Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Month: January 2022

New Media Reader: The New Stereo vs Neil Young

January 27, 2022 / / 0 Comments

KeyboardTime to continue on our journey with the New Media Reader. The next essay in the book is "New Media: from Borges to HTM" by the textbook's editor, Lev Manovich.

Our editor describes new media as any computer-based artistic activities. However, that definition expands to interactive exhibits in museums and new tools of commerce, computer games, Artificial Intelligence (AI), networks, multi-media, 3D modeling (and now 3D printing), CD Roms (has-beens), DVDs (practically has-beens), animation rendering tools…

Pieces are presented and aided by computer software, algorithms, different media and semiotic logics, text parsing, image manipulations.

He says digital medias challenge our “romantic ideas of authorship" (because of the interactivity, the collectives, the on-the-fly publications).

He says digital media pieces challenge our ideas of the one-of-a-kind object (because of the infinite copies and infinite states).

He also says they challenge our ideas of a centralized distribution of control (for example, the Internet network that has bypassed the art industrial/commercial system).

Digital media challenges our deeply held conceptual, ideological and aesthetic beliefs.

Cyberculture even possibly challenges our ideas about our own human identity and culture.

The keywords are modularity, variability and automation.

On the downside, some people have developed a literal fetish for the latest technologies.

Manovich says new media is always an incorporation of the old, morphs with the old, guided conceptually by old media (just the names of tools alone: page, frame, desktop, icons, maps, zoom, pan). 

At one time proponents believed new media would build a better democracy because there would be less centralization of propaganda and that more intimacy between people online would "eliminate distance.” Disinformation and propaganda have since exploded but from de-centralized spaces (so they were half-right). 

There were worries (as there is with every single communications innovation, including the printing press and motion pictures) that new media would cause the erosion of moral values and would destroy the relationship between humans and world (which is not looking like such a crazy idea now). 

The real breakthroughs have come with "faster execution of sequences of steps, sorting, counting, compositing, changes in quantity and quality (he singles out new recent forms, like the music video and photomontage between 1985-1995). 

He then tracks a very interesting historical mesh of a timeline:

The Modernism era ends, Post-Modernism begins, new visual/special communication techniques are used to challenge societies attitudes, constructivist design, typography, cinemograph editing, montage, mainstream computers cut-and-paste, memes, windows, tables, filtering reality in new ways, collage, media assets, film, audio, raw data processed and mined, manipulating databases, search engines, simulations.

In the 1960s we saw interactive happenings, performances, installations, processes, open systems, (we didn’t always need computers for this, by the way), the principles of modern GUI were articulated, networks created and imagined…

…finally realized in the 1970s with the Internet, UNIX, object-oriented programming, better networking, workstations, real-time control, the graphical interface (Macintosh 1984), draw and paint programs, creativity tools, the first inexpensive computer, Atari with sound, video games, movies, Photoshop, (a key application of post-modernism, he says), big business goes online, government goes online, higher education goes online.

In the 1990s we have real-time networks and an exploding Internet, “a radically horizontal, non-hierarchical model of human existence in which no idea, no ideology, no value system can dominate." Fast forward to QANON and the Russians exploiting social media algorithms in 2018 and dominating the fringe of each political party, fully controlling one.

Manovich calls the Internet a “perfect metaphor for new post-Cold-War sensibility.”

It's good to remind us right now this textbook is old

The challenge to the "romantic idea of authorship" never did prove its point fully. Most humans still seek a somewhat direct communication between other humans. Engineers have been the only ones to declare this point won; we’re not even close to a consensus of artists, writers or art critics.

The same goes with the challenge to the one-of-a-kind object. Original art, the handmade culture of etsy.com all still thrive. Museums still have more stuff than they can display in a hundred years.

But the point about distribution, this is what I feel is still relevant and revolutionary. It's a double-edged sword, though. Sure, you can easily disseminate your own work now but so can everyone else. And some messages are full of much more propaganda and mind-manipulation than others.

