Experience, by Martin Amis

"In one of his most stunning utterances Nietzsche said that a joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling. * * A passing note. When Princess Diana died it took four or five days for the jokes to marinate. When John Kennedy Jr died the jokes were instantaneous, electronic, light-speed. The feeling, in other words, had no chance to exist; it was born dead. One wonders, too, about subsequent road kill on the information highway."

It’s an unusual book, more moving in the depth of its completion than any of his novels, even Success and Money, my favorites. He tells the very busy, if at times too baroquely detailed, stories of a) his life up to the moment, b) his relationship with his family with a definite concentration on his father and c) the serial murder of his cousin when he was still a young man. The way he fractures the narrative in time and place is eerie, not quite right, but very poetical and atmospheric, and the three stories, with millions of other smaller stories, insult each other sometimes and cozy up at others. It’s not compelling formally but you enter deeply each scene and vignette. They’re either vivid or vicious (or both).

The photographs he includes in three sections are also intriguing because they’re not really in order and are deliberately misleading in their captions: photographs of his two wives, a couple of lovers, his parents and children and Philip Larkin, and then his cousin Parkington who was strangled (at least) by Frederick West, a particularly horrifying British serial murderer.

And Amis is devoted to poetry. His father was no small poet and his father’s best friend was Philip Larkin. He piggishly smokes cigarettes and drinks and lets it all hang out sexually, but he’s also very interested in how everything appears to him, the way people talk and impress and betray or are just silent toward each other to him, what’s the motivation?

from Jake by Kingsley Amis:

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not the ones he had known and dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of the injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

St. Luke's Labyrinth, Bethesda MD

Today I am planning on taking the kids over to Bethesda, picking up my mother, and walking the nearby St. Luke's Labyrinth. This will accomplish my childrens' longing for mystery and Harry-Potter-like anachronistic gothicisms (i.e., they love labyrinths) and my mother's need to exercise. Supposed to get hot (94 degrees) so we will probably not stay long. Thought I'd write a pre-emptive note about it, to keep me subconsciously alert to any opportunities for concentrated thinking or imagery. Here's the church's opening description of the site: "The labyrinth has a single path for walking into and returning from the center. Unlike a maze, the labyrinth has no false turns or blind alleys. You cannot get lost." What's not to love about that? Also, the church's suggested prayer for meditation while walking: "Bless this labyrinth and all who walk it, O God. By the power of your Holy Spirit, make this a safe path, a path of discovery, a holy path. May all who walk this path be strengthened to serve all creation in your name."

Letter's to Wendy's

September 27, 996

If we think of the future as the Pritty Titty Bah-B-Q, and the past as a Motion-Excreting Machine (excreting through the pores), we get a much clearer picture of the present. Will the present is forever beginning to be a buffet, it is always already eaten away to the point of shimmering. This shimmering should not be confused with what is actually edible.

Wendy's restaurant comment cards beg customers to "Tell us about your visit," and Wenderoth writes a year-long diary this way.

They call it fiction but I was reading it like a long thick burger of prose poems: am I wrong. There are no characters but the speaker. There is no plot but the calendar.

If there are themes to the entries (each one no longer than a medium-length paragraph of five or six sentences, and some shorter than that), they are pornography, American plastic culture, a sort of existential philosophy tethered by junk food and anonymity, solipsistic desire-fulfillment. But it's funnier than all that, sad, too, sometimes, in a sentimental way.

In fact, the Wendy's setting provides the intellectual space for an almost infinite deconstructive exercise.

November 25, 1996

This idiotic notion that one should love the other customers. Love here really only means: agree, for the time being, not to attack. People pretend, though, that each customer is an irreplaceable piece of some priceless puzzle -- like the death of each customer is significant for every other customer. It's just not true; one cannot love what one does not know, and -- unfortunately -- one knows very little.'

November 27, 1996

The Virgin Mother appeared to me today. She was holding two baked potatoes with sour cream and chives. "The're delicious," she said, and she smiled, emanating a great white light. I took one from her. It was warm and inviting. I cut into it with my plastic fork and plastic knife and I took a bite. It was, as usual, very dry. She held out the other potato to me. "You try it," I said, "it's dry as fuck."

