looks completely dashed when Ken crushes his hopes for landing the account almost immediately. Don, always sensible in such circumstances, applies himself to drinking the primo vino. Chateau Margaux ‘53 is a real vintage, selling online today, described as “supple and fragrant,” and as possessing a “distinctly perfumed aroma, refined elegance and tremendous power.” Price (in 1970)? $600 to $2,000 a bottle. David, what would that be at today’s prices?

We get such nice little glimpses of old intimacies in this episode: Trudy and Pete’s aforementioned momentary rapprochement, after long bitterness. “You should ice that hand,” she tells him, almost tenderly, after he’s socked the admissions officer. She lets down her guard a little, complains about being a vulnerable divorcee, about getting older. Pete seems to tear up, a glimmer of his old love for her almost visible, sighing admiringly, “You're ageless!” Joan rests her head on Roger’s shoulder when she gets the bad news about Sterling Cooper being swallowed by McCann Erikson as Jonah by the whale, recalling to mind their old passion. Don learns that the waitress he fell for, Diana Bauer, who pushed him away and disappeared, has been calling his answering service, though instructing the operators not to tell him she’d phoned. Roger’s intermittent old flame, Marie Calvert, comes up in conversation, though she doesn't appear. Roger proposes a toast to the dear departed comrade and founder Bert Cooper as the gang sits in a bar, shell-shocked about the merger, trying to “absorb” the reality of what’s to come. 

Wonderful question about Ted's lack of interest in Peggy now that he's actually divorced and theoretically free. What happened to their yen for each other? He's taken up with a woman he knew in college, professes to be happy now. Could this account for some of Peggy's brittleness around the office? The affair with Peggy may have been what Ted needed to propel him out of an ailing marriage, more than it was true love on his part. And I’m not sure the sharp- edged, intensely ambitious, uptight current version of Peggy would be a great long-term match for the laid-back Ted. I’m also not persuaded that Peggy, with her keen visual sense, would be able to tolerate that buffoonish mustache. I’m still hoping the ex-lawyer brother-in-law of the fired Mathis will return and sweep Peggy off her feet. But who knows what the Mad Men writers have in store for us? Till next week! 

Fond Regards,

Amy

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 10

Mad Men (c) Anna West, 2015. 15" x 11" Oil on Canvas

Dear Amy,

In a show as well-written as "Mad Men," there is always some competition for the  best line of the week. Here are my choices.

#1: "When I watch television, the commercials are my favorite part." This is said by Sarah, 17, one of Sally's friends, flirting with Don, who later (defensively) says she is "fast." Don is treating the girls to a restaurant dinner before they take off on a "twelve states in twelve days" bus tour. One reason I like the line is its ironic self-consciousness, which makes me take a second look at the commercials punctuating this week's episode. And I have to say that among all the spots for cars, credit cards, bad new movies,prescription drugs and their side effects, snack foods (Doritos), cable TV's indisputably evil empire (Time Warner), and "4G LTE signal" gadgets, the only commercial that holds my attention is that for the new Apple watch. I have no intention of buying one, mind you, being quite satisfied with the Omega on my wrist, but it is arresting -- unlike the mediocre stuff that keeps interrupting a show that is, after all, an elegy for Madison Avenue and the advertising campaigns of yore.

#2: "I'm a little nearsighted; I'm not blind." Said by Richard, a man in search of an optometrist who lucks into meeting Joan instead and has the wit to keep the conversation going and to land a dinner date with our favorite red-head. Is he good enough for her? We'll see.

#3 "This is supposed to be about my job, not the meaning of life." Said by Peggy to Don during an employee-review session. If there is a line that sums her up, or at least defines her characteristic position among the shenanigan-prone characters at Sterling Cooper, for better or worse this is it. 

#4) "This conversation is a little late. . .and so am I." Said by Sally to her mother, showing a ready and somewhat cruel wit. Rebuffing the attempt at mom-daughter candor, she is really saying: I can out-bitch you, Betty.

#5) "You don't have any character. You're just handsome." Said by John Mathis, who is about to be fired, to Don. The line reminds me of an anecdote about handsome Robert Taylor, who plays Ivanhoe, among other movie heroes, and was married to Barbara Stanwyck for twelve years. To critics who complain that he is a wooden actor, the correct response begins, "If you look like Robert Taylor. . ."

#6) "This place reeks of failure. It's an $85,000 fixer-upper." Said by the real-estate agent, Melody by name, who is trying to sell the Upper East Side  penthouse apartment Don and Megan had shared. The lines are informative -- that price in 1970 would have to be multiplied by at least thirty in today's market -- and it is one of those thesis sentences ("reeks of failure") that leaps out at you. Yet Melody, surprising herself, sells the apartment after all, and there you have Don: managing to move forward despite the occasional stink of failure, still true to his idea of what masculinity looks like even when others around him let their facial hair get in the way or buy their clothes somewhere cheap instead of Paul Stuart.