All cultural gifts are problematic. Take Manovich’s explanation of the web browser itself as a cinema screen (I know Millennials who don't own TVs anymore), a music player (ditto: no stereos or portable devices), a museum, a library, a game console.

Just try to share with a Millennial or Gen Z person any kind of pop culture artifacts. They're a generation of people disabused of the idea that pop culture must be owned and living inside their habitats. This means sharing a mix-tape with a Millennial or Gen Z aficionado is very challenging as music (for example) has become oddly re-centralized. The Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan controversy of the day shows just how precarious that centralized stereo system can be.

Books about Writing Fiction

January 25, 2022 / / 0 Comments

SwimShort Stories & the Writing Process

In the past year I’ve read two very amazing books about writing fiction. For my birthday this year, poet Ann Cefola sent me the new book by George Saunders explicating Russian short stories as illustrative for fiction writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. And although the stories he explicates very lovingly and expertly are not my favorite short stories, the book is non-the-less illuminating as Saunders walks us through craft techniques such as character development page by page, discovering the heart of a story, patterns in stories, plots, strange fictions, didacticism and ambiguity.

The ending section I found particularly moving and the exercises in the appendix are informative and not to be missed. This is a long book. I took my time with it and it took me about 3 months to finish. 

This is not your every-day writing guide, however, and it's well worth the effort you spend on it.

In explicating Ivan Turgenev’s story “The Singers,” Saunders says,

"I teach ‘The Singers’ to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be. As young writers, we all have romantic dreams of being a writer of a certain kind, of joining a certain lineage. A painstaking realist, maybe; a Nabokovian stylist; a deeply spiritual writer like Marilynne Robinson—whatever…

(‘The writer  can choose what he writers about,’ says Flannery O’Connor, ‘but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.’)

This writer may turn out to bear little resemblance to the writer we dreamed of being. She is born, it turns out, for better or worse, out of that which we really are: the tendencies we’ve been trying, all these years, in our writing and maybe even in our lives, to suppress or deny or correct, the parts of ourselves about which we might even feel a little ashamed.

Whitman was right: we are large, we do contain multitudes. There’s more than one ‘us’ in there. When we ‘find our voice,’ what’s really happening is that we’re choosing a voice from among the many voices we’re able to ‘do,’ and we’re choosing it because we’ve found that, of all the voices we contain, so far, that has proven itself to be the most energetic.”

A friend of mine likes to sort writers into the generous type and not-so generous type. With her rubric, Saunders feels like a very generous writer and teacher.  As I said, the final section called “We End” is a particularly moving wrap-up on why we feel compelled to write in the first place.

“It really is true: doing what you please (i.e., what pleases you), with energy, will lead you to everything—to your particular obsessions and the ways in which you’ll indulge them, to your particular challenges and the forms in which they’ll convert into beauty, to your particular obstructions and your highly individualized obstruction breakers. We can’t know what our writing problems will be until we write our way into them, and then we can only write our way out…

We can decide only so much. The big questions have to be answered by hours at the desk. So much of the worrying we do is a way of avoiding work, which only delays the (work-enabled) solution.”

“Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen. It’s a sacrament dedicated to this end. We can’t always feel as open to the world as we feel at the end of a beautiful story.”

Saunders describes writing and a reading  even a little phrase as a little tussle between two people,

“By that little tussle, you know I’m here. And I know you’re there. That phrase is a little corridor connecting us, giving us a fragment of the world over which to tussle, i.e., connect…

That’s a pretty hopeful model of human interaction: two people, mutually respectful, leaning in, one speaking so as to compel, the other listening, willing to be charmed.

That, a person can work with.”

ScienceThe Science of Narrative

Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better is a much shorter book and much of it based on the research he did for his book Selfie. Storr uses evolutionary psychology, culture and neural science to define why we respond to certain storytelling techniques and he covers things like creating a world, cause and effect, change agents, theories of characterization, dialogue, higher stakes, plots, beginnings and endings.