December 11, 1996

Thinking presses on one, demands that being admit its foundation in sense. Faith relieves this pressure. Its strange babbling is learned intuitively, like a way of laughing. The most stupefying faith there has ever been is the faith in "heaven." Such a faith proposes the abrupt and complete end of sense. This proposal cannot even conceivably be accepted, however much one cries, "I accept, I accept."

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

By the end of the year it happened that she had quite lost interest in the man himself, but was deeply absorbed in his mind, from which she had extracted, among other things, his religion as a pith from a husk. Her mind was as full of his religion as a night sky is full of things visible and invisible. She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time.

the creme de la creme

the dialogue for the character of Jean Brodie is almost impossible to excerpt, it is all pitch-perfect and eminently quotable.

Throne of Blood by Akira Kurosawa

The reason this film trumps all other Shakespeare adaptions to cinema is simple: it doesn't care a whit for the original, cerebral, figurative and image-laden language. It carves all the meat off the bone of the plot, and uses music, atmosphere, stark melodramatic performances, and visual imagery instead.

Some of the sounds -- the wind howling up and down Mount Fuji, where the film was located, the whinnying of the battle-mad horses, the solid percussion of the actors' bare feet running in measured syncopated blocking, the whistle and impact of arrows -- take on the force of characters themselves.

Yamada's Lady Asaji is bone-chilling. Her face barely moves, her pale white makeup is passive, and she has eyebrows drawn on two level of her forehead. When she finally breaks down near the film's end, endlessly washing her spotless hands in a room whose walls are covered with an innocent victim's blood (the notorious traitor Fujimaki killed himself in the same room, now known as the Forbidden Room), wailing that she can't get clean, the effect is almost euphoric. Earlier, she exits through a panel in the dwelling's wall, vanishing into pitch black, then returning seconds later with a pitcher of drink for her husband.

Mifune's Washizu scowls even when he is laughing.

mist, colossal trees dripping with rain, rich black volcanic soil and bulky fortress architecture

Noh thousand-year-old theatrical tradition

The Noh stage must have on it three pine branches and a symbolic Shinto temple-arch. In the film, shots are carefully composed to include tangles of branches in the foreground, and the vast entrance gate of Washizu's fortress serves for the temple arch.
A Noh play features a "doer" (Shite) and a "companion" (Waku) who plays a subordinate role. Washizu and Asaji are the Shite and Waku respectively. Elements in the Noh include a battle-drama (we get one here) and a so-called "wig drama", in which a female character dominates the action. This is the central portion of the film, in the quiet of the fortress quarters, when Asaji ruthlessly manipulates her husband's ambition. Every Noh play has a ghost which appears to the Shite, and the spirit in the forest fulfils that function. Noh plays are never original works, in that (by a venerable convention) they are re-workings of ancient legends. Kurosawa follows tradition by quarrying his tale from Shakespeare's play.

There is no western term to describe the stylized striking of poses so important in Noh. Our word "dance" is a crude word which approximates to, but does not convey, the grace of the Japanese art-form. Asaji, alone with the blood-stain, gives us a glimpse of this delightful ritual.

Finally, Noh contains an aural richness almost totally absent from western tragedy - the complex rhythms of stamping and percussion which accompany the spoken word. In the film, the rhythmic patterns of horses' hooves on soil, and Washizu's bare feet on the boards of the banquet hall, are meant to reinforce the mood as they creep into our emotions by subliminal insistence.

Drama City by George Pelecanos

Drama City is my introduction to homegrown DC crime writer George Pelecanos, and I am mightily impressed. The crime plot is good , the characters very solid (a paroled felon trying to go straight as an animal-control officer, his very sympathetic and secretly sex-addicted female parole officer), it meshes mightily halfway through and I couldn't put it down -- but it's the Washington DC landscape Pelecanos paints that is most impressive. The Georgia Avenue-Petworth-Shaw corridor geographical and sociological detail which he provides are mesmerizing. Having just finished Richard Price's monumental Lush Life, about criminals and wannabes and yuppies and tired cops on Manhattan's lower East Side, it was easy for me to peg Pelecano's as our own Price.