I teach on West 12th Street so it's nice to know that that's where Joan lives.  But tell me why does she tell Richard she's been "divorced twice"?  Other questions for you: How do you like Glenn Bishop now that he has had the growth spurt that I can say from experience is one of the glories of being a high school senior? Given characters named Whitman, Crane, and Ginsberg, is it significant that Glenn's last name is that of a famous poet?  (Was this new info? I remember Glenn's mother, who worked for JFK in 1960, but not her last name.) Finally, as a writer, don't you relish the fact that Roger, asked to produce a 2,500-word speech on a tight deadline, would delegate the task?

 

Love,

David

 

Hombres Locos [April 25, 2015]

Dear David,

I love your “best lines of the week” conceit for this week’s blog post.

This was my favorite episode of the (SOB!!!) final season so far, due in large part to generous helpings of Sally, Peggy, Joan, and Betty, all my favorite Mad Men femmes. With at least 3 of them involved in sex-related situations or conversations during the episode, life couldn't be better!

(GIANT ASIDE: Speaking of commercials-as-punishment, which you brought up in your opening paragraph: I sometimes end up re-watching Mad Men episodes on the computer. And while grateful that AMC makes them available this way for further study, the strategy for delivering commercials during these online viewings is heinous. Quartets of commercials abruptly interrupt the show, often at key moments (nothing new there). But unlike watching network TV as you described, where you usually get an array of different commercials each break, online you see the same one or two commercials EACH DAMN TIME. During some of the frequent commercial barrages, you see the same single commercial four times back to back. (I turn the sound off so at least I don't have to hear them.) Highly obnoxious. When this indignity occurs, I console myself by leaving the room, to pet dogs, secure snacks, pee, or take a close look at my eyebrows in the bathroom mirror (always edifying, I find. You can tell your future by scrutinizing your eyebrows.) And I keep a list of the products that are advertised in this mind-battering, abusive way, so I will remember NEVER to buy ANY of them. I feel Don Draper would rather be celibate for life than ever allow ads for any product Sterling Cooper represented, be it peanut butter cookies or pantyhose, to bludgeon a poor, lowly computer user in this abusive way. END OF CRANKY ASIDE.)

I love two pairings or doublings in this episode. ONE: we get to see both Joan and Don woken up as the show opens. Don's overslept and his realtor lets herself in to show his on-the-market house, and thus wakes him. On the opposite coast, Joan, on a business trip, is awakened in her hotel room by her annoying mother, who's babysitting her little boy back in New York, calling too early because she just can't keep it straight about the time difference. We get the fun of hearing what Joan orders for breakfast from room service, which is a perfect character description of Joan via food: “A glass of skim milk, a grapefruit, a pot of coffee..............(significant PAUSE) ..........and some French toast.”

The second pairing is a kind of image/dialogue rhyme. When Joan is having sex with Richard for the first time, there's a little jokey pillow talk about how avid he is. He teases, “I just got out of jail.” She smiles and sweetly replies, “And you're acting like it.” When Sally and Betty are dealing with travelers checks for Sally's impending school trip, Betty lamely tries to extract a promise from Sally that she won't launch into teen nymphomaniac mode on the trip: “There are going to be boys everywhere. So I hope you won't act like you were just let out of a cage.” This is an interesting remark on a number of levels, but the image of surging sexual appetite being analogous to being freed from a cage or jail is arresting (ha ha).

The mother/daughter scene with Sally and Betty was excellent. It made me realize that, in many ways, Sally is more sophisticated than Betty. Maybe this is true of most mothers and daughters, once the daughters reach young womanhood? Betty seemed suddenly hopelessly old-fashioned and out of touch trying primly to warn Sally about “boys.” As you noted, Sally used the opportunity to land a verbal sucker punch.

This episode contains one of Betty’s finest hours, in my view. She is often the beautiful woman fans love to hate, but in this episode, dealing with the distraught Glenn Bishop who's about to ship off to Vietnam, she actually treats him tenderly, with a mixture of maternal and sexual wisdom we rarely see from her. She is kind to him, and rebuffs his awkward advance (I thought) with real gentleness and concern, her vaunted haughtiness and narcissism nowhere in sight. She knows what he needs to hear at this crucial moment. “You're going to make it, I'm positive!” There has always been chemistry between Betty and this kid, ever since he was a small boy. (I also applaud Mad Men's writers, for being brave enough in early episodes to allow their story line to deal with the sexuality of children, and I admire the way they have pursued that plot thread now in this final season, rather than dropping it, though it is a hot potato topic.) It's been so amazing to watch Glenn and Sally grow up and come of age on this show!

I loved Don and Sally’s terse interchange as she was boarding the school trip bus. She may at times seem more sophisticated than Betty, but her relation to Don is a different  story, and of course they are very alike. He's able to take on the chin her rather vicious adolescent attack on his parenting, and his reply is to tell her that while she's beautiful, she could be so much more. For all his Don Juan antics, he takes women seriously, and in some cases tries to get them to take themselves seriously as well.

