Happy Birthday: James Stotts & William Blake

This is no mere coincidence. Happy birthday to poets James Stotts (1982),

“june eighth”

a seed stolen from the arboretum and forgotten in the fruitbowl
exploded like a gunshot

and what had i expected?
that it might sail on the wind or fly in the gullet

might float by when the briars flooded—
but i assumed i’d intervened…

it woke me in the night, when
i was ready for any other crime, any other scene

(from Brink Magazine)
--

— and William Blake (1757),

“To Autumn”

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou mayst rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

"The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

"The spirits of the air live on the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees."
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat;
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

Fiction Writers Lower Expectations via Poet Colleagues

From Slate / N+1: “The model for the MFA fiction writer is her program counterpart, the poet. Poets have long been professionally bound to academia; decades before the blanketing of the country with MFA programs requiring professors, the poets took to the grad schools, earning Ph.D.s in English and other literary disciplines to finance their real vocation. Thus came of age the concept of the poet-teacher. The poet earns money as a teacher; and, at a higher level of professional accomplishment, from grants and prizes; and, at an even higher level, from appearance fees at other colleges. She does not, as a rule, earn money by publishing books of poems—it has become almost inconceivable that anyone outside a university library will read them. The consequences of this economic arrangement for the quality of American poetry have been often bemoaned (poems are insular, arcane, gratuitously allusive, etc.), if poorly understood. Of more interest here is the economic arrangement proper, and the ways in which it has become that of a large number of fiction writers as well.”

On Poetic Judgment

One such crystalline paragon.

“You do not hold a poem up against a crystalline paragon that has always existed in your mind (though you may recognize instantly that a given poem fails to achieve something a similar poem did superbly); instead you examine the new associations a poem has provided you with (assuming it has) and decide whether they expand your mind, your self, your equipment for dealing with the world. This may not be an instantaneous process. A new poem may leave you intrigued but baffled. You may love certain details, find the rhythms seductive, but lose the thread of the argument or suspect the poem of slipping into irrelevancy at points. Only over time does it sometimes happen that you come to see how the disparate parts of the poem draw together previously unassociated perceptions to create a more comprehensive understanding of, and response to, the world in which you function. We might in fact propose this as a defining characteristic of any art: an encounter between the observer and the work is inherently unstable because it changes the observer, sometimes in unpredictable ways.”
— Jan Schreiber, Contemporary Poetry Review

In our post-postmodern age, questions of greatness and relative value are back on the table. We have moved, I hope, beyond hard-line camps of blind adherence. Instead of stumping for our respective camps, people — young people — are willing to make their ideas vulnerable to scrutiny. I'm sure there's plenty of partisan culture war left. But the question of judgment is open again, to truer exploration than it has been for decades.

Elements of Schreiber's essay are appealing: that expertise is not as important as sensibility; the humble admission that we are not, individually, up to the task of absolute judgments. But he is too focused on that lack of “absolute standards in aesthetic matters” and what it means for literary judgment. He paints a picture of the culture wars, where “reasoned debate among the proponents of one aesthetic versus another is generally impossible because the proponents are championing some of the deepest elements of their personalities, those by now almost hard-wired preferences and responses that define who they are and who they wish to become.”

Picking up from various mid/late twentieth century critics, it's not out of bounds to acknowledge that “building the work is indeed building the self” and that “for both poets and readers, the process of building the self entails the assembly and assimilation of many works.” Such malleability is not extended, though, when Schreiber talks about the inability of different camps to find avenues of discourse. Suddenly the same readers and critics who are built by the work and changed by aesthetic  judgments become “hard-wired.” It seems to me that reasoned debate is only impossible when the parties are self-righteous and un-critical about their prejudices and preferences. Just look at politics.

Well, I would hope the poetry world were better than that.

As I wrote recently in this space, aesthetics are complicated holistic responses to art, grounded in contemporary culture, historical resonance, the ethics of each subject, and the transcendental — that portion of the artist's intention or experience that affects a reader via the work's constructed elements. Aesthetics are able to change the individual, and responses change as the person does. A person reaches equilibrium in relation to a work of art and then has that plane disrupted, sometimes ruptured, by personal experience or shifting ethics or historical understanding.

What makes a poem great? How are we to judge? These are each part of a much larger question: how do we evaluate our own aesthetics? It takes the discussion far beyond the oversimple psychologizing of Schreiber.

