Archives for February 2004

“The story was thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting, some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy. There was much Church, but more love-making. And it was downright honest love,–in which there was no pretence on the part of the lady that she was too ethereal to be fond of a man, no half-and-half inclination on the part of the man to pay a certain price and no more for a pretty toy. Each of them longed for the other, and they were not ashamed to say so. Consequently they in England who were living, or had lived, the same sort of life, liked Framley Parsonage.”

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

My septuagenarian mother and I watched Lost in Translation yesterday afternoon. Somewhat to my surprise, she liked it, though she initially found Sofia Coppola’s elliptical style of storytelling a bit hard to follow. (Gen-X moviegoers suckled on MTV take jump cuts for granted, but most people born before 1950 or so are accustomed to films in which the plot elements are laid out fairly straightforwardly.) In addition, it hit me after about 10 minutes that she didn’t know what jet lag was, meaning that she couldn’t understand why Bill Murray didn’t just lie down and take a nap. Once I explained his problem, she was fine.

My mother said two things that stayed with me:

(1) She’d never heard of Scarlett Johannson. “At first I didn’t think she was very pretty,” she said, “but then I changed my mind. Isn’t her skin beautiful?”

(2) About two-thirds of the way through the film, she remarked, “They didn’t have to spend much time learning the dialogue, did they?”

Not long ago, a reader wrote:

I was reading a few of your articles and noticed biographical details scattered throughout the prose. My suggestion is that you gather them all
together, fill in the gaps and post the expanded “about me” as a permanent addition to your blog. Where are you from, why did you become a critic, and where did you get your first break, long-term goals, etc. What could be more interesting for your regular readers?

A lot of things, actually. It’s not that I’m averse to autobiography–indeed, I once went so far as to commit a memoir–but like most natural-born short hitters, I find that I prefer as a rule to salt my writings with personal detail rather than serving it up as a main course. I did try squashing the story of my professional life into an annotated resum

God of the Machine is waxing fogyish this morning about the five questions I asked Our Girl on Sunday. I can hear his joints creaking all the way from here.

As for his attempt to crack wise about my knowledge of art history, I’ll leave it to those bloggers privileged to have viewed the Teachout Museum. Go get him, Lizzie! (And if he’s trying to make fun of OGIC, too, he’s a dead man….)

I shall arise at 4:30 tomorrow morning and, one hour later, depart Smalltown, U.S.A., via regional shuttle bus. Much, much later, I’ll descend upon LaGuardia in a jet, and from there (if necessary) proceed directly to Maria Schneider‘s gig at Hunter College’s Kaye Auditorium. Then it’s home again, finally, where I’ll plug back into my broadband connection and resume normal blogging activities. Eventually. Once I’ve gotten some sleep.

The point being…see you Friday.

Brandywine Books has called attention to a review essay by the always illuminating Bruce Bawer in the current issue of The Hudson Review. The essay is only available as a PDF, directly accessible here. Bawer witheringly reviews the new anthology Poets Against the War, indicting it on critical rather than partisan grounds:

A staggering number of poems here follow a single trite formula, presenting the news of war as an unpleasant intrusion upon an (American) life lived in harmony with nature and characterized by a taken-for-granted feeling of safety and tranquility. Here, for example, is Virginia Adair’s “Casualty,” the book’s opening poem, in its entirety: “Fear arrived at my door / with the evening paper / Headlines of winter and war / It will be a long time to peace / And the green rains.” Adair’s poem is followed immediately by “Cranes in August,” in which Kim Addonizio describes her daughter making cranes out of paper while outside “gray doves” coo, and “Geese, October 2002,” in which Lucy Adkins, hearing geese flying above her “north to the nesting grounds,” reflects that while in Washington “our country’s leaders / are voting for war,” in Nebraska “the geese fly over / the old wisdom in their feathers.” This pattern is broken by poem #4 (Afzal-Khan’s “Osama” ode), but it is resumed in poem #5, wherein Kelli Russell Agodon describes her daughter picking up ants on the beach, trying “to help them / before the patterns of tides / reach their lives. . . . Here war is only newsprint.”

And that’s just the beginning of the A’s. Throughout these poems, the implicit argument is: Why can’t the whole world be as peaceable as my little corner of it is? The poets appear to believe that their serene lifestyles are somehow a reflection of their own wisdom and virtue; they seem to think they are in possession of some great yet elementary cosmic knowledge from which the rest of us can profit. What they evidently do not realize is that what they are celebrating in these poems is a security for which they have to thank (horrors) the U.S. military and a prosperity that they owe to (horrors again) American capitalism. Entirely absent from their facile scribblings, indeed, is any sign of awareness that this “blue planet” is a terribly dangerous place and that the affluence, safety, and liberty they enjoy, and that they write about with such vacuous self-congratulation, are not the natural, default state of humankind but are, rather, hard-won and terribly vulnerable achievements of civilization.

September 11 changed the world. But it seems not to have penetrated very deeply into the imaginations of many contemporary American poets, who, as this anthology amply demonstrates, continue to go through familiar motions, writing smug, trivial verses in which their principal goal is to proclaim their own sensitivity. This was never enough in the first place, and it is certainly not enough now. Confronted at last with a big theme, too many of our poets have only proven how feebly equipped they are to address questions of real substance and complexity. This is not to suggest that anyone is necessarily wrong to oppose a given war or disapprove of a given president (of whom the present critic, for what it’s worth, is no fan either). It is only to say that when civilization is in crisis, a serious poet owes it something more than glib, reflexive, one-dimensional posturing. It is to say that poets so transparently rich in self-regard might manage to muster a bit more respect for their art, their readers, and their civilization. And it is to say that an intelligent poetry of dissent ought to exhibit signs of independent thought, of mature moral reflection, of an understanding of the concept of social responsibility that extends somewhat beyond marching and button-wearing, of a solemn recognition that this is bigger than me. To turn from these vapid self-advertisements (in which the level of political thought and expression is on a par with that of your average boy band being asked in an interview on MTV Europe what they think of President Bush) to the war poems of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon or, say, Auden’s “September 1, 1939”–the most famous line of which, “We must love one another or die,” is actually misquoted in Hamill’s book–is to leap across a chasm whose breadth shames not only most of the poets collected here but, alas, the entire flimsy house of cards that is contemporary American poetry.