There's online scuttlebutt about Joan's two divorces...claiming she was married to someone named Scottie prior to her tying the knot with the inept Army surgeon, but I'll have to do further research. Glenn has performed that miracle that adolescents do, turned from a lumpy, funny kid to a wonderful creature, a tall, good looking young man (yuk hairdo, facial hair scraggles and sideburns of the period notwithstanding.)

Since you were speculating, David, about what the closing scenes of Mad Men will be, I wonder if the show's last moments are going somehow to involve Don’s so-called “Gettysburg Address,” the speech about the company's vision and future direction that Roger has sloughed off onto our favorite Lothario? What thinkest thou?

Till the next installment,

love,

Amy

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler Recap Mad Men Season 7 Episode 9

 
Dearest Amy,

            Others have probably observed that Don Draper’s “born again” moment – the moment when he took on the identity of a deceased officer in a Korean War battle – is an identical repetition of what shirtless Bill Holden has done in the POW camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai. But though poor Bill comes to an unhappy end in that remarkable movie, it is not what I foresee for Don when Mad Men reaches April 1970, Nixon moves against Cambodia, and four Kent State students die at the hands of the National Guard. Unlike the literalists who believe that the falling-man motif in the opening credits must control what happens at the very end, I feel that the aptest concluding sequence would have Don alone at the bar of a cocktail lounge, approached by a woman (or that woman’s friend) – with the implication that nothing is terminal. . . that Don will continue to be Don, a true Don though not in the Corleone sense. . . and that “some things that happen for the first time / [will] seem to be happening again. . .” 

            Don’t go all moral on us, Matt Weiner. We did not identify ourselves with Don Draper because we disapprove of him (though we may well disapprove of a lot of the things he does).

            It surprises me that Megan is so bitter. And that her mother would clean out Don of his furniture. And that Don, headstrong though he is, would go all-in on Diana, the waitress from Racine, Wisconsin. 

             It doesn't surprise me that, thanks to Marie Calvait, Don's apartment is devoid of furniture, and he stands in it, disconcerted, surrounded by emptiness.

            It doesn’t surprise me that media maven Harry Crane should so sleazily and brazenly hit on Megan when lunching with her ostensibly to discuss her agent and her career . .  .although I am surprised that Harry, whose fashion taste has always been erratic at best, is wearing a nice suit and tie when entering Don’s office. Don’s navy suit and tie are, to be sure, three times nicer. 

       It doesn’t surprise me, but it disappoints me, that Harry covers his ass so shamelessly in Don’s office, telling him that Megan is “unstable” and will say “crazy things.”

            It surprises me that Don writes out a million dollar check to give to Megan while their divorce attorneys behave like attorneys and prolong the negotiations.  “Nothing about you is real,” she tells Don and gives him back the engagement ring that came from Don Draper’s real wife and widow. “You’re nothing but a liar – an aging, sloppy, selfish liar,” Megan says.  Well, OK, but she deserves better lines. . . and the point about Don has been made and need not be emphasized at such moments.  

            It surprised me that art director Stan’s girlfriend Elaine is so loving and so adventurous, willing to pose in the nude for his photographic portfolio.He turns out to be a nice guy -- after such an unpromising start. . . .

            It surprised me that Megan has a sister. Can’t see the advantage of introducing her now, but who knows?

            It doesn’t surprise me that Megan’s mother would call on Roger Sterling to do a service for her. . .a service combining money (Marie needs him to pay $180 to Megan’s movers) and desire (“please take advantage of me,” she says breathily),

             It surprised me to encounter hustler Pima, the photographer with the great reputation, who will do anything with either Peggy or Stan or both to get a lucrative assignment . . I don’t see a future for her, but I’m not plotting the show. 

       If I were, well, I am missing Sally, hoping for a reprise of Dr. Faye Miller, maybe a flashback of art director Sal or crazy Krishna Paul, and a return to the office of Michael Ginsberg.

   If they asked me I’d want a major advertising crisis – the need to satisfy a well-heeled but hopelessly resistant client, an ingenious solution to a thorny problem.

If it were up to me. . . but it isn’t. Who, by the way, is singing “C’est Si Bon” over the closing credits? Henri Betti?

What did you make of the episode?

 Love,

             David

Dear David,

Speaking of being born again: Betty scared the bejesus out of me in that opening scene where Don was babysitting at Henry and Betty's house, making chocolate milkshakes for his and Betty's little boys. How did she terrify me? By declaring that she was going back to school for a master's degree in psychology, aiming to re-invent herself as some kind of counselor or therapist. Can you imagine having a shrink who looks like Grace Kelly, only aggressively sexier, and who has the poor impulse control and unchecked, rabid narcissism of a sulky four year old?

David, I heartily second your plea to the admired Matt Weiner: "DON"T GO ALL MORAL ON US" Don't "punish" Don for being Don in concluding Mad Men. That would be an expected, tidy exit strategy unworthy of that character, the series or your audience.

