Jim's comments (member since Sep 04, 2007)

Jim's comments from the Constant Reader group.

To me the biggest advantage of a Kindle is instant gratification. When you finish a book at 8 PM, you can immediately get another one to replace it without moving an inch.

The second biggest advantage is being able to take your entire library with you wherever you go. If you get bored with one book in the waiting room, you just go to another.

In terms of a reading experience, I think it is every bit as good as a book.

Ruth, you could tell me anything about Hegel and Schonpenauer, and I would believe it. All I know about them is their names.

Of course, I believe you implicitly anyhow.

Now you have me confused, Carol. So Nabokov focuses on something that is unfocused. Hmmm. Is this another case of the absence of the present not being present enough? Where are Hegel and Schopenauer when I need them most?

This morning's advance preview ofThe New Yorker brings a review of Paul Auster's newest book by James Wood.

Wood begins with a parody of Auster's plots and then berates him for not being Philip Roth or Jose Saramago. Wood tells us: "Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough." I think this is supposed to be a profound insight.

Auster may come out with cookie cutter books, but isn't this a cookie cutter review? The popular literary novelist isn't really that good, and somebody else really does it better.

I am reminded of John Updike complaining about critics who looked at every novel as an inferior version of one they would have written had they wished to take the time.

Having only read City of Glass, which I liked, I am not in a position to judge Auster's accomplishment, but surely there is something more interesting to say about a book if you are going to review it all.

One the one hand, I like the idea of Nabokov's absorption in the minutiae of lepidoptery and on the other, I like Maxwell doddering in the slop for love.

The fantasy is that life would be perfect if you could focus on just one thing instead of going from poetry to eating to expressing fine thoughts to cleaning the gutters.

For those who want to know more, it turns out that Paul Vance is a member of the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, having produced many other hits such as "Leader of the Laundromat", "What Will Mary Say", and "I Haven't Got Anything Better To Do".

Under the influence of Ezra Pound complaining about winter, I started thinking about this poem:

An Old Man’s Winter Night


All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

This poem has stayed with me since I was young, and I suppose part of charm is the sentimental scene of the lonely old man in the farmhouse and part of it is just watching Frost play with things like "the pane in empty rooms" and the initial allusion to the biblical verse about seeing through a glass darkly.

Looking at some internet analysis of the poem, I can see how it can also be interpreted as a somewhat existential comment on Man's Essential Loneliness in the Universe, which sounds like something I would have considered earnestly when I was 16. Now this interpretation feels so obvious as to be a cliche.

Today I think what appeals to me most is the image of the old fellow with all this anxiety around him just having a good nap. Perhaps attitudes change over time or perhaps that is what I always liked about the poem.

Whatever it is I should give Frost a lot of credit for producing something that stays in the mind so long. (Does this mean I have to give credit to the lyricists of "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", the immortal Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss?)

I find that there was an anti-poet laureate elected by the Poetics list at SUNY Buffalo a few years ago to protest Billy Collins.

He is Anselm Hollo and he teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado. From what I can tell geography had nothing to do with it. The complaint was that Collins's poetry wasn't as challenging as Hollo's.

Here's a Hollo sample:

“the ideal story is that of two people
who go into love step for step
with a fluttered consciousness
like a pair of children venturing together
into a dark room” yeah right but then
then it’s LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION!
& the relentless Surroundarama
Split-Screen Spectacle of
Everyday Life & Things to Do
but it’s still a terrific idea
since being what or who is also just with
in days and nights of beaucoup conscious disquiet
though sometimes it’s not so easy
to reinsert oneself into the mortal coil


give up your ampersands & lowercase ‘i’s
they still won’t like you
the bosses of official verse culture
(U.S. branch) but kidding aside
I motored off that map a long time ago
yet have old friends
still happily romping in the English lyric
and Reverdy! dear Reverdy! so much of him rhymes
it must be poésie ma chérie …
looks at the stacks of books on the floor
gods help us, dear poets
pass the salt pass the mustard
hike the present
or the hypothetically honest horse-drawn past

*************

I am not sure that I see the challenge here. The issue is really which school of poetry gets the recognition. (I would say it's about which one gets the money, but the notes on the Poetics list suggest that they were appalled by the fact the NYT mentioned money several times in the article about the appointment.)