For example, he illustrates how the brain assembles a sentence and why active sentences create better pictures in the brain than passive sentences.

He talks about how we organize the world in our brains:

“Our goals give our lives order, momentum and logic. They provide our hallucination of reality with a centre of narrative gravity. Our perception organizes itself around them. What we see and feel, at any given moment, depends on what we’re trying to get—when we’re caught in the street in a downpour of rain, we don’t see the shops and trees and doorways and awnings, we see places of shelter…

In order to encourage us to act, to struggle, to live, the hero-making brain wants us to feel as if we’re constantly moving towards something better.”

Talking about figurative, poetic language, he says,

“It’s….associative thinking that gives poetry its power. A successful poem plays on our associative networks as a harpist plays on strings. By the meticulous placing of a few simple words, they brush gently against deeply buried memories, emotions, joys, traumas, which are stored in the form of neural networks that light up as we read. In this way, poets ring out rich chords of meaning that resonate so profoundly we struggle to fully explain why they’re moving us so.”

It's this tone of generosity from Storr and Saunders that is missing from other explication and writing books I’ve bailed on in the last year.

Two examples are Break Blow Burn by Camille Paglia and Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Paglia’s book is structured very similar to Saunders’ where you read a poem and then she explicates it, but without the whole of Saunders’ joy and amazement. Her explications read more like student papers. Admittedly, Paglia is a difficult writer for me. I heartedly agree with half of what she says and vehemently disagree with the other half. Her tone is often self-righteous as if she’s writing out of grievance.

Klinkenborg is lacking that same chip on his shoulder and is full of great thoughts about writing  sentences, but his aesthetic preference for short, journalistic sentences seemed lacking in theperspective. What about the beautifully meandering Proustian sentence. But in all fairness to Klinenborg, I only made it to page 30.

I haven’t given up on these books. I’m assuming I’m just not ready for them yet and they’re sitting back on the to-read shelf.

IMG_20210925_100651Places Where the Story Lives

A year or so ago my friend Natalie sent me a story box from the Deadbolt Mystery Society. I’ve since shared these delightful things with many of my friends and discovered there are a few groups putting out these mystery boxes (some aren’t even boxes but letters of artifacts mailed to you periodically).

I’ve done two boxes from Deadbolt and the experience of solving the mystery (I’m better at some clues than others…I suck at solving mathematical riddles for example; thankfully there are hints and solutions available) has made me think a lot (again) about where a story lives.

In this case the narrative is assembled from little pieces of artifacts. My latest ‘story’ included ragtime music, a tiny board game, a tiny set of poker cards (adorable and enticing enough to get me to play a series of hands to uncover a plot point), a piano keyboard, newspaper clipping, letters, notes and book covers.

You have to string a story together from pieces and interactions with the box items. There’s no reason why a story must live in a book, on film or any other one kind of place.

The Essay Project: The Second-Person Pronoun

January 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments

HoldenThe next essay in the stack is “The Abuse of the Second-Person Pronoun” and there was no author attribution or note as to where it was published. Which is typical for a lot of these essays. An online search says the author is Jonathan Holden and book might be The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric. Not sure about that. The book is out-of-print and I can't find a table of contents.

In this essay, the author makes a very good point but then stretches it to 18+ pages. Maybe an essay covering all the pronouns would have been tighter and more helpful.

Holden is taking issue with “the deployment…of an ambiguous ‘you’ that could refer to the reader, that could convey the third-person-singular sense of ‘one,’ or that could be the poet…musing to himself.”

“Such ambiguity is not," Holden says, "accidental…for the apparent bonuses are enormous….one would suppose that the reader, feeling that the poem were addressed to him personally, would enjoy a greater sense of intimacy with the speaker and stronger sense of the narrator’s speaking presence…”

“[the pronoun] helps to spur a poet through the lonely process of composition by providing him, in his solitude, with the illusion of a listener, with the sense that he is speaking to somebody, however ill-defined."