This episode's color scheme seemed to be warm earth tones, hovering around the red, orange, red-brown and rust part of the spectrum. Remember Pete's hilarious tomato red golf sweater, Don's dark red shirt in the initial milkshake scene, and Betty's peach print gown in that same scene? Stan and Harry are clad mostly in brown this episode, Peggy 2/3rds of the time in orange, and rust red (and once in green to disrupt my scheme); Meredith in buttercup yellow, and then an orange jumper. Pima carries a bright red umbrella in the scene where she tries to seduce Peggy. Megan wears a very fetching rust colored dress in the fancy hotel room she and her sister and mother occupy in Manhattan, in contrast to her sister's dowdier (by comparison) brown frock. Don's bedroom is deep red. Stan and Pima presumably have sex in the weird red light of the darkroom. Sultry waitress Diana's now has a brown-red uniform (matching the color scheme of the more upscale steakhouse she seems to have graduated to from the coffee shop.) The walls of her crummy hotel room are red orange, complete with red bedspread, in the scene where the episode grimly ends.

Speaking of Diana, this hot bit of speculation just in from tenured professor of Mad Men studies Denise Duhamel:

A friend obsessed with the show said that there is a theory that Diana, the waitress, could be Don's DAUGHTER!

Remember when he was raped in the whorehouse?

I really doubt that would be the case, but why would Mad Men bring her Diana in and drop her, when all I want is more Peggy, Joan, Betty, and especially SALLY?

Indeed, the question on everyone's lips is "Whither Sally???" And thanks, learned colleague Denise Duhamel (who shares initials with Don Draper! Could this be one of the factors that initially drew professor Duhamel to this important field of research, in which she has so distinguished herself in recent years? If waitress Diana is indeed Don's Daughter, then one version of her maiden name would be Diana Draper, another set of nicely alliterative initials to monogram her leather luggage with, should she ever have enough dough to buy any.)

Favorite line of the episode: probably the one delivered by Harry Crane in the squirm- worthy scene you referred to, David, where Harry tries, with the suaveness of Sasquatch, to put the old casting couch make on Megan. Never has poor Harry acted like more of a cad (perhaps he was still smarting from being referred to as "Mr. Potato Head" by an unkind client in last week's installment.) Reeling from how gorgeous Megan looks when she joins him for lunch at a snazzy hotel restaurant, he gapes and gasps: "You're like Ali McGraw and Brigit Bardot had a baby!" (Perfect description of actress Jessica Pare in this part.)

Things I loved about this episode:

1. Roger's code for the clients who are "blotto after lunch:" N.A.C. NO AFTERNOON CALLS.

2. When Don is nuzzling Diana, he murmurs, "You smell incredible. What is that?" and she replies dryly, though also a bit dreamily, as Don's nose is gently snuffling her hair, "shampoo." (She continues after that, talking about how it's Avon shampoo, remarking "I bought it in my living room," perhaps setting us up for door to door sales of cosmetics as a business model Don's agency may take an interest in?)

3. In Pima's photo shoot for a Vermouth commercial, all the models seem to be dressed like sexy witches.

4. Stan's ultra-cool, pot-smoking, cute wife Elaine, whose nurse uniform and hat seem to rhyme with Diana's waitress uniform and very similar starched white cap.

This episode is not unique in featuring lying as theme. One might even say that to the cynical among us, lying is a foundational concern of the show, as all advertising could be viewed as a form of lying. Diana fibs to Don about being childless, then later confesses "I lied to you." Don responds wonderfully, with a tender, quizzical "Already?" When Peggy tells Stan that Pima made a pass at her, too, and that she's a hustler, he growls "I don't believe you." Peggy looks him in the eye and says, "Which part?" When Roger asks Megan's mother if Don really agreed to Megan taking every stick of furniture from their formerly shared apartment and ship it to California, she says he did. Stan's wife asks how Pima liked his cheesecake photos of her, and he responds, "She loved them." As you noted, when finalizing their divorce, Megan calls Don an aging, sloppy, selfish liar, when actually, he's probably the least dissembling main character featured in this episode.

Till next week

love,

Amy

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler Recap Mad Men Season 7 Episode 8

Dearest A,

            OK, let’s get our bearings. The more things stay the same, the more they change – on the surface at least. Peggy Lee sings “Is That All There Is?” while Peggy Olsen’s midriff expands; hem lines are going up and these boots were made for walking; the tension between Peggy and Joan gets more intense; the transformation of Ken Cosgrove from nice guy with level head to one-eyed sourpuss continues apace; and the guys usher in the dawn of the worst decade of male fashion with ugly mustaches – Roger’s white stache in the Rollie Fingers mode; even worse, perhaps, Ted’s big brown concession to the Zeitgeist.  

The trio of oversexed McCann ad men who can’t get enough of Joan’s panties, hose, and bra: did we (men) really behave that crudely back then? (Don’t answer.) And if, onomastically, Harry Crane echoes Hart Crane, and Dick Whitman evokes Walt, and Michael Ginsberg recalls Allen, then meek John Mathis in the flesh, who reports to Peggy and matches her up with his brother-in-law, will disappoint all of us who made out to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are” and “It’s Not for Me to Say” in suburban cellars prepping for the high school prom in 1966. I have never before used the word onomastically in a sentence.

