Archives for 2004

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.”

Many thanks to Sarah for directing me to this Denver Post article about John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, longtime object of my affection/obsession. Things I learned:

Originally McGee’s first name was to have been Dallas. Then John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and MacDonald didn’t want to have that association. When he was casting about for a new name, fellow writer MacKinlay Kantor suggested that Air Force bases had nice-sounding names, and MacDonald settled on Travis.

Various means were considered to enable readers to distinguish one book from another in the series. Use of numbers was rejected because readers might think they had to read them in sequence. Eventually he and his publisher came up with color, and MacDonald went back and dropped color references into the four manuscripts he already had written.

MacDonald placed McGee across Florida in Fort Lauderdale because he had a hunch the books would catch on and didn’t want his privacy in Sarasota disturbed by gawking McGee enthusiasts.

Gawking TMFTML enthusiasts, on the other hand, can train their binoculars here. And don’t forget this more out-of-the-way gaping spot.

“I hear you laugh at me for being happy in the country, and upon this I have a few words to say. In the first place whether one lives or dies I hold and always have held to be of infinitely less moment than is generally supposed; but if life is the choice then it is common sense to amuse yourself with the best you can find where you happen to be placed. I am not leading precisely the life I should chuse, but that which (all things considered, as well as I could consider them) appeared to be the most eligible. I am resolved therefore to like it and to reconcile myself to it; which is more manly than to feign myself above it, and to send up complaints by the post, of being thrown away, and being desolate and such like trash. I am prepared therefore either way. If the chances of life ever enable me to emerge, I will shew you that I have not been wholly occupied by small and sordid pursuits. If (as the greater probability is) I am come to the end of my career, I give myself quietly up to horticulture, and the annual augmentation of my family. In short, if my lot be to crawl, I will crawl contentedly; if to fly, I will fly with alacrity; but as long as I can possibly avoid it I will never be unhappy.”

Sydney Smith, letter to Lady Holland, September 9, 1809

I left my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at 9:15 yesterday morning, and arrived at my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., at 4:15 yesterday afternoon–an eight-hour trip, allowing for the change in time zones. The reason why it takes so long is that Smalltown, the place in southeast Missouri where I grew up and where the rest of my family still lives, isn’t close to any major airports. It’s a two-hour drive south of St. Louis and a two-hour drive north of Memphis. To get there, I take a taxi to LaGuardia, a plane to St. Louis, and a regional shuttle bus to Smalltown. Short of chartering a helicopter, I couldn’t make the trip in much less time than that.

Every time I visit Smalltown, I’m struck all over again by the sheer size of the United States, something that never fails to impress visitors from elsewhere, though Americans take it for granted. We’re not the only big country in the world, but I wonder if we might not be the only one whose citizens commonly travel such long distances by such circuitous routes. Perhaps Canada is like that. A Canadian friend of mine tells me that Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow” sums up her life pretty accurately: “I took a ferry to the highway/Then I drove to a pontoon plane/I took a plane to a taxi/And a taxi to a train/I’ve been traveling so long/How’m I ever going to know my home/When I see it again?” On the other hand, I doubt a resident of downtown St. Petersburg would make his way to Siberia all that often, even if his mother did live there. When my mother was a girl, Americans didn’t take such journeys lightly, and her parents were both born in an age when eight-hour trips were more likely to be made by horse. You can’t get very far on a horse in eight hours. Back then, the world was what you saw outside your window. Now it’s what you see on TV.

I’d never do it again, but I once traveled all the way to Smalltown and back again in a single day to attend my grandmother’s funeral, an experience I wrote about many years ago in a memoir of my small-town youth:

Once upon a time, the children of America stayed close to the nest and ate Sunday dinner with their parents and went to work in the family business. Now they seek their destinies in faraway lands called Chicago and Paducah and Memphis and New York, though they come home as often as they can: for Christmas usually, for funerals always.

I glanced at my watch. My brother would be doing the driving, and he drove nearly as well as my father, so I had nothing to worry about. I squeezed my father’s hand and listened to the preacher. A few hours later, I looked down at the lights of New York through the scratched window of a jet airliner, marveling at the thought that I could eat breakfast in New York and go to bed in New York and, in the middle of the day, help to bury an eighty-four-year-old woman in a cemetery deep in the Missouri wildwood. Perhaps I was not so far from home as I thought. Perhaps I had not traveled so far as I thought.

Perhaps, indeed, I haven’t–and in some ways, Smalltown and New York are growing closer every day. My brother, for example, knows the rumor du jour about John Kerry, not because he heard it on the evening news or read it in the Smalltown Standard-Democrat but because he has a computer and a high-speed connection to the Internet. Nevertheless, Smalltown is still a long way from New York, not just in clock time but by other yardsticks as well. No sooner had I unpacked my bag, for instance, than my sister-in-law was asking me if I’d seen a preview of The Passion of the Christ, and whether I thought it’d be any good. They’re talking about Mel Gibson in Smalltown, and not the way they’re talking about him in New York, either, even though the people here also watch Seinfeld reruns and read blogs. It’s a big country, big enough that there are still plenty of nice places to live that are two hours from the nearest airport, big enough to be infinitely more varied than a lifelong Manhattanite who gets all his news from the New York Times can imagine.

I love that difference, and the vastness that makes it possible. On Sunday afternoon, I climbed into the shuttle bus (a minivan, actually) and headed down I-55 from St. Louis to Smalltown. It’s a beautiful drive, especially north of Ste. Genevieve and most especially in winter, when the leaves have fallen from the trees that cover the rolling hills, leaving behind a narrow but subtle palette of colors, nothing but tan, brown, grey, and dark pine green, all set in a big bowl of blue sky, with an occasional bright billboard to remind you that people live here, too. As I drifted off to sleep just south of Ste. Genevieve, the radio in the van was playing the Eagles; when I woke up again, the hills had flattened out and the radio was playing Dwight Yoakum. That’s how I knew I was close to Smalltown. I always know my home when I see it again.

“One of the things I learned very early is that students always recognize a good teacher. They may be overimpressed by second-raters who only talk a good game, who are witty and entertaining, or who have reputations as scholars, without being particularly good teachers. But I have not come across a single first-rate teacher who was not recognized as such by the students. The first-rate teacher is often not ‘popular’; in fact, popularity has little to do with impact as a teacher. But when students say about a teacher, ‘We are learning a great deal,’ they can be trusted. They know.”

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander