Bamberging in the Bamberg.
Friday, July 04, 2008


When Oscar Wilde cautioned that, "it is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious," he obviously sided with the charming. Being a fairly tedious person (I write poetry) I can agree with the letter of this aphorism but not with its emphasis. Because isn't it true that, once some genius like Wilde sets the bar on charm, the effect afterward becomes merely inflationary? And with that inflation, don't the charming soon find one another and pretty much stay in that rarified company? So, yeah, charm becomes as superfluous as yachts. Sooner or later, perhaps even now, there will be but one charming person left in the world, an impeccable person who can communicate, in a type of preternaturally gentile super-language, to the three or four also-rans able to decipher her charming jibberish. (Almost all literary fiction, incidentally, aspires to this penultimate state, but never to the top spot. The reason for this? I think it's that novelists are proud of being able to explain the workings of these horribly afflicted, charming circus freaks to the rest of us, and because we sometimes, in our tedium, pay them for privilege.) The rest of us must distinguish among types of tedium -- bulimia, Democratic politics, hedge-fund-management, "interesting" sexual positions, bowling, the eating of pro-biotic yogurts, etc., ad nauseum. The charming are no longer capable of describing this world at all: only the tedious can speak with the prerequisite dull articulation. Except, it happened one time. One time only, as far as I can tell. This rare event was called Cosmos. It's a novella by Witold Gombrowicz.

I'll bore you with the set-up. The narrator, Witold, and an acquaintance met by chance, named Fuchs, meet outside of a remote boarding house in order to get away from the pressing concerns of family and work. Both men are so utterly tedious they find no legitimate way to occupy their time while on vacation. Lucky for them, the discovery of a hanged sparrow, a bit of wood dangling in a decayed bit of masonry, and a few arrows possibly (but not actually) scrawled on the ceiling send them out on a mission to discover their provenance. They closely observe the family -- a stout, tedious, fairly stupid middle class bunch -- for further clues. Witold, in his one act of heroism, gets so frustrated watching the married daughter of the family patriarch interact with her housekeeper and her husband -- so tediously attentive is he in his search for "clues" that a phantom sensuality begins to surround her -- that he eventually strangles her cat. There is a fairly uneventful suicide at the end of the book, but that's pretty much it. It's one of your plotless kind of deals.

Boring, yes? I can't deny it. But consider this: Witold is not really the protagonist. I mean, how could he be, since all protagonism in this novel is charmless and therefore un-literary? Who cares about protagonism among the tedious? So, then, I choose as my protagonist, my hero, (because I have nothing better to do on this July 4th, except maybe write a few poems) Leo the patriarch. It's true, he does takes a long time to reveal himself. The description of him comes early, at the dinner table. "Leo Wotjys was like a gnome. His head was like a gourd, and his bald pate, reinforced by the sarcastic flashing of his pince-nez, dominated the whole table." Leo hums constantly, talks wistfully and abstractly of the past, and lets loose a constant, thin stream of what the narrator calls "verbal monstrosities," as when he wants his daughter to pass him the radishes: "Pray papass to your papakins a radiculous radicule, my precious bulbul."

He is justifiably ignored by the narrator in favor of the unutterable minutia of his daughter's mouth, its particular ghostly relation to the housekeeper's mouth, the arrows on the ceiling, etc. Yet Leo comes to the fore now and again, humming his little songs and rolling up little crumbs of soft bread and lining them up in neat little rows. So far this probably sounds a little sub-Beckettian and you're probably right. It's funny like Beckett, themed like his work, and all written at just about Beckett's level (which, whatever, probably makes it top-notch). Yet Leo becomes more persistent throughout, hums more, suggests a family trip to the mountains. Once there, Leo starts humming like a lunatic, his hands start to flutter, he takes on an aspect of almost manic self-satisfaction. In sight of the mountains, he corners Witold and gives him something akin to a manifesto. It beginns with a word, "Berg," an utter nonesense word which immediately deports Witold to the back of the narrative, and he reacts with ineffectual anger, for "Berg" is the summation of Leo's life, a fully self contained system, encompassing even the narrator, a world in which tedious Leo rules with absolute authority. "So," says Leo, "you are a bamberger, then. You're a sly one. I'm a bamberger too. We shall bamberg happily together."