Things have changed on the Semitism front at least. The dark-haired waitress waiting on Don, Roger, and three female accomplices in a diner – the waitress named Di – reminds our boy of Rachel Katz, nee Menken, and the first of the last episodes of “Mad Men” go right back to episode one of season one when the heiress of Menken’s department stores gets treated rudely by Don and company in the then-judenrein firm of Sterling and Cooper. In a dream Rachel is one of the models auditioning for the chinchilla ad that the agency is planning. In the most memorable dialogue of the week, she tells Don “I’m supposed to tell you you missed your flight” and he replies with the over-sincerity of a commercial: “Rachel, you’re not just smooth, you’re Wilkinson smooth.” 

Rachel Menken has died of leukemia. It happened just a week ago. Don is stunned; he pays a shiva visit to Rachel’s sister Barbara, who needs not explain what this seven-day period of mourning entails. Don knows. He has, he says, lived in New York for a long time. Barbara’s husband: “We need one more for a minyan.” Don: “I’ll be glad to help.” Barbara: “He can’t. He’s not Jewish.” The men doven while he stands in the vestibule looking on. You think of the Jews we have met since Nixon and Kennedy faced off in series one: Jane Siegel, who marries Roger; Jane’s pint-sized cousin, butt of jokes, mocked incessantly by Roger until he deftly aims a punch at Roger’s solar plexus; Abe who loves Peggy; Ginsberg, crazy as a loon but right up there with Don and Peggy in the copywriting department; foul-mouthed comedian Jimmy Barrett and his wife, Bobbie. Don has slept with Bobbie, he has slept with Rachel, and it could be that the antidote to anti-Semitism is good sex. As Ava Gardner put it, when accounting for why she and Sinatra fought constantly yet played their romance through to its end, “If a man’s good in the feathers, you can forgive a lot.”

Meanwhile, Don remains the Lothario de ses jours, shtupping the waitress in an alley and topping a midnight visitor on a wine-stained carpet. In the immortal words of every TV critic in America, Does he know who he is? Will he ever find out? And how will it end? Will he jump? Will he fall? The last two questions reveal too literal a reading of the opening credits and should be disregarded. To the first two questions: Sure. He’s the guy who radiates confidence when he sells you a Mercedes. “The best – or nothing.”

Love,

D.

Dear David,

 You are right to open the discussion saying Let’s Get Our Bearings. I needed that! I feel like I’ve been hibernating in a badly ventilated cave. It’s bad for my health to go too long without our favorite TV series. As Mad Men scholar Brian Tucker was quick to remind me, when I puddingheadedly remarked that this final-season opener, with its quick jumps between a multitude of story lines, felt very all over the place, so in media res…..this final season was broken into two parts by the network, and was originally intended to be one long farewell season of fourteen or so episodes, rather than two installments of seven episodes with an intervening intermission of more than a year. So I need to get my head right and get up to SPEED.

 

As many thumbs up as I can muster in agreement with your observation about the utter hideousness of mustaches of the period. Oh, horrid ornaments of facial hair, marring the visages of two perfectly good-looking male characters! I gasped when I saw Roger re-enter the Edward Hopper-esque coffee shop from the john. Good god, he’s turned into a catfish! Or has pigeon wings glued to his upper lip! It’s impossible to look at him or Ted now without laughing.

 

Sea green seemed to be this episode's color theme. The stewardess who Don beds on the floor has a sea green mini dress on (is it her flight uniform?) and rapidly reveals a lovely diaphanous sea green panty and bra set. The waitresses in the coffee shop featured in this episode wear sea green uniforms with white caps and aprons. Peggy is clad in a flattering sea green cocktail dress with color coordinated jacket for her date with underling Mathis’ brother in law. When they go back to her apartment after the date has turned from awkward to hot, there is a metallic sea green typewriter visible on Peggy’s desk as they make out and talk about zipping off to Paris. Though I read that technically the gem can come in many colors, maybe all the sea green in this episode is TOPAZ, a jewel I’m most familiar with being aqua or blue green, and of course that is the brand name of the pantyhose whose on account Joan and Peggy are made to suffer so ignominiously.  (More on that in a second.) To conclude the costume commentary: the three babes Roger and Don are shoehorned into the coffee shop booth with (after some swank affair that has the men sporting tuxes) are arrayed in evening frocks, long and short, that are dead ringers for gowns my barbie doll had when I was a tot. That really took me back, making me relive muscle memory of stuffing that barbie doll’s hard little plastic body into those glamorous tiny dresses whose life-size versions I thought would be a big part of my future as an adult woman. Au contraire. I have never worn an evening gown or evening gloves in my life. The era for that ended, at least in my milieu and tax bracket, long before I hit adulthood. It was all about blue jeans and peasant blouses and loose granny dresses by the time I got old enough to put my dolls in a drawer and to be more concerned with my own outfits than Barbie’s. I love that the waitress is reading John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, that weighty paperback crammed into her apron pocket.

 

I think we’re in 1969. It’s “The End of an Era” we’re told in Mad Men print ads and on billboards, both because the show (sob!!!!) is coming to an end, and also, I think, because the sixties are drawing to a close. I conclude this, because:

1. That’s the year Peggy Lee had a hit with “Is That All There Is?” the wry, doleful, existential ballad of ultimate underwhel-ment that bookends this episode

2. That’s also the year that President Richard Nixon announced on TV that there would be a substantial drawdown of American troops from the war in Vietnam. We see and hear Don watching such an announcement in a super brief scene towards the end of the show (though there were many such announcements in the run up to the end of the war, so this date is hard to pinpoint.)

 

The scene in which Peggy and Joan try to get the trio of McCann Erikson male creeps to agree to OK a deal in which Marshall Fields Dept. store lends its elevating name to Topaz panty hose is indeed chilling. Those guys torture them, clearly showing off for each other and competing to be named winner of the Lowlife Misogynist Slime award (except the poor guy on the end who has no lines!). The interchange between Peggy and Joan in the elevator immediately following is maybe my favorite scene in the episode. Trapped literally and metaphorically in a tiny claustrophobic space, the two begin decompressing from their harassment in a way that starts off sounding like commiseration, but quickly degenerates. Peggy, continuing her understandable and common but misbegotten conflation of longing to be taken seriously and having to take on the oppressor’s mind set, ends up telling Joan that she is partly responsible for the harassment because “you can’t dress the way you do” and not expect to incite this kind of behavior from men in a professional setting, or out in the world. They end up attacking each other, yet also paradoxically giving each other permission to bust a move that may or may not be to each woman’s benefit. When Joan retaliates, telling Peggy that of course Peggy doesn’t dress the way she (Joan) does, because (by implication) Peggy is more Plain Jane than Bombshell--Peggy doesn’t have the looks to carry off the stunning, figure-hugging clothes Joan wears, Peggy is devastated. Later, she reverses her decision not to allow herself to be set up on a blind date by Mathis, almost to prove Joan wrong, to challenge the idea that she’s unattractive, or that she isn’t as attractive as Joan. When Peggy insults Joan back, saying, “You’re filthy rich, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” (because Joan, unlike Peggy, is now a partner in the firm) Joan thinks about it hard. When one of the McCann Erikson creeps calls later in the day, she tells her secretary to say she’s unavailable, in a meeting. Then she flees work and indulges in a high end shopping spree: evening dresses, shoes, boots, the works. (More wardrobe designs straight out of my old barbie doll’s cardboard closet. Sigh.)

 

Ken is also tortured, by Roger and another jerk from McCann Erikson. (Does anyone decent work at McCann Erikson or is the firm’s roll call just wall-to-wall assholes?) The duo team up to fire Ken in a vicious way, seeming to want to cause maximum pain, and relishing it, making jokes. They add insult to injury, letting Ken know that his severance package is tied to his “gift wrapping” (Ken’s term, later) his accounts for Pete to take over. Yet at the end of the show, Ken takes a very tasty revenge. His retiring father in law has made him head of advertising at huge Dow Chemical, enabling him to tell Roger and Peter: “I’m going to be your client, and I hate to tell you but I’m very hard to please.” Which elicits an expected expletive from Pete. Would that Peggy and Joan could get some of their own back too, sticking it to their sadistic sexist abusers!

 

Don’s Don Juan antics are important in this episode, as in so many. We get two contrasting amorous scenes. Drunk, wine spilling and therefore carpet ruining sex with the cute stewardess in his lavish apartment. Quick, up against the wall sex in a dark  alley with the waitress who reminds him of his dead love Rachel. Rachel who he has prophetically just dreamed of, and then learned she is recently dead. Rachel whose wake he briefly appears at before being triply snubbed (for not being Jewish, for being out of touch with her, and for being a cad towards her when she was alive) and then unceremoniously handed his hat. He ends up haunting the coffee shop, talking to his waitress about Rachel in very, spacey abstract terms. She’s a little sympathetic, but eventually tells him, “That [i.e., sex] isn’t going to happen again. Next time you come in, bring a date. I just work here.” The most eligible almost bachelor in 1969 Manhattan, shunned by his old love’s sister at her memorial, rejected by the coffee shop waitress, ends this episode looking ever handsome but bewildered, and forlorn. Cue Peggy Lee.

 

Another episode tonight! Can’t wait to read your reaction!

 

love,

 

Amy

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler Recap Mad Men Season 7 Episodes 1-7

Are you ready for the final episodes of Mad Men? In case you need a refresher, here are the "Point Counterpoint" posts from last season. 

Episode 1: "Time Zones"

Episode 2 "A Day's Work"

Episode 3: "Field Trip"

Episode 4: "The Monolith"

Episode 5:  "The Runaways"

Episode 6:  "The Strategy"

Episode 7:  "Waterloo"

Check back weekly for the Gerstler-Lehman recaps of the final episodes of Mad Men. 