I have always thought that the Poet Laureate position was a paying gig that got passed around through the fraternity of academic poets as a reward for time served sort of like editorship of Best American Poetry, Pulitizers, and National Book Awards. Since poetry doesn't pay, everybody needs to have a chance to make a living.

Frederick Seidel, who is independently wealthy, doesn't show up on the laureate list. Nor does Allen Ginsberg, who may have been one of the few poets to make a living from books and readings. I wonder how many of the laureates have participated in the Iowa or the Stanford writing programs, and how many have had dinner together informally before and after appointment.

The broader question is what do you want a laureate to be? A great poet? Somebody who markets poetry effectively to a general audience? Somebody who is presentable as a representative of the American people? All of the above?

Further reading shows that Ms. Zucker has quite a fascination with birth and is a "certified labor doula" which wikipedia tells me is "an assistant who provides various forms of non-medical and non-midwifery support (physical and emotional) in the childbirth process." As near as I can tell this is something similar to the Lamaze thing we good fathers were supposed to be doing 37 years ago.

She also has a series of poems related to 9/11 and she created the the 100 Poems blog in which a number of younger poets wrote a poem a day to help Obama through his first 100 days. See http://100dayspoems.blogspot.com

I am overwhelmed by how she manages to mix such responsible parenting and civic mindedness with her obvious pleasure in apocalyptic events in the manner of Allen Ginsburg.

Here is one of her less gynecological poems.

The Dread of the Power of the Instincts


The good enough mother dreams of arson
and writes: "noodles: please warm."

The listening device insists but the child, coughing,
doesn't cry—shifts, shifts, turns over.

On the ultrasound-scan I looked porous: sponge
around the blinking fact of fetus and am still unfinished.

To say the form is organic is to say nothing.
This suffering, boredom.

A flawless beauty this nurture cuts and how the good enough
mother smoothes and files her patience.

How perfect, look, long suffering they say, and know nothing.

Kindle, smolder, flame, consume. Kindle, smolder, use.
I put out hors d'oeuvres, some of them half-frozen.

*****************************

Getting back to her parents, I discovered that her father, Benjamin Zucker, is not only an experimental novelist but also a dealer in gems. Her mother, Diane Wolkstein, is a professional storyteller of such renown the Mayor Bloomberg declared June 22, 2007 to be Diane Wolkstein Day.

When do any of them get time to watch The Simpsons?

Thanks to the Publisher's Weekly 2009 list I discovered Rachel Zucker today. I wrote a little about her under that heading, but with further research I found "Welcome to the Blighted Ovum Support Group" http://42opus.com/v8n3/welcome-to
which explains men are too weak to have children and definitely fits into the TMI category, although it is impossible to look away.

I haven't read through all of poems at http://www.rachelzucker.net/poemsonline/... but I suspect they are all worthwhile.

Inspired by the list, I found some poems by Rachael Zucker including "Hey Allen Ginsberg Where Have You Gone and What Would You Think of My Drugs?" which makes being a middle class housewife-writer sound a little more exotic than one might normally think.

Books with prominent seraphs: their feet feet feet I am
marching to the same be—

other

than the neuronic slave I thought anxiety made me
do it, made me get up and carry forth, sally
the children to school the poems dragged
by little hands on their little seraphs
to the page my marriage sustained, remaining
energy: project #1, project #2, broken
fixtures, summer plans, demand met, request
granted, bunny noodles with and without cheesy
at the same time, and the night time I insomnia
these hours penning invisible letters—

till it stopped.

doc said: it's a syndrome. you've got it,
classic.

it's chemical,
mental

circuitry we've got a fix for this
classic, I'm saying I can

make it better.

Everything was the same, then,
but better.

At night I slept.
In the morning got up.



Insomnia is definitely a noun that deserves to become a verb. Read the whole poem at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMI...

Aside from the merits of the poet, I was fascinated by her biography. Her father is a novelist, her mother collects folktales, and she grew up in Greenwich village in the 70s. From there she went to Yale and got an MFA from Iowa Writer's Workshop (Is it time to call this the West Point of Creative Writing, yet?). Currently she is teaching at various places around the New York area. If her life were a novel, it would be a cliche.