He elucidates by telling a story. "Once, while we were living at Drohobycz, an actress came to the town on tour, she was a superb creature, absolutely superb," he says (and here he's describing perhaps the only charming personality to ever intersect with his life, someone who, even then, one had to pay to see). He continues,

...and one day I happened by pure chance to touch her hand on the bus, oh, what heaven, what ecstasy, oh, to be able to start life all over again, but it's no good, you can't put the clock back. I felt bitter and resentful, but I ended by pulling myself together and deciding there was no point in wasting time thinking about touching someone else's hand when you had two hands of your own. Believe it or not, after a certain amount of practice you can get quite expert in touching one hand with the other, under the table, for instance...So, I can't complain, I have managed to get something out of life. If others have managed to get more, well, good luck to them.


His manifesto continues. "You can enjoy ourself like a pasha at the dinner table making little bread pellets...Epicurism, or voluptuousness," says Leo, speaking directly to Wilde, "can be of two kinds, it can be like a wild boar, a buffalo or a lion, or it can be like a flea or a mosquito." This is Bergery. I'll get nutty here and say that New York -- charmless, pleasureless New York, defined at every block by bank branches dressed up to look like nurseries -- is full of this bambergery, shameless bambergism. It began with the receptionist at the front of the cubicle block, with all of her little fuzzy-headed trolls lined up on her computer monitor and her teddy bear sweaters and bits of flair, but it has since spilled out everywhere, on the lips of those with liprings, in those disgusting Maori earlobe-holes the punks wear, in the "Gettin' Lucky in Kentucky" T-shirts worn by otherwise healthy-looking Midwestern college boys. Bergery exists in sideburns, flip-flops, Deicide T-shirts, vintage dresses with puffed shoulder sleeves. The five-dollar-bill now shows the Bergery of our treasury by taking on a purplish hue. New York is the epicenter of Berg, its pleasureless people, out brunching or fetishizing new bands with cute new sounds, its foremost ideologues.

I took a lot of pleasure the other day in helping out a pretty, fresh faced worker, a likely example (I see them all the time now that I've read the book), someone with the effronterous Bergery of an Obama pin tacked to the lapel of her grey business ensemble. Someone so white she had little pink blotches on her cheeks, as if her whole body were screaming for Bergism. She said she wanted something for a long weekend trip, and that the last book she read "and really liked" was Michael Chabon's "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay." I suggested Cosmos to her -- "it's a little unusual," I said. "I think you'll like it very much." So triumphant and small did I feel at that moment, I did not even look back at her as she made her purchase and walked outdoors to the perfect little weekend I had designed for her. Cue fireworks, illuminating my face through the window as I sit home, contemplating the small.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:44 PM, ,


Indulge me, is all I ask.
Sunday, June 29, 2008

Sometimes your buddy here at the Entertainment Industry spreads himself a trifle thin and puts into publication things he's carelessly edited. The trusting, kind souls at Stop Smiling let him get away with this often -- they have deadlines, too -- and so you will find in the latest, Gambling-oriented edition of that magazine a column of mine that bears comparison, grammatically, to scrambled eggs. Here is the correction to that article, which will soon appear on the Stop Smiling poetry archive. All I want is your unconditional love.