Pixar: It Gets Better

Nota Bene: Eugenio Montale

“Eugenio Montale”
by Serena Maffia

“Where tradition is understood not as a dead weight of forms, of exotic rules and customs, but as an inner spirit, a genius of the race, a consonance with the most enduring spirits our country has produced, then it becomes somewhat difficult to suggest an external model for it or draw a precise lesson from it. Tradition is continued not by those who want to do so, but by those who can, sometimes by those who are least aware of doing so. Programs and good intentions are of little help in this regard.”

— Eugenio Montale, “Style and Tradition”

Literary Decline: the LOA Edition

The Library of America blog rounds-up the discussion of Joseph Epstein’s recent comment in Commentary: “literary culture . . . seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down”

Rodney Welch commented there: “I can't access Commentary so I'm only going to respond to what is excerpted here — but no, I don't think Epstein is far off the mark, and I have to give Library of America some credit for making me think that way.

I've been reading here and there in the two Edmund Wilson volumes, and you have to wonder: where is today's Wilson? Harold Bloom and James Wood maybe. Look at all the great critics from the past, the ones who were so engaged with American life and culture: Mary McCarthy, James Agee, Dwight MacDonald, Philip Rahv, Malcolm Cowley, Matthew Josephson, Alfred Kazin, Mark van Doren, Susan Sontag. The list goes on and on. Look at all those names and try coming up with a comparable crowd in terms of insight, intelligence and achievement. You cannot do it.

Granted, this was all a little before my time, but even when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, there was at least some kind of a book culture going on, and average people had some sense of — as Epstein said regarding Einstein — writers who were for some reason famous, like Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and John Updike. People may not have read them but they knew who they were. Today, that kind of interest has been shifted to the margins.

The posts from Pritchard and Nathan are not encouraging, because the most relevant writers and critics they refer to are senior citizens or close to it. Take away the big names and it's a very thin crowd, isn't it?”
 
And so I responded: “RW: I probably could have focused more on young writers, that's true. Terrance Hayes, Juliana Spahr, Tim Donnelly, AE Stallings, Ainge Mlinko, Ben Mazer, John Kinsella, Ashley Anna McHugh, Kazim Ali, DA Powell are all younger. I just finished Stephen Sturgeon's first book in manuscript (out from Dark Sky in Spring 2011), and it was astounding — so, there's a recommendation. As for critics: have you read The Critical Flame (www.criticalflame.org)? The Quarterly Conversation (quarterlyconversation.com)?

Things absolutely look different today. Media has had a whole-hog revolution, splitting the generations. The median age of America is at its highest point and rising. Young people — who in the 1960s looked ahead toward promise and progress and affluence — now will spend their lives toiling to get out from decades of failed policies. We will fight a long global war against radicalism. The business model of literary culture is failing; education has become a business; literary culture has been marginalized by those with political and profit motives.

It's not shocking that we have not been eager to replicate the culture that was handed down. But short of talent and intellect we are not, and we will not fail.”

Alexander Lewis on Daryl Hine @ The Critical Flame

While so much of contemporary poetry takes the form of earnest (if one-sided) heart-to-heart talk, Hine's formal polish and ironic distance is often reproached as insincere or overcooked. “Highly stylized politely describes bright eyesores,” he quips. Hine associates his own work not with “unmediated experience,” but with experience’s distillation to “spirits.” He is intoxicated by formal rules that squeeze the imagination into complex patterns, and sometimes makes a joke — or lament — of his own coolness. In one poem, Hine identifies with the cold, anonymous eroticism of spawning trout, assuming his “cold-blooded avatar, the fish.”

The impression one gets of Hines through the poems is that of a poet unflappable and immune to criticism. Indeed, he seems to take most criticisms as a form of compliment. One review condemned him as a “poetic machine of superb delicacy and subtlety,” built to “produce rolls of exquisite wallpaper or lengths of tapestry.” Hine, like a modern Lucretius, probably approves of such mechanical comparisons, would even make a rueful joke of it. Here he both celebrates and laments the breakdown of that bodily machine in impeccable style:

Seeing the body must remain its subject,
Itself at once both predicate and verb,
An organic calculator
Living a life unprogrammed by the mind,
Transmitting messages nobody it thinks will understand,
Many intercepted by the reader,
Receiving in return a few laconic orders.
O that your every wish were my command!