Holden talks about "the blurred ‘you’ “like the expression ‘you know?’ so often tagged onto the end of a sentence…the purported universality of the proposition…an unpremeditated, colloquial intimate tone that is far less pretentions that the sermonic ‘we’…which in a poem would sound unbearable stuffy and tweedy.”

With the universal 'you,' poets can “simultaneously emphasize particularity and universality at every juncture…both personal and prophetic…”

Holden summarizes with these three possibilities:

  1. Substitute for “I” first-person pronoun, the poet himself, autobiographical.
  2. Substitute for “I” first-person pronoun, a character in the poem speaking.
  3. Address to a person the poet is speaking to (which can make the poem a “private, cryptic message to that person"). Holden feels the poem has an obligation to name this person in the text or as a title, for example “To Jenny” as a title.

Holden also suspects the second-person pronoun “may lessen the danger that the poet will sound self-pitying, over-introspective, whining or that the entire poem will seem somehow ‘too personal’ to be relevant…this impulse to place the poet in a more peripheral position in the poem is…the result of a continuing reaction against the excesses of the confessional mode….trying to find a less central position for the poet…”

Unfortunately, at least during the time of the essay (which as far as I can tell was in 1980 so this must be infractions of the 1970s), “too often it is being misapplied by poets in poems that have basically a testimonial or a narrative character.”

He goes on to give examples of 'you' poems that would be better as 'I' poems:

  • Philip Booth’s “Still Life”
  • Dennis Schmirtz’s “Rabbits” 
  • Michael Ryan’s “This is a Poem for the Dead”

In these cases Holden feels “the substitution kills most of the poem’s feeling. ‘My place now’ is far less wooden than ‘your place now” and that “the speaking voice takes clear responsibility for what it is saying.” Plus, “the poem becomes a single human voice, and whether the speaker is fictional or real is of no consequence.”

Holden feels autobiographical poems should use the ‘I’ pronoun. However, there are instances when one part of the poet’s self is taking to another part of the self. Holden also insists the “blurred-you is a defensive tactic…[that] betrays the author’s anxiety by trying too hard.”

Perhaps. But there are many reasons why a poet would want to suppress a known ‘you’:

  1. For self-protection (this could be personal, political or social).
  2. To protect the subject or the ‘you’ person.
  3. Because the poet is working through something, or possibly not ready to reveal the you.
  4. For fun, to give the reader Easter Eggs.

Millions of secretes lie within poems for various reasons, not all due to defensiveness or anxiety (although they can be). Holden insists the ‘you’ “grasps at the reader’s collar, insisting too shrilly on his complicity.” (I think that’s projection).

Or that the second person “….protests far too loudly that the poem’s subject has universality.”

And here I think he has a point. Sometimes we over-estimate our 'you' universality. Holden calls this a form of faking, but I think it’s just one of the very human biases, consensus bias.

Holden is right in finding the style a bit trendy though: “it lends the poem a cool, poised attitude, a veneer or public decorum…”calls into question…the assumption of its absolute sincerity…the suave ‘you’—the you that commits itself to nothing and can turn the finest poem into an empty, elegant-sounding workshop exercise.”

Snap!

Holden asks “Why is the first-person…so much better?” He says because the view simply assumes the reader’s participation instead of cajoling it. He says, “true earnestness is the mark of the best poetry…”

Here we go. The best poetry is [insert your own self-satisfied idea here].

Holden says the best poetry is willing to make a fool of itself. But I say there is plenty of room for that in ‘you’ poems, too.

Good examples of the ‘you’ in a poem, according to Holden:

In these poems, the substitution of 'I' for 'you' ruins the poem And that’s exactly what Holden recommends doing, writing your pieces both ways to see the tonal effects of both versions. He also spends pages describing how reading the poem before a live audience can tell you whether the ‘you’ pronoun is working for you and why reading poems in front of audiences is a swell thing and the difference between talking to the self in a lyric and an oral addresses, all of which seems a bit in the weeds for this essay.

Although critics of the second-person pronoun often claim, like Holden does, that “the reader cannot decide how to take this poem unless he knows to whom ‘you’ refers.” I disagree. As long as there is a vague outline of who the poem is addressed to, which can be hinted through the content, you're a-ok. And that’s the responsibility of the poet, to give some kind of guide (is this a love poem, a sibling poem, a friend poem, etc.?).

Similarly with the general 'you' as a casual replacement of ‘one’, this is the responsibility of the poet to identify somewhere in the content that the address should be taken as universal. 

The Essay Project: The Beat Poets

January 12, 2022 / / 0 Comments

CorsoThe student who contributed this essay to our class forgot to note the author so I had to look that up, “Variations on a Generation” by Gregory Corso and as far as I can tell it's from The Portable Beat Reader edited by Ann Charters. This is another good example of how an essay could be historical, instead of simply a craft essay or personal opinion about some aspect of poetry. 

Corso starts by defining writers who are members of a group as if to say the better talents belong to groups (which would leave out Emily Dickinson among plenty of other excellent loners): “every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation,” what Corso calls clusters joined by “geological location” or “philosophical sympathies” like the transcendentalists who were joined both geologically and philosophically. His other examples are “local-color realists…born between 1849 and 1851” or “experimental modernists…born in the decade between 1879 and 1888.” These “clusters or constellations” occur in all the arts.

(This might be a good time to note The New Yorker recently had a good article on the drawbacks of thinking in terms of generations…but that's a digression.)

Anyway, we're used to thinking along this generations line so Corso explains F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of the Lost Generation, a “reaction against the fathers which seems to occur about three times in a century…distinguished by a set of ideas inherited …from the madmen and the outlaws of the generation before.”

This is a helpful definition, Corso says, when considering the Beats  and their “intricate web of perceptions, judgements, feelings, and aspirations…the shared experience for the Beat writers was historical and political, based on the tumultuous changes of their times.”

Corso lists the good and the bad as influences here: anti-Communist hysteria, the Cold War, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Arthur Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas.

He traces the word “beat” in etymological detail, coming out of  Jazz and meaning 'down and out' from 'dead beat' or beat-up or streetwise. The genesis of the word started in 1944 and traveled from Herbert Huncke to William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who saw in the word as a “melancholy sneer” like “solitary Bartlebies” (from Herman Melville’s short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener"), the “archetypical American non-conformist.”

Ginsberg’s friend Lucien Carr said, “maybe it was term we just sold ourselves. It was trying to look at the world in a new light, trying to look at the world in a way that gave it some meaning. Trying to find values…that were valid.”

[A generic enough a statement to stick to any rebellious manifesto.]

The term “Beat Generation” was coined in 1948 when bop music writer John Clellon Holmes wrote a piece appreciating the stories of junkies and the new consciousness, furtiveness and the “weariness with all the forms”….and the movement had “the subversive attraction of an image that just might contain a concept, with the added mystery of being hard to define….a vision and not an idea.” Holmes saw Jack Cassidy as the central figure after the publication of his novel Go. Then an article by Gilbert Millstein appeared in 1952 in The New York Times' Sunday Times, which officially launched the term.

Early works of note were:

  • Chandler Brossard's Who Walk in Darkness
  • George Mandel's Flee the Angry Strangers
  • Jack Kerouac's Jazz of the Beat Generation and On the Road which followed Allen Ginsberg’s censorship trial in San Francisco for Howl and Other Poems

Kerouac was dubbed the spokesman by this time and in 1958, Esquire Magazine published “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation.” 

The Beat poets are often conflated with the San Francisco Renaissance writers but were only associated to them via Allen Ginsberg who had moved from New York to California. The West Coast group was already a community by 1954 and contained a loose group of poets including Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Duncan, William Everson, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Philip Lamentia, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Weldon Keys and Gary Snyder.

It was at the event "Six Poets at the Six Gallery” in 1955 where the poem "Howl" was unveiled.

According to Michael McClure: “we saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead—killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life…We wanted voice and we wanted vision."

The West Coast poets tended to revolve around presses: Unitide Press, Equinox Press, the Pocket Poets Series from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore that published "Howl" which was seized by San Francisco customs officers and the press was charged with “publishing and selling an obscene book. But that just led to national attention and big sales.

Meanwhile, the word Beat came to be associated with the milieux of bop music, drugs, hipsters, the new kids of rock ‘n’ roll and soon it just became synonym for bohemian rebellion. Other terms in early competition were 'hip generation' (Norman Mailer), “the subterraneans” (Allen Ginsberg), “bop generation” (Jack Kerouac). A San Francisco Chronicle columnist coined the word “beatnik” as a condescending term in Look Magazine in 1958 when he referred to the “250 bearded cats.”

There was plenty of criticism for the poets in the US and the UK. Poet George Barker wrote a poem called “Circular from America” where he said, “Mill of no mind…1/2 and idea to a hundred pages….For laboring through/Prose that takes ages/Just to announce/That Gods and Men/Ought all to study/The Book of Zen.”

Ouch.

They were seen as “an amusing phenomenon" in the English magazine X although the UK had its own Kitchen-Sink Writers or “Angry Young Men,” a group that included John Osborne, Colin Wilson, John Wain and John Braine.

Conservatives in the encyclopedia The Americana suggested in 1958 that these writers were simply “self-conscious delinquents, addicted to…jazz, dope and the lunatic fringe of sex and literature, received attention out of all proportion to its significance…”

McClure insisted “at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and naives and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power-support bases.”

In 1958 Jack Kerouac published The Dharma Bums which was based on the poet Gary Snyder’s life and values and which became “a blueprint for hippie culture a decade later.”

Corso says,

“Like the work of the radical writers of the 1930s (but without their specific political agenda), Beat poetry and fiction was an alternative literature by writers who were sweeping in their condemnation of their country’s underlying social, sexual, political, and religious values…Earlier modernist poets like Ezra Pound or Lost Generation writers like Ernest Hemingway had attacked the system from the safeguard of their life abroad as expatriates, but the Beat Generation writers protested their country’s excesses on the front lines.”

William Burroughs understood the threat to conservatives as "much more serious…say, than the Communist party…you can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road….Art tells us what we know and don’t know that we know.”

The important works:

  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Pictures of the Gone World (1955)
  • Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956)
  • Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957)
  • Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (1958)
  • John Clellon Holmes' Go (1958)
  • John Clellon Holmes' The Horn (1958)
  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind (1958)
  • Gregory Corso's Bomb (1958) [writer including himself in the history there]
  • Michael McClure's Peyote Poem (1958)
  • John Wieners' The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958)
  • Diana DiPrima's The Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (1958)
  • William Burroughs' Junky (1958)
  • William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1958)
  • Gary Snyder's Riprap (1958)
  • Kerouac's Doctor Sax (1959)
  • Kerouac's Mexico City Blues (1959)
  • Philip Whalen's Self-Portrait from Another Direction (1959)
  • Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts (1960)
  • Philip Whalen's Like I Say (1960)
  • Ginsberg's "Kaddish" (1961)
  • Kerouac's Book of Dreams (1961)
  • Michael McClure's Dark Brown (1961)
  • Diana DiPrima's Dinners and Nightmares (1961)
  • LeRoi Jones' Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961)

According to Corso, “the Beat Generation did less well for its women. Reflecting the sexism of the times, the women mostly stayed on the sidelines as girlfriends and wives.” This group was more about “male bonding.” It’s experimentation involved what Gregory Corso called, “bop prosody, surreal-real images, jumps, beats, cool measures, long rapid vowels, long long lines, and the main content, soul…the brash assertiveness of the postwar years.”

JuliemaryWhen I met Julie Wiskirchen at Sarah Lawrence in the mid-1990s, the first thing she invited me to join was a Guggenheim event in Manhattan to see an Allen Ginsberg reading. In my memory Ginsberg sang, "Don't smoke, don't smoke….the government dope. Smoke weed!" But this is the full text of the piece proving my memory is not very good….but in any case Julie and I have been lifelongs every since.