----

THE SUBTLE ART OF EGOTISM

Night Wraps The Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky
edited by Micheal Almereyda
Farrar Straus and Giroux, $27.00

I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation
Francis Picabia, trans. Marc Lowenthal
MIT, $40.00


Every generation for which poetry isn’t a matter of mere diligence and hard work eventually comes around to Vladimir Mayakovsky. Brash, violent, mercurial, the greatest exponent, avant la lettre, of slam poetry (if poetry could ever be said to “slam,” Mayakovsky’s could), Mayakovsky herded his audience before many a public performance with a hush (“Quiet, my kittens...”) and then, while reciting poems of violent passion, theocide and weird bodily transformations, stepped aside every so often to outholler any and all of his numerous hecklers. And they were numerous. In his lifetime Mayakovsky acted as representative for the literate violence of the movement called futurism. As he matured, he lent his voice to the contentious rule of Vladimir Lenin. Yet he was loved more than any English-speaking poet could dream. When he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart in 1934, upwards of 30,000 people attended his funeral.

Filmmaker Michael Almereyda has assembled a new collection of Mayakovsky’s work, Night Wraps the Sky, in hopes that the Russian futurist will catch on in our own more meritorious age. Alas, we’ll have to wait longer to see a substantial new translation of this very important Russian author’s work, similar in scope to the 1970 Hayward and Reavey translation currently available. This will be, as my Russian-speaking friends tell me, quite difficult: Mayakovsky’s wordplay is uniquely specific to his native language and does not carry over nicely into English. So, though the new translations in Almereyda’s book do pop with life, there are far too few of them. Instead, this is a scrapbook. Memories of Mayakovsky’s life, pictures, and assessments of his legacy are presented here so as to carry over his passion to “shine through to the new tomorrow.” Admirers of beautiful contention will love this, and Night Wraps the Sky should whet their appetites for more.

Another of modernism’s great egoists made a comeback late last year in an exhaustive edition, handsomely designed. Francis Picabia was the self proclaimed “genius, idiot, funny guy” –- add to that, autodidact, reactionary, nihilist –- of French Dadaism. As a painter, he considered himself a rival to Picasso, and when he couldn’t paint, he wrote poems, aphorisms, manifestos and diatribes, all collected in I Am A Beautiful Monster.

Picabia, who flourished in the first three decades of the 20th century, seemed to demand from his contemporaries the respect of a 19th century bourgeois painter of the Ernest Messonier type (with all the roast beef that implies), all the while presenting a public face more or less like Popeye. “My head swells / enough to drive one mad,” he wrote. That swollen head of his got him in trouble with his contemporaries every step of the way.

His poems—tightly wound machines of invective and sharp imagery—feature the most beautiful illogic ever created in that most illogical century. He was also a very strong aphorist, which shows the influence of Nietzche, the only writer he read with anything approaching real seriousness. I find on one page: “It’s really only nonentities who have genius in their lifetime.” And on another: “Spinoza is the only one who hasn’t read Spinoza.” You don’t chew these little morsels without having to spit them out.

The translations from the French by Marc Lowenthal are a real triumph and give nothing to decorum. A shame, then, to find his rather decorous commentary throughout the book—often one will find commentaries wedged between every poem. It’s as if, having unleashed Picabia’s fury on his contemporaries, Lowenthal felt it necessary to qualify it at every step, and the attempt comes across as a little schoolmarmish, especially since Picabia does such a fine job of explaining himself. He once made a sandwich board and forced surrealist doyen Andre Breton wear it around: it distills both Picabia’s Dadaism and the essential conservativism inherent in that movement: “IN ORDER TO LOVE SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO HAVE SEEN IT AND HEARD IT FOR A LONG TIME YOU BUNCH OF IDIOTS.”

posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:43 PM, ,


Battlestar Melodramatica
Thursday, June 26, 2008

Woah. Let's back up a minute. Battlestar Galactica is getting pretty stupid, right? No? Is it just me? You saw it that last episode, right? Like, the scene where Edward James Olmos, alone in his cabin, punches out the mirror, downs a bottle of space-whiskey and then (cut without transition) is found inconsolably weeping in his son's arms, in a scene edited exactly like a Warner Brothers cartoon? If you didn't burst into laughter at that point you must have ice water running through your veins. The show has already become pornography for those who really like to see military types saluting, weeping, or, preferably, both. But this was too much. Fine, I do get it. I do. Edward james Olmos is a good actor, he works really hard, and has been rewarded with a lot of bit parts. I can picture it in my head, how we came to this. Flash back five years. Olmos, fresh from walk-on parts in The West Wing and Touched by an Angel, gets a call from his agent:

AGENT
Eddie, I've got a regular gig for you. Okay, don't get mad. Promise you won't get mad.