[. . . ]

 
Read the rest of this essay on Daryl Hine,
former Poetry magazine editor, at The Critical Flame!

Tonight! U35 POETRY: John Cotter and Adam Golaski

U35 POETRY
Tonight! 7:00 pm
The Marliave10 Bosworth Street
Downtown Crossing
Boston, MA

A reading series of apostate youth, age 35 and younger.
Our poets for November are John Cotter and Adam Golaski.
U35 is always free, public, and serves liquor.

John Cotter is the author of Under the Small Lights (Miami University Press 2010). His short fiction and poetry has appeared in Volt, The Lifted Brow, Lost, and New Genre, among others. A founding editor at the review site Open Letters Monthly, John has published critical work on contemporary novelists, poets, and translators.

Adam Golaski is the author of Color Plates and Worse Than Myself, a collection of strange stories. His story “Stone Head” will appear in the first issue of Shadows & Tall Trees; his essay “Threshold in the First Half of the Tenth Chapter of Lucius Shepard's Viator” will appear in the next issue of Wormwood. Adam is co-publisher — with Matthew Klane — of Flim Forum, a poetry press, and maintains the blog Little Stories.

Zara Raab on The Art of Recklessness @ The Critical Flame

‘In his 170-page paean to reckless impulse, Dean Young spurns consistency, “over-thinking,” and all emphasis on craft, procedures, and technique. He casts out discipline and hard work, perfection and conventional thinking, if not convention per se. Even communication, contrasted with expressiveness, is death and ruination to the poem, which thrives on the primitive and experimental, the imagination, “the spark,” and on joy, spontaneity, messes, and errors. Young favors gewgaws and thingamabobs and dojiggers — physicality — over signs and abstractions; he favors chance over design, the irrational over the reasonable, humor over profundity, tantrums over civility, puzzlement and nonsense over clarity. The poem stands above its critique: “Poetry is always in advance of criticism.” The new transcends the old, though he also acknowledges that we should not fetishize the new or engage in novelty for its own sake.

‘Young’s resistance to convention in poetry is the resistance of the young — no pun intended — to authority, to parental or societal control. “Hamlet,” he writes, “retains his liberty through a resistance to any sort of coherence of self by which he could be sensibly manipulated.” The trouble begins when Young attempts a philosophical scaffolding for what would be best left as a plea for vitality and vigor. A simple call to rejoice in these pleasures, however, is not the goal. For Young has fall in thrall to Roland Barthes, the French intellectual and structuralist critic. Barthes and other mid-twentieth century structuralists posited a distinction between language as representation and language as expression. “The writer’s language,” Barthes wrote, “is not expected to represent reality, but to signify it.” Young joins the critic in rejecting representation, for political as well as aesthetic reasons. “Perhaps,” Young writes, “the drive to represent itself is a form of oppression, a fist of fear and power, and what we should be doing is EXPRESSING.” Influenced perhaps by Susan Sontag’s ideas about photography (though he doesn’t mention her by name), Young plays with the idea that representation, far from being the poet’s aim, is act of desecration: “Andy Warhol’s silk screening of JFK with his head blown open across Jackie’s lap rob[s] by reproduction a public event of its sacredness and turn[s] it into decoration, mass media.” ’

Read the rest of Zara Raab's essay on The Art of Recklessness, by Dean Young,
at the new issue of The Critical Flame.

Nora Delaney on Translated Literature @ The Critical Flame

‘Randhir thinks about the low-caste girl: “just beneath the skin there seemed to be a layer of faint light giving off a spectral glow like how a pond can radiate light from beneath its turgid surface.” The beauty is both familiar and strange. This strangeness returns in Argentinean Samanta Schweblin’s story, “Birds in the Mouth,” about a girl who eats birds alive, much to the consternation of her bemused father; and in the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s works “Whispering Grassfeet” and “Otherness Touched,” which present deliberately alienating and odd images (the “grassfeet” and “otherness” of the titles) that are difficult to fully comprehend. In their alien beauty, many of the stories and poems in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal adhere to the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky’s claim that good art makes things strange so that they can be felt all the more closely. By defamiliarizing the reader, good art makes the stone stony.