Jamesland by Michele Huneven

This gorgeously-written eclectic novel takes place in the Los Feliz neighborhood near Hollywood, in Los Angeles. Equal parts philosophical/religious treatise, self-help/addiction/mental-health handbook, and deep character-based fiction along the lines of a Henry James, the Jamesland of the title actually refers to Henry's older brother William James, widely credited with the invention of modern psychology, but also a well-know philosopher and religious thinker.

The three central characters: Helen Harland, a Unitarian Universalist pastor struggling to hold onto her year-old position at a new church, where she is faced with a congregation that finds her too religious, Pete Ross, forever pondering the question "How do people live in this world?", a mentally-ill, obese, renowned chef who suffered numerous breakdowns, lost his job, wife and children and is now living with his mother (who became a nun at age 40), and Alice Black, sometimes-bartender, great-great-granddaughter of William James, caring for her eccentric, sometimes brilliant, sometimes-demented great-aunt Kate, who is writing a book on William James, but alternately delusional and believing she is living in William James' time. Alice is reeling from her affair with the husband of movie star.

The plot is a series of dinners and events planned by Helen in which she gradually brings the two misfits Alice and Pete together, at the same time finding peace herself with her annoying congregation and distant husband. Pete's exotic cuisines (from his stint as an accomplished chef), Alice's aunt's detailed obsession with the religious, philosophical and extra-sensory research of Williams James also contribute to the tapestry.

Road Dogs

Elmore Leonard's latest offering centers around two men who became friends doing prison terms in Florida, who reunite in Venice Beach after getting out, to squabble over a woman, who tries to play them both and take the money and row.

Once again we meet Jack Foley fished out of the clink after serving some years of a 30-year sentence. Inside he has met and befriended Cundo Rey, a dimunitive, wealthy, aggressive and sex-crazed Cuban who pulls some of his many strings and gets them both out early.

Cundo's wife Dawn (both Cundo and Dawn are also recurring Leonard characters ). But Dawn is lovely and wily (and maybe a psychic), Cundo is a murderously jealous husband who may well think Jack owes him big-time, and Jack? Well, when you've robbed a hundred-twenty or so banks, is it that easy to go straight?

I marvel at Leonard's dialogue-writing skills. This book is fully 75% dialogue.

“What I don’t understand,” Cundo said, walking the yard with Foley, “I see you as a hip guy, you smart for a fucking bank robber, but two falls, man, one on top the other, you come out you right back in the slam. Tell me how you think about it, a smart guy like you have to look at thirty years.”

Foley said, “You know how a dye pack works? The teller slips you one, it looks like a pack of twenties in a bank strap. It explodes as you leave the bank. Something in the doorframe sets it off. I walk out of a bank in Redondo Beach, the dye pack goes off and I’m sprayed with red paint, people on the street looking at me. Twenty years of going in banks and coming out clean, my eyes open. I catch a dye pack and spend the next seven in federal detention, Lompoc, California. I came out,” Foley said, “and did a bank in Pomona the same day. You fall off a bike you get back on. I think, Good, I’ve still got it. I made over six grand in Pomona. I come back to Florida— my wife Adele divorced me while I’m at Lompoc and she’s having a tough time paying her bills. She’s working for a magician, Emile the Amazing, jumping out of boxes till he fired her and hired a girl Adele said has bigger tits and was younger. I do a bank in
Lake Worth with the intention, give Adele the proceeds to keep her going for a few months. I leave the bank in the Honda I’m using, America’s most popular stolen car at the time. Now I’m waiting to make a left turn on to Dixie Highway and I hear the car behind me going va-room va-room, revving up, the guy can’t wait. He backs up
and cuts around me, his tires screaming, like I’m a retiree waiting to make the turn when it’s safe to pull out.”

“You just rob the fucking bank,” Cundo said.

“And this guy’s showing me what a hotdog he is.”

“So you go after him,” Cundo said.

“I tore after him, came up on the driver’s side and stared at him.”

“Gave him the killer look,” Cundo said.

“That’s right, and he gives me the finger. I cranked the wheel and sideswiped him, stripped his chrome and ran him off the road.”

“I would’ve shot the fucker,” Cundo said.

“What happened, I tore up both tires on the side I swiped him. By the time I got the car pulled over, a deputy’s coming up behind me with lights flashing.”

“Tha’s called road rage,” Cundo said. “I’m surprise, a cool guy like you losing it. How you think it happen?”