OLMOS
I won't get mad, I promise.

AGENT
This could be a regular franchise type of thing. Regular work.

OLMOS
Give it to me.

AGENT
They're remaking Battlestar Galactica for the Sci Fi Network.

OLMOS
Oh, for Christ's...

AGENT
You'll be the lead, Eddie.

OLMOS
(Sigh.) What am I in this one, the Mexican space-drug smuggler? Or, what, the hard-nosed Mexican chief of the space-police? Just give it to me straight.

AGENT
Space captain, sir. You'll be the space captain, or general, or something. The boss.

OLMOS
Just send me the script. I've got to eat. Listen, I've got the one request..

AGENT
I know, Eddie...

OLMOS
I won't wear tights. No fucking tights.

WEEKS PASS

OLMOS
This isn't too bad. Lot's of dialogue, which is nice.

AGENT
And it's a franchise type of thing, potentially.

OLMOS
Let's do this.

TWO YEARS LATER

OLMOS
"Heavy is the head that wears the crown." What do you think?

AGENT
Great, Eddie. What is that, Shakespeare?

OLMOS
Fantastic stuff. Hey, you get any director gigs for me?

AGENT
Just Battlestar, but I'm working on it.

OLMOS
I need to direct. I've got to get in that seat, man.

AGENT
Genius like yours can't be put out to pasture, Eddie. I'm working on it.

OLMOS
Hey, what did you think about that scene where I busted up after finding out Ty was a Cylon?

AGENT
I'll tell you the truth, Eddie. (beat) I was weeping when I saw that.

OLMOS
That's quality television.

AGENT
You're not wrong.

OLMOS
I really felt it, man. I felt that one.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:57 PM, ,


Bedlam
Monday, June 23, 2008


Just saw Bedlam again. The Lewton/Robson team puts almost too fine a point on redeeming the lunatics in this, one of the last films Lewton produced before he lost his wartime pull in the industry. Lewton was determined, as he usually was, to draw a humanist parable out of the raw material of the horror film, and it is in this spirit that Boris Karloff, as Chief Apothecary Simms, represents archetypal tyranny while his inmates of his asylum represent, in almost Capraesque fashion, ordinary folks. They all have bunny eyes. It's Karloff's corrupt order versus the inmates' Romantic disorder.

Yet these inmates are also the monsters on the lobby poster, and as such they are contractually obligated to spring out of the shadows now and again and give the audience a jolt. You don't see their eyes in these scenes, just grasping hands. The horror/civics-lesson divide always gets a little muddled in a Lewton film, which is what's great about them and what turns them into unofficial Hollywood tragedies. Simone Simon, torn between her desire for her husband and her instinct to bite his face off in Cat People, is a clean, classic example. In the case of Bedlam, however, the tragic character is a voiceless mob, and the effect is pretty bizarre.