‘There is a careful balance of the alien and the universal in each piece of writing in this anthology, no matter its language or culture of origin. Some languages are over-represented; stories and poems in Russian and Spanish, for instance, as well as other European languages, are common, and readers will be familiar with the excerpt from Lydia Davis’ new translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

‘The Editors do make an effort to offer languages and cultures less familiar to American readers, though. Yang, with the help of scholar and Uyghur specialist Dolkun Kamberi, includes a selection of Uyghur poets. Despite these poems’ somewhat conspicuous placement at the back of the collection — as if they were an afterthought — Yang asserts that the Uyghur verse forms the “center of the poetry” in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal.’

Read Delaney's review of Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, the 2010 Two Lines anthology of literature in translation, at the brand new issue of The Critical Flame.

Anthony Domestico on Franzen's Freedom @ The Critical Flame

“Franzen has been willing to sacrifice subtlety for thematic clarity in the past. He used parental, romantic, chemical, and economic ‘corrections’ to connect his previous novel’s many disparate parts; similarly, in Strong Motion (1992) he too cutely linked corporate and pro-life extremism to give his sprawling novel some semblance of order. But you emerged from these works, and The Corrections in particular, struck not by their sometimes-awkward integration but by the imagination exhibited in individual scenes, like the painful chapter in The Corrections that describes Gary Lambert’s battle against depression and mixed grills. The parts didn’t always cohere — Chip’s adventures in Lithuania could have been excised without loss — but this messiness was part of the novel’s charm and why it felt to many readers symptomatic of our times. And, despite its large size and even larger ambition (and despite a scene in which a character digs through his own feces to locate his wedding ring), Freedom just isn’t messy enough. Maybe the obvious patterning is a sign that Franzen has finally accepted his mainstream audience: Freedom is definitely Franzen’s most accessible, book-club-worthy book. Regardless of his reasoning, though, the relentless schematization threatens to smother the life out of the text.”

Read the rest of Domestico's incisive essay on Jonathan Franzen, his development, and the new novel, at the brand new issue of The Critical Flame. 

Lecture by Eileen Myles

Hat tip to Ron Silliman

Elaboration: the “Shutting Down” of Literary Culture

T.S. Eliot

In the comments on my last post, Frank Wilson from Books Inq. made the following observation: “I think that Epstein's point has more to do with the fact that there is no poet these days who come close to the kind of stature that Eliot had in his. I am old to remember that time. Eliot, as Epstein suggests, was the literary equivalent of Einstein. And while, as you suggest, there are plenty of good writers around today and plenty of people who take art, music, and literature seriously, the culture as whole no longer seems to. As a working class kid in the ’50s I felt it was necessary for me to learn about classical music and not just enjoy rock 'n' roll. I suspect that's rare these days.”

Frank's reading of the phrase “literary culture is . . . shutting down” is somewhat more generous than mine — but, also, probably not incorrect. I was latching onto and skewering the one aspect of the post that most directly affronted me, foregoing the rest of the argument about Eliot. So, from his prompt, I'd like to elaborate. Right now, I feel myself to be very much part of a literary culture that is growing at an astounding rate. Still, I think we need a defense of the integrity and vibrancy of today's literary culture. If done right, this post might stand as a small part of that defense.

Eliot, I believe, was not feigning humility when he said that there aren't 15,000 people in the world who are interested in criticism. There are almost certainly not. Not today, and not in 1956 either. As Epstein points out, “everyone seemed to know that [Eliot and Einstein] were immensely significant without quite knowing for what.”

Eliot's metonym jumps
right out at you!

Those 15,000 people attended Eliot's talk at Minnesota for the right to say that they were there — not because they cared about or understood his lecture. People like to posture, they like events that give them stories, and a certain cache certainly existed then around literary culture. It was seen, as Frank intimates, as having inherent importance; above and greater than base popular culture or everyday life. Yet, at the same time, the majority of those 15,000 people must not have understood a word of that speech. Were they better off for having been there, absorbing none of it? Was literary culture stronger because of that?

As we enter this area of the discussion, I admit to being conflicted. Neither a strict traditionalist nor an anything-goes pluralist, I'm torn between the shared cultural touchstones that build community, the belief that some art is actually better than other, and the knowledge that a too-rigidly delineated “official” canon can suffocate and lead to unjust biases. Aesthetics are not by any means universal and human. They are complicated holistic responses to art, driven by the contemporary and the ethical as well as the transcendental. An aesthetic response can be as deeply flawed as any person.