-- sdh

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 6

On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 3:55 PM David Lehman wrote:

She Did It Her Way

      Twinnings: parallel lines that meet somewhere between the cross-country plane and the clouds above. I'll list a few.

      Peggy has just turned thirty, and Joan is nearing forty.  No fear could quite compare with the fear of becoming an old maid.

      On the flight back to LA are Megan and Pete’s fuck-bunny Bonnie, for whom Pete is not quite Clyde enough, and both are disconsolate for one reason or another.

      Stephanie Paterik tells me that when Roger and daughter rough it in the Catskills, Dad and offspring adopt identical sleep postures. That was two episodes ago.

      And this week, when the episode concludes with Don and Peggy and Pete at a Burger Chain, their formation echoes the visual configuration of Ted, Peggy, and Pete a year earlier at the airport lounge where they sit and everyone but Ted laughs, because everyone but Ted has been drinking whisky sours, and Ted is about to fly them in his little plane and catch hell from his wife -- only in the Ted episode it's a triangle and here it's more like Don and Peggy on one team and Pete on the other.

      Prejudices persist. When Bob Benson bails out the handcuffed GM executive who “tried to fellate an undercover police officer,” the cop on duty says, “good night, ladies.” And when Bob – the only character who looks good in a plaid jacket – says he “struck out” yesterday when looking for a suitable present for Joan, her mother pipes up: “The Jews close everything on Saturday.”

      This one-time shomer Shabbat yeshiva boy wonders: can the office be as judenrein as it was back in the benighted days of 1960? Gone are Ginsberg, to the loony bin; likewise the secretary who married Roger, took acid with him, won a big divorce settlement, and why can’t I remember her name? And then there's the latter's cousin, the pint-sized copywriter who went west, grew facial hair, went Hollywood, and after enduring one taunt too many, socked Roger in the solar plexus in season six.

      Is Megan having an affair? Stacey said so as soon as she heard Don offer to bring a suitcase of her stuff (a fondue maker!) when he visits her next in LA, end of July, to which she replies she’d like them to meet somewhere else – “Not LA, not here, just us.”

       The episode centers on Peggy and how she will handle the creative work for the national Burger Chef campaign. Pete imagines he is praising Peggy when he says there isn’t a better woman in the ad business – but she, and we, hear it as a left-handed compliment. Though the presentation gets Lou's approval, she knows there is something wrong with her family-friendly sequence of  guilty mom, indulging dad, and hungry kids in the car. So what does she do? Light up a cigarette, have a drink, chew out an associate – just like the master himself.

      Everything leads up to the heart-to-heart with Don. “Now I’m one of those women who lie about their age. I hate them.” She wonders, “What did I do wrong?” He answers, “You’re doing great.” In an epiphany that doesn’t quite announce itself as such, she asks, “Does this family exist anymore?” by which she means the family toward which she has pitched her ad – a family that eats as a group rather than watching television alone together. “What if there was a place you could go and there was no TV and you could break bread and anyone you were with was family?” And then on the radio comes the familiar opening chords of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way,” his mega-hit of 1969. “And now the end is near.” And Don and Peggy dance. (Will they end up together? Maybe, said Ron and David. No way, said Yoav and Stacey.) But taking her cue from the familiar voice, she will do the ad her way.

      The literary allusion in the last scene is masterly. Pete and Peggy and Don sit at a Burger Chef. In a way each is a loser (and remember, even Sinatra in “My Way” says he is “tired of losing”), they come from very different backgrounds, yet they form a sort of family.  She is going to have her ad shot here, because, she tells Pete, it’s “a clean, well-lighted place.” “Okay, Hemingway,” Pete has the wit to reply. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” one of Hemingway’s finest stories, the setting is a café in Madrid, where men in quiet desperation go to drown their sorrows. They believe in nothing, they do the most drastic things, like trying to take their lives, for nothing, because nothing matters. Nada. In one of Hemingway’s bravura performances, the word “nada” orchestrates a paragraph. In the mind of the waiter closing the café at two in the morning the word “nada” replaces the nouns in the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.”

      It is the use of one literary allusion to counter another: Lou (who, according to a friend of mine, an advertising veteran, is the most believable character in the whole show) has responded enthusiastically to the original ad Peggy drew up for Burger Chef. “It’s good to see family happiness again,” he says, and the line’s true significance becomes clear when you take it into account that “Family Happiness” is the title of a novella by Tolstoy.

      The ironies are multiple. An American fast-food joint takes the place of the Spanish café with the zinc bar and the brandy drinks that sound so exotic in a foreign tongue. Yet the nihilistic desperation is the same, even if Don, Peggy, and Pete smile gamely in the artificial camaraderie of their work.

      There's my report, dear Amy. And I never even got around to Joan’s defiant response to Bob Benson’s proposal.

 -- DL 

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 9:17 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear David,
 
(You continue to field musical and literary allusions popping up in our favorite show with the alacrity of a legendary outfielder, a Raul Mondesi, or perhaps a Dusty Baker.)