The climactic horror setpiece in the film, in which the inmates hold court over their tyrannical warden, is a neat set-up, one that echoes M and Fury and even Sullivan's Travels, yet with the promise horror films have that these films don't: that no lawful hand will necessarily come down on Peter Lorre's shoulder at the end of the movie and whisk him away, that no ingenuity or plot contrivance will get Joel McCrea off the chain gang. Yet there's no through-line in the scene in Bedlam, no empathetic characters, just two monsters, tyranny and democracy, pulling the moral of the story into taffy. You've got a guy screaming "cut him in half!" (entertainment!) over and over as the more principled inmates argue (humanism!) for his release: and, since Bedlam is a principled movie, all too much so in this case, this release is granted. Immediately after the inmates enact Roosevelt's Universal Declaration of Human Rights Karloff is (entertainment!) stabbed -- not luridly, almost gently -- with a trowel, and so the panicked inmates mortar Karloff into a wall. When, a few scenes later, the stalwart Quaker hero discovers the fresh mortar, he is inclined to say something about it, but the heroine compels him to keep his mouth shut. (Humanism! no wait, that's awfully pragmatic, isn't it?) "Why should thy hand be added to the weight that those people must bear?" she asks, eyes still large and electrified; she's obviously become unhinged from having been a forced inmate of the asylum herself. You expect him to do his UDHR routine and lecture her about the rights of all men, weak and strong, etc. No. He simply laughs, and it almost looks as if they are going to kiss as the Hogarthian end title appears on the screen. Weirdest scene in Bedlam: the only horror movie I can think of that ends with an explicitly stated moral compromise.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:49 AM, ,


Another Late Night
Monday, June 16, 2008

About once a month I find myself in that lizard-stem-driven state the internet inspires, where at two in the morning I'm googling myself and my friends and all my ex-girlfriends and the alumni of my old high school as well as weighing the merits of the greatest television cop show intros, looking up recipes for nostalgic, disgusting foods I'll never eat again but sort of want to, watching lizards talk bad about seahorses, or searching the Internet Movie Database for great but unappreciated minor actors and so forth. Eventually, and here's the point I'm trying to make, I wind up close to my vocation and wind up looking at poetry blogs. There are a lot of them out there, knitting away. Most of it is brutally out of touch and intellectual in the stupidest sense of the word: see if you can get through the following blog essay and its subsequent reader responses (or, really, any thread relating to the once-inspiring flarf movement) without wanting to take a long nap.

Still, names I know are mentioned, in rare instances I am mentioned in passing as reading with or having read with some more luminous name, and so I read, 2 in the morning becomes 3 in the morning, I find my hobby mirrored by the fruitlessly ambitious as a profession or a revolution (usually both) and myself actually caring about discussions of post-avant poetics or what is the proper motivation for innovative poetic strategy. At the end of it all I just generally feel as if I've been watching suicide porn for the last hour and want to lay down with my head beneath the water -- no thrashing, gently -- and die. In these perambulations, I always come back to two blogs, both of them a cut above the pack and both of them depressing, in their own way.

Joshua Clover's blog is interesting in part because his intellectual qualities are unperturbed by self-consciousness. He has a self confidence that can be profitably argued with, and an ability to reckon with the fact of popular culture -- the way it works, the way it sounds and feels, the way in which it is far more interesting than most poetry -- that bolsters even those ideological claims of his I can't allow myself to agree with.

Jim Behrle, on the other hand, is more complicated. Good luck finding the majority of his acidic little cartoons (Ron: "My answer to the boxers versus briefs question should be engraved onto the side of the Library of Congress" Curtis: "My thong is glistening with devotion!"), as he seems to erase all links to them as he goes along. The effect is funny, at first, then oppressive. The man is inconsolable -- to him, a crowded professional field is akin to apocalypse. For Jim, there are poets everywhere: poets spilling out of the cracks between the saturated wood, poets crawling between the tracks of the subway with the rats, poets of Zeus-like power observing him from the sky, poets serving their kids BBQ on engine-red picnic tables on perfectly manicured suburban lawns, and all of them have blogs, and all passionless, all watering down the sweet Coca-cola of the real with their bloviating. He's right of course, both about the number of poets (and bricklayers, and white-collar office workers, for that matter), and about their ineffectuality. But what does he want, for Robert Lowell to walk the Earth once more? Artists will never be great again, and I take that as a good sign. As many people as possible should play at art and sport, and should not bore us with their professional status or lack thereof. Otherwise, I can't see what politics -- or their weird proxy, blogs -- are for.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:57 AM, ,