New Year, New Attitude, Olivia Gatwood and Joan Didion

January 6, 2022 / / 0 Comments

RupalOk, let’s get started. We have a lot to get to. First off, happy 2022. New year, new adventure.

I received a Masterclass subscription for Christmas and I started right away with Ru Paul. I felt he would be the best person to help me reorient myself to the new year. His talk was about recalibrating the self at the deepest level.

The class was not about drag, per se, other than his famous quip, “We’re all born naked, the rest is drag.” It was mostly about tuning your frequency to what people see. Not suprisingly he recommended meditation for this and talked about cycles of cynicism that stall in bitterness, how the ego co-opts joy. He talked about his cultural lighthouses (Monty Python being a surprising one). In the second half, he also gave red-carpet and makeup tips (which are always mesmerizing to watch). For example, he says if you want more money wear a suit. Full stop. I don’t need any more money, so I won’t be buying new suits. But I appreciate the spirit in which that advice was given. He talked about your life’s work being to communicate yourself, but lest we fall into an ego-hole, he also talks about paying it forward and serving others. (“It doesn’t work if we’re all solo agents”). He tells you how to talk to your inner kid.

CornellwestThen I watched the Cornell West Mastercalls which completely turned me inside out. West’s suggestion that we could see differently, act courageously and feel deeply was the invitation I needed to sign up in the first place). Ostensibly this class was an introduction to Philosophy, what does it mean to be human, etc.? Surprisingly he talked a lot about love and music. He asked us to, like Socrates, question our presuppositions. We can’t live without them, he says, but we need to question them with humility. We need to learn how to die. That was a big one. He talks about moving from being an observer to being a participant. He talked about pity versus compassion and he inspired me to read Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh to learn the difference.

I really needed to hear his message about leaving “a bit of heaven” behind “in a world run by the hounds of hell,” to stay out there in the thick of it, even though things are really awful right now. After all, if the cracked vessel Cornell West can move ahead in the world with a positive attitude, what the hell is wrong with me?

He said that no matter how bad things are, love, joy, holiness and the sublime are still happening. (and I have to remind myslef, still happening on the internet). Both Ru Paul and Cornell West helped me reorient myself to 2022, not just in spite of recent anxieties but a lifelong one as well. 

So how do these Masterclasses relate to writing? Well, these talks were both about what you choose to pay attention to and that's what writing is all about at its deepest level too.

That said, I’m excited about two new projects this year, an online poem about my grandfather and a more traditionally conceived Katharine Hepburn epic. NaPoWriMo 2022 is also coming up in April. I’ll only be doing two more years of NaPoWriMo and then I’ll have reached my goal of 300 poems. I haven't decided if I'll follow the prompts one last time or pick another theme.

DidionI was very sad about the news that Joan Didion had passed away. Didion is my favorite writerly model for many reasons. After moving to Los Angeles many years ago Sherry, a friend from Sarah Lawrence College recommended Joan Didion as the best writer about LA (or California, I can’t remember exactly what she said). But yes, she is. I checked out every Joan Didion book from the Redondo Beach library. Although she was not a probable writer for me to love as a John-Wayne loving, glamourous, Hollywood insider. My favorite books of hers were Where I’m From (which helped me think about my own family history in a critical way) and The Year of Magical Thinking (which made me soberly approach my own magical thinking).

Didion also helped me think about Los Angeles in a new way. She talked about America and the cult of exclusion (class, race, etc.)…she understood intelligentsia and she understood California and she was a long-time New York City resident. She could credibly make the case for a west coast intellectualism. And yet no one seemed more included, seemed more a part of the upper crust of that culture than did Joan Didion…and yet she called it out anyway, which is remarkable.