THE FAMILY EPISODE:

(could this theme have been writ any larger?)

We began this episode with Peggy and cute, nerdy male office minion doing market research in the Burger Chef parking lot after sundown. The scene looked very B movie-- shadowy, streetlit. A beleaguered mom with kids roiling in back seat of her car hurriedly answers Peggy’s queries about her family’s fast food habits, eyes glued to the ten dollar bill she’s been promised. The birth of the focus group? Oh, America, whither thou goest?! So Peggy starts on the outside, standing uncomfortably, peering into a car in a dark, trying to keep her voice smiley and bright whilst gripping her clipboard, straining to get the data she needs. As you point out, by episode’s end she has moved into the light, sitting in the blindingly over-lit Burger Chef interior, in a booth with a pair of key members of her work “family.” The man who she lost her virginity to, whose baby she bore and gave away (Pete) and the man who has been her symbolic father, her mentor, who she desperately wants to be (Don.) Don’s small, wordless motion to Pete in the last moment of that scene, indicating to that egotistical blockhead (Vincent Kartheiser is soooo brilliant at playing narcissism) that he has a smear of catsup on his upper lip, is beautiful. It’s familial, intimate, and at the same time a bit condescending and smirky.

Speaking of family, Joan bravely fends off a marriage proposal from a gay colleague, Bob Benson, who wants her to be his “beard.” His offer to make a kind of alternative family with her, and be a father to her tiny son, while allowing both adults to pursue separate sex lives, doesn’t appeal to her. “We could comfort each other through an uncertain world,” Bob says, coaxingly. He even offers her a ring, a sort of image rhyme with the notorious scene in last week’s episode, in which poor demented Ginsberg, now in the loony bin, offers Peggy his lopped off nipple in a little jeweler’s box. Bob’s proposal quickly turns to a less-than-kind hard sell when Joan balks. “I am offering you,” Bob says rather loftily, “more than anyone else ever will.” I found Joan noble in this scene. “No, you’re not,” she demures, “because I want love, and you should, too.” Joan’s hard-won dignity is a radiant element of her considerable beauty.

Speaking of the varieties of love (or high altitude lust): Pete and his paramor Bonnie’s retreat into an airport bathroom at 30,000 feet for a quickie put me in mind of a paperback that was in heavy rotation amongst Junior High school girls I knew back in 1969, the year this season of Mad Men takes place. The book, which came out in 1967, is Coffee, Tea or Me. It purported to be a memoir chronicling the sexual adventures of a pair of randy young stewardesses. Later, the “memoir” was revealed to be the concoction of a PR dude called Donald Bain. Predictably, we pre-teen and teenage girls were ravenous all during secondary school to get our hands on any book that mentioned sex. The Happy Hooker (1971), The Godfather (1969, I forget which specific chapter, none of us read any other parts of the book, I’m afraid) and The Harrad Experiment (1962) were a few of the extracurricular titles that joined the immortal Coffee, Tea or Me on our secret mandatory reading list. I do have a growing fear that someone in this series is going to die in plane crash. Sometimes I read the gorgeous opening/credits sequence, where Don is falling, falling, falling, that way. I hope I am wrong.

Stan is wearing love beads to the office! I still think he has a yen for Peggy. They seem to understand each other on deep levels, and perhaps it’s symbolic that during a phone conversation about work Stan is eating a banana and his shirt is open to his navel. I know everyone and their cousin thinks that Peggy is going to sleep with Don. Maybe she will. I think she should sleep with Stan. There. I’ve said it. If only Stan could have been a fly on the wall, an invisible witness to the scene in which Peggy, unable to sleep because she knows she has to totally rework the Burger Chef pitch, does a sexy little jog across the room when she gets up in her semi transparent nightie, he might not be able to hold back any longer.

Later in the show, Pete grumbles, “I hate the word family.” Well may he say so. He has been absent from his little daughter Tammy’s short life so long she doesn’t recognize him. When he comes to visit, she refuses to come out from behind her nanny’s skirts, and is frightened of him as she might be of an intruder. Pete waits around after his paternal visit, after putting his daughter to bed, for ex-wife Trudy to come back from a date, getting smashed on her booze. He confronts her drunkenly and is so belligerent she eventually says, “You’re not a part of this family anymore.”

Footnote one: Correspondent Benjamin Weissman informs interested viewers that actor John Slattery, who plays Roger Sterling, looks buff in his steam room scene this episode because he’s a real life surfer. For his own safety, we hope Mr. Slattery wears more than a gym towel when riding the big waves (there are SHARKS out there, John!) Speaking of sharks, the dialogue in that steam room is pretty vicious, quite biting.

Footnote two, in closing speaking again of family: My mother in law as absolutely swooning over the scene where Don and Peggy slow dance. OOOOh, she sighed. He was so tender with her. She seemed so overcome that I ran to the medicine cabinet for the smelling salts, in case they were needed, but that wonderful lady kept her head.

That’s all till next week.