The cache that literary culture possessed at mid-century was built upon the widespread public education — Frank was “a working class kid in the '50s” whose educational expectations were much higher than working-class kids 50 years prior — and a relatively rigid, long-standing canon of high culture. The narrative of literary “development” at that time made Eliot's authority not only possible, but natural and maybe necessary. And he was the perfect figure upon which to project such cultural authority: his work was difficult, obscure, and steeped in the classical tradition; and he himself was lightly fascist but without doubt a genius. Thus, his position, once offered, was gladly accepted.

I sound now as if I were unhappy with Eliot's place at the center that briefly held: Modernism. I'm not, though. Not at all. I love and deeply respect his work. The copy of his Collected Poetry and Prose that my fiancee gifted me is a treasured object. He deserved his fame as much as any other writer of that time — and he used that fame not unjustly, I think, in working to make literary culture strong (at least as he envisioned it).

You're wondering, “How is this a defense of literary culture today?”

Well, it's absolutely fair to say that no single person has the stature that Eliot did then. Ashbery or Heaney are closest. But I'm not sure that such a figure is possible any longer. First, the narrative has changed: as an audience, we no longer anoint demigods because we no longer adhere to the same hegemony and homogeneity that existed at mid-century. The internet toppled this orthodox urge after decades of culture wars over postmodernism and pop culture. We now have equal access to most work, as well as a variety of traditions and subcultures, and the ability to make work available to an audience. (For example, a working-class nobody production assistant starting a blog on literature.)

Well, except this guy.

Second, we have largely unmasked / undermined the pretension of high culture. People no longer feel the need to pay lip service to so-called high art, and alternate traditions have been legitimized in kind. This development is, I think, double-edged. We sacrifice the social impulse to commit to difficult art and a certain depth of canonical knowledge for the flourishing appreciation of a broader base of art forms. Thus, classical music and jazz have champions and thoughtful critics, as do rock music, hip-hop, and country; and excellent genre fiction is no longer marginalized while the merits of literature from non-European traditions are rightfully acknowledged. But our knowledge of Greek and Latin, as well as English classics, has greatly waned. In a life of limited hours, one chooses to spend them on breadth or depth — very few have talent enough to cover both.

Those two points, I think, mark out the barrier between generations. Postmodernism was a long conflict: our generation, the younger generation today, is post-war.

It's important to assert that the changes I describe are not mistakes, accidents, or failures. The end of high-culture hegemony does not / did not weaken literary culture, nor the end of narrative orthodoxy. While our conception and evaluation of literary culture has shifted, the on-the-ground situation of literary culture looks very much like it did at mid-century: small journals and presses expanding rapidly with a variety of opinions and tastes. Expansion is not what “shutting down” looks like.

Ashbery is no Eliot because neither he nor his audience need giants. Eliot was also a relic of the class-based, hierarchical, stolid Victorian era. Society has become vastly more inclusive and democratic, and literary culture has absolutely never been so democratic. In what can be contained within legitimate culture, we have never been so close to Whitman, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher.

Are there problems? Heavens, yes. Who said there were not problems? Big publishing as a business looks pretty bleak, and book reviewing may become an amateur sport pretty soon. People generally could do well to read more and watch TV less. These are not fatal.

Besides, there are so many excellent poets writing today: John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Geoffrey Hill, Rae Armantrout, D.A. Powell, Mark Levine, Ange Mlinko, Maxine Kumin, Ben Lerner, Mark Strand, Seamus Heaney, Tim Donnelly, and many more. Beyond that, there are even more young poets uncounted: scribbling, sweating, reading. I've been attending literary lectures with hundreds of literary companions for years now. The numbers are smaller than Eliot, true — but each one of them is worth a thousand passive on-lookers from 1956.

The Critical Flame :: Issue 10, Nov/Dec 2010

On Fiction

Anthony Domestico on Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

“Freedom just isn’t messy enough. Maybe the obvious patterning is a sign that Franzen has finally accepted his mainstream audience: Freedom is definitely Franzen’s most accessible, book-club-worthy book. Regardless of his reasoning, though, the relentless schematization threatens to smother the life out of the text.”

Daniel Wood on Lisa Lang’s Utopian Man

“Australian author Lisa Lang advances a somewhat different response to that question which makes her book, for much of its length, a dazzlingly intelligent and aesthetically disciplined contribution to the genre. Lang seems to propose a certain savage truth about the march of history: that, at bottom, it is the simple unfolding of entropy.”