Some interesting tributes online:

Joan Didion and the Voice of America: This piece talks about her connection to Normal Mailer and V.S. Naipaul’s pessimism-as-style, how that was always misread as white-woman fragility. The article also focuses on her important writings about race and how she typed out Hemmingway’s sentences to learn the craft of the sentence. The article also mentions “her ability to combine the specific and the sweeping in a single paragraph.” Apparently the writer is working on a Fall 2022 exhibit on Didion at the Hammer Museum. I look forward to that.

Joan Didion’s California: This article talks about “the foundational mythologies of California” and “Didion’s generational ties with the state…her mercurial and melodious sentences…her signature lilt…her own indelible, intruding, and exacting subjectivity…the routine admission of her presence across all her writings…her deep displays of sentimentality” and how “no one who enunciates the moods of this place [California] quite like Didion does….to write hard about the places we love and has permitted us to be a little glamourous while we do it.”

What Joan Didion Saw:  “Didion was a pattern-seeker” this article says, she found “the markers pointing out how the whole thing worked….through her efforts, the craft of journalism changed…her ominous, valley-flat style…[working] in the danger zone between sensibility and objectivity: to be receptive to a passing feeling, a change in cast, and then to bear down, with unsparing rigor, in the work of understanding why.” The article explains her “flash cuts”…her “restless mind” and quotes Didion to say, “In retrospect, we know how to write when we begin. What we learn from doing it is what writing was for.” Didion teaches us “how to put together a paragraph, whether to add the ‘the’ or not…what to do with those sentences, how to turn the craft of storytelling away from shared delusion, is the effort of a life.”

Nobody Wrote Sentences like her: According to Didion, “to shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” This article talks about her “incisive, steely prose,” the piercing restraint … palpable down to the grammar, which she called “a piano I play by ear.” The article also mentions her musicality, “controlled and concise sentences,” how she deconstructed mythologies including the California dream, the myth of New York City, her disillusionment, her economy, her questioning of the self, her sarcasm and irony, her understatement and the enigmatic way she could convey a mood.

There are two Library of America editions available:

The 60s/70s Joan Didion

The 80s/90s Joan Didion

And a book about her writing style, Joan Didion: Substance and Style by Kalthleen Vandenberg 

Dunne-didionDidon’s husband writer John Gregory Dunne was no slouch about writing about Los Angeles himself. And their movies are worth checking out. A particular favorite of mine from my college Al Pacino obsession is The Panic in Needle Park. 

Didion taught me there was a way to speak as the self in a self-obsessed time, how you can be hard on yourself or ambivalent about yourself without letting yourself either disappear or take over the message. Not that I ever get there, but she’s the writer I most wanted to be like, the reality of her suffering, the mythology of her seemingly enchanted life, the hard, slogging work…all of it.

 

PartyA  friend of mine in Albuquerque recently told me about the book of poetry Life of the Party by Olivia Gatwood because it’s a book about violence against woman (which we were talking about at dinner one night) and because Gatwood is an Albuquerque poet.

There are some really good poems in the book but it was honestly a hard read for me. Very hard. I could only read a few poems A WEEK because I felt the author put herself in dangerous situations and then felt traumatized by them. She did things for men long past when she could (and should) have easily stopped. Dare I even say it, she felt like a doormat complaining about being a doormat.

But I then felt a lot of guilt over blaming the victim (because some crappy things happened to her). Her lack of boundaries frustrated me (granted, I have too many probably) but many of her conclusions were a bridge too far for me.

But that said there were some great poems: “Girl,” “Ode to Pink,” “Ode to the Women on Long Island” (a particularly memorable one  I recommended to Monsieur Big Bang for a character of a show he's working on), “Sound Bites While We Ponder Death."

Over Christmas I discussed the book with friends at a dinner party and how I was struggling over how to verbalize my frustration with Gatwood’s lack of boundaries. My friend who recommended the book, her significant other gently said to me, “maybe her definition of love is very different from yours.” And I was like, oh yeah; that would explain it pretty much. 

Talking about books with other people is a good thing.

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