The interesting thing about the Ginsburg poem is that you see her fighting to get out of the cliche:

The psychiatrist's lived in NY so long
he's of ambiguous religious—
everyone's Jewish sometimes—
writes: "up the dosage."


now,
when I'm late I just shrug
it's my new improved style
missed the train? I tug
the two boys single file

the platform a safe aisle
between disasters, blithely
I step, step, step-lively
carefully, wisely.

I sing silly ditties
play I spy something pretty
grey-brown-metal-filthy
for a little city fun.

Just one way to enjoy life's
trials, mile after mile, lucky
to have such dependable feet.

you see,
the rodents don't frighten I'm
calm as can be expected to recover left to my
one devivces I was twice as fast getting everywhere but
where did that get me but there, that inevitable location
more waiting, the rats there scurry, scurry, a furry

till the next train comes

"up the dosage."

Does anyone READ "The Wasteland"? Well, I do from time to time, but does being read a necessity for being classic? How many people spend time poring over The Iliad?

Try making it through the month of April without hearing how April is the cruelest month in a million newspaper columns and magazine articles, particularly those relating to baseball teams getting off to a slow start. And what would an article about weapons control be if it didn't show us fear in a handful of dust?

As for recent classic status, I would think both Updike's Rabbit series and Roth's Zuckerman series will be around for a while. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell seem to be becoming classic. Turning to a younger generation, maybe The World According to Garp Lois Gluck.

Big and Little Bugles, tulips, big bassoons, dancing bulbs and basses? Could this be about the Joy of Sex? I am pretty sure it's not about the Trinity.

Hey, Yulia. I am an innocent bystander -- sort of :)

I have read several of Russo's books. You can even find a positive review of Bridge of Sighs on my bookshelf. I think Russo's great, and I can't imagine anyone who likes Updike not being attracted to Russo.

While Michael is really missing out, my thought was just that limiting yourself to one era isn't necessarily a bad thing. You could probably bury yourself in books written in 2005 (172,000 according to the Wikipedia) and spend the rest of your life profitably. Not limiting yourself is ok, too. I'm easy.

As for getting smarter with age, I am afraid that hasn't worked out too well so far. Maybe next year.

So tell us more about Cape Magic.

I applaud Michael's resolve not to read anything after Updike (although since Updike's last novel came out in 2008 that leaves him a lot of room). With 23 novels and 24 short story collections, Updike could keep anyone busy for some time just by himself.

My theory of why they "don't write 'em like that anymore" is that there is that there is already enough supply to meet demand. If you need 19th century novels, I can direct you to nearly 60 novels by Trollope, 100 by Balzac, and the mere 16 that Dickens produced.

We live in a world of unparalleled richness. Much as I like Empire Falls, there is no need to ever leave Brewer, Pennsylvania, as Rabbit Angstrom would be happy to tell you.

As I think more about it, the grasshopper was featured prominently in Aesop's fables as the lazy alternative to the industrious ant. That ties in better to the general idea of indolence that seems to be guiltily celebrated in Oliver.

Prayer as a form of indolence?

Oliver doesn't pick a creature of either innocence or violence. It could be just an oddity that moves its jaws the wrong way. Although grasshoppers are often associated with plagues, the notion of it eating sugar out of her hand and floating away makes the insect seem kind of lovable

Oliver asks the same questions that Blake asked, ends up in a prayerful pose in spite of herself, then tries to dismiss the whole idea and turn it all into a question of setting priorities for your daily, if wild and precious, life.

Could it be that disbelief poses its own dilemmas?

I agree with you,Philip, about "The Lamb" being unsettling in a way. I pair it with Blake's "Tiger"

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

As Newengland suggested, standing next to Blake's Lamb of God is the God of Abraham and Isaac.

I can't read this without hearing echos of William Blake:

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bade thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a lamb,
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child;
I a child, and thee a Lamb,
We are called by His Name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee!


While Blake comes to a nice comfortable conclusion (here at least), Oliver doesn't exactly although she makes wandering about sound like fun.

One thing that interests me is the tendency of poets over the centuries to look at nature and see it telling us about something else. Wordsworth and Emerson are the biggest culprits, but the line obviously stretches from Homer's Wind Dark Sea to Mary Oliver.

Is there automatically a connection? Much as I want to deplore it all, looking at the fascination of contemporary artists like Takashi Murakami with popular culture I wonder if it is not possible to draw your images from anywhere.