On Nonfiction
 

Zara Raab on Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness

“The trouble is partly that Young’s penchant for the avant garde of more than a century ago divorces his reading of poetry from any connection or correlation with experience or so-called common sense.”

Nora Delaney on Some Kind of Beautiful Signal

“There is a careful balance of the alien and the universal in each piece of writing in this anthology, no matter its language or culture of origin. Some languages are over-represented; stories and poems in Russian and Spanish, for instance, as well as other European languages, are common, and readers will be familiar with the excerpt from Lydia Davis’ new translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.”

On Verse

Alexander Lewis on the Poetry of Daryl Hine

“Hine is less an oracle than a high-energy technician. A recurring metaphor is nuclear fusion — its poetic procedures putting mundane, household elements under graceful pressure until they fuse together into a new substance, dense and glowing in contrast to their prosaic ingredients.”

On Cleaning Up the Woulds and Shoulds, Etc.

“I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.”

At Commentary, Joseph Epstein writes, “Understatedly spectacular is the way [T.S.] Eliot’s career strikes one today, at time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down. [. . .] literary culture is, I believe, shutting down chiefly because literature itself has become unimportant: what is being created in contemporary novels, poems, and plays no longer speaks to the heart or mind.”

Shutting down, eh? That's a shame. I'll have to let the folks at The Quarterly Conversation, Jacket, Maggy, Pen & Anvil, Dark Sky, Dzanc Books, Fulcrum, The Critical Flame, and others know. Not to mention all the blogs! We damn fools have persisted under the fantasy that through hard work and imagination we can make something worthwhile. Make literary culture vibrant. That popularity and dollars are not the sole measures of success. That the dislocation of our elders in this culture has no bearing. That we actually . . . well that we are literary culture, even.

But it is clear as day to anyone writing a broad cultural essay these days, we're not speaking to hearts or minds. Not to hearts, certainly: we've got no empathy. And no minds. Minds? No, no! Gracious, no! Haven't you heard, we're the dumbest generation? Literary culture can pack up and call it a day. Ginsberg is dead, dead as the middle class — stinking, rotting dead. What else could matter? Not these kids. Kids! Today, oh these kids, running around with their Teeters and Fan Books and whatnot! Can you imagine, Ginsberg? Like these kids? Young? like this? Never happened. No, you could never understand. That reminds me of a poem:

“Age Before Beauty”

My unrelated aunt's older sister
with the dye-job red hair (hiding gray)
turned a plump head towards me,
‘You aren't even formed yet, you'll learn.’

She patted me on my knee
and snatched the remote control.
Her loose, wrinkling jowls swung
like wet sheets out on the line.
--

Nope. Literary culture be dead, son. Damn fools.

Abstract Expressionism, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Arts.

The Independent reports: “For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art — including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko — as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince — except that it acted secretly — the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex-communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.”

--

I wonder what kind of art is being used by the CIA to convince Muslim Extremists that we aren't all money-grubbing, morally bankrupt infidels. Probably not this:

Untitled (Cosmo Girl), 1991
by Cindy Sherman

Somewhere in a Volcanic Lair

“One opens The Atlantic Monthly and is promptly introduced to a burst of joyless contrarianism. Tiring of it, one skims ahead to the book reviews, only to realize: this is the book review. A common experience for even the occasional reader of B.R. Myers, it never fails to make the heart sink. The problem is not only one of craft and execution. Myers writes as if the purpose of criticism were to obliterate its object. He scores his little points, but so what? Do reviewers really believe that isolating a few unlovely lines in a five hundred page novel, ignoring the context for that unloveliness, and then pooh-poohing what remains constitutes a reading? Is this what passes for judgment these days?

If so, Myers would have a lot to answer for. But in the real world, instances don’t yield general truths with anything like the haste of a typical Myers paragraph (of which the foregoing is a parody). And so, even as he grasps for lofty universalism, Brian Reynolds Myers remains sui generis, the bad boy of reviewers, lit-crit’s Dennis Rodman.”

Somewhere in a volcanic lair, stroking his snowy long-haired cat, in front of a huge war-room map of the world, with glowing lights to indicate the location of every living poet, William Logan is plotting revenge against Garth Risk Hallberg for not recognizing him as the original Dennis Rodman of reviewing. Beware, Mr. Hallberg! Muahaha!

Kidding. This was an enjoyable reposte, from The Millions.