The essay extends Bawer’s critique of contemporary poetry in his book Prophets and Professors. As alternatives to poetry against the war, Bawer recommends recent books by Joseph Harrison, Timothy Murphy, Gerry Cambridge, and Deborah Warren.

Books are published by installments, and A Terry Teachout Reader is down to the short strokes. I got a package in the mail from Yale University Press the day before I left for Smalltown, U.S.A., containing two copies of the dust jacket, which is printed prior to the actual book. I’d wanted a piece of modern American art on the cover of the Teachout Reader, so I polled the readers of “About Last Night” a few months ago, asking whether they preferred Fairfield Porter’s “Broadway,” John Marin’s “Downtown. The El,” Stuart Davis’ “Owh! In San Pao,” or Davis’ “Ready-to-Wear.” The Porter won, and I can now report that the final product looks great. In fact, I’ve never had a better-looking dust jacket–and I’ve had some handsome ones.

No book is completely real to the author until he holds the very first copy in his hands. Until then, it becomes real by stages–the manuscript, the proofs, the dust jacket, the bound galleys–and the fact that it’s actually going to be published sinks in a little deeper with each additional step. By the time you’ve seen a half-dozen books through the press, you’re not likely to be surprised by any part of the process, but my heart still leaped when I pulled the dust jacket out of the envelope and held it in my hand.

I know the Teachout Reader isn’t going to be a best seller, and I’ve been around the track often enough to suspect that I’m going to get my share of kick-in-the-crotch reviews (which I won’t read–I’m scrupulous about that). That’s par for the course. On the other hand, I brought one copy of the dust jacket home with me, knowing my mother would take it to the office and show it off to her colleagues, which she did. If she could, she’d blow it up and slap it on a billboard in the center of town. She’s like that.

It’s not that my mother reads everything I write, least of all “About Last Night.” She hasn’t figured out blogs yet, nor is she especially media-savvy. We went to the neighborhood video store yesterday to rent a couple of movies to watch during my visit, and as I was picking my way through the westerns, she called out, “Oh, look! Have you heard of this one? I think Bill Murray’s always funny.” I turned around and saw her holding a copy of Lost in Translation. I nodded my head and said, “You might like that one, Mom. Let’s rent it.” I’ll tell you what she thinks of it tomorrow.

I’m sitting in my old bedroom as I write these words, listening to the whistle of a freight train off in the distance. It’ll keep on blowing for several more minutes, because the tracks run all the way through town, and it takes slow trains a long time to clear the city limits. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal about riding the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, and in the first paragraph I mentioned the trains that rumble through Smalltown. “Their tracks criss-crossed the main street of the small Missouri town where I spent my childhood,” I wrote, “and their lonesome whistles cleaved the night air as they carried sleeping strangers to places I’d never been.” The editor kicked the first draft back to me with a terse note saying that “lonesome whistles” was a clich

Back to Terry’s five questions: “If you had to live in a song, what would it be?”

A song where everything’s still the same:

Everybody’s had a few

Now they’re talking about who knows who

I’m going back to the Crescent City

Where everything’s still the same

This town has said what it has to say

Now I’m after that back highway

And the longest bridge

I’ve ever crossed over Pontchartrain

Tu le ton temps that’s what we say

We used to dance the night away

Me and my sister, me and my brother

We used to walk down by the river

Mama lives in Mandeville

I can hardly wait until

I can hear my Zydeco

and laissez le bon ton roulet

And take rides in open cars

My brother knows where the best bars are

Let’s see how these blues’ll do

in the town where the good times stay

Tu le ton temps that’s all we say

We used to dance the night away

Me and my sister me and my brother

We used to walk down by the river

That’s Lucinda Williams’ “Crescent City.” The appeal of this song–aside from the gorgeous fiddle–is how the Crescent City and environs are static, but alive: full of walking, driving, gossip, dancing. And just in case all that activity isn’t enough to keep things from getting stale, the song contains the outside space of wherever the narrator is returning from.

Of course, everything in “Crescent City” is really just in the narrator’s head–the song takes place while she’s on the road home. Yet the scenes she imagines are so vivid (helped out by that fiddle), it’s easy to forget that they’re only imagined. In this, the song has something in common with a poem so famous, it’s hard to hear freshly:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of dancing daffodils;

Along the lake, beneath the trees,

Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

The waves beside them danced, but they

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;

A poet could not but be gay

In such a laughing company.

I gazed, and gazed, but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought–

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude,

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Before the standard-bearers get their noses all out of joint over the comparison, let me state that I am not putting Lucinda on the same artistic plane as Bill. (Now I’ll probably hear from the people who think Wordsworth suffers from the comparison!) I’m just pointing out that the song and the poem are each about the memory of their apparent subject. But they both make their remembered scenes so vivid that you easily forget they’re really about the reveries of a woman behind the wheel of a car and a guy on a couch.

My runner-up is David Bowie’s “Kooks.”