“I wasn’t paying attention. I let myself catch a dye pack in Redondo Beach, something I swore would never happen. The next one, seven years later, you’re right, I lost it. You know why? Because a guy with a big engine wearing shades, the top down, no idea I’d just robbed a bank, made me feel like a wimp. And that,” Foley
said, “is some serious shit to consider.”

“Man, you got the balls to bust out of prison, you don’t have to prove nothing.”

“Out for a week and back inside.”

“What could you do? The girl shot you, the chick marshal. You don’t tell me about her.”

Karen Sisco. Foley kept her to himself. She gave him moments to think about and look at over and over for a time, a few months now, but there weren’t enough moments to last thirty years.

Lush Life by Richard Price

Lush Life, Richard Price

Buddha from Brooklyn

The Buddha from Brooklyn

Brothers by Hua

Brothers, Yu Hua

Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurty

Streets of Laredo, Larry McMurtry

Poor George by Paula Fox

Poor George, Paula Fox

This is a slow-working novel, like a drink you've never had before and doubt its kick, and then you wake up with a broken tooth, a throbbing headache, lying next to a woman who doesn't speak English.

Toni Frissell, a woman floating in the water at weeki wachee spring florida for harpers bazaar (1947)

Lonesome Dove

So I'm 20 years behind on this phenomenon, but it has waited patiently for me. What a fine book! Not fancy except in its panorama, not sophisticated except in its characters, not exotic except in its elevation of the cliched American West. I recall shunning Larry McMurtry because he was too popular. Ah, youth. I can't imagine writing a novel this profound and this popular, this accessible. Every character grows over time, and eventually shows even a sliver of humanity or fatefulness that allows the reader to empathize with them (except, perhaps, Blue Duck, the murderous, rapacious soulless Indian outlaw, who kills everything in his past).

About halfway through the book I started sensing there was something beyond cowboy camraderies to Call and Gus' relationship: it is essentially a chaste gay marriage that they call the Lonesome Dove Ranch.

The TV mini-series is wonderful, too. Producation values are a little tacky, a little late-80s, but what are you going to do with on a mini-series budget? Robert Duval absolutely nails Gus, and Tommy Lee Jones is excellent as the stony, silent Call. Ricky Schroeder (!) is impressive as the young boy Newt.

California Sorrow by Mary Kinzie, Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid by Simon Armitage

In California Sorrow, Mary Kinzie writes in free verse, and not just any old free verse, but open field, fragmented, white-spacey free verse. I like her 2007 book a great deal, find it oddly confessional ("First Passion" and "Privilege," for example) and plainspoken in places, from this sternest, most latinate and eytmologically-gravest poet. The marvelous prose poem, "The Poems I Am Not Writing," is a John Koethe-like discursion on the process and prayer of writing poetry, training oneself to write away from the center, to allow the poem to show itself despite your best efforts to cloud the issue with your conscious effort and ideas. She comes up with the phrase "windless bony dusk" in one of the prose sections, and then attacks it:

"'Windless, bony dusk' is rather good, but in prose it is just too pleased with itself. A poem I am not writing yet might chasten it."

A History of Cereal and Violence

Behind the times, as usual: just saw the sort-of gripping movie A History of Violence, which actually feels like a graphic novel without resorting to any animation whatsoever. Over the years, I'd seen the preview so often -- the loaded momentary truthfulness of Viggo Mortenstern's innocent life, the heavy foreshadowing (Ed Harris' scarred face and destroyed eye) that maybe old Viggo weren't so nice -- that I felt like I'd already seen the movie. Still, it's not far from being a pretty good movie -- how faintly can I praise it? Certainly, the sex scene with Maria Bello on the stairs (the two people I mentioned the movie to immediately referenced that), not to mention the 69 scene with her in a cheerleader outfit, are outstanding, and easily made the movie half its money. But what about the cereal box in several intimate breakfast scenes? I'm talking, of course, about Honey Bunches of Oats.
Why is Honey Bunches of Oats featured in at least two breakfast scenes? I can't think of a gentler cereal, it's almost Shakespearean in its sweetness:

Nay, though thou would run with me,
run down through thorn-scored hayricks in the crick,

shall I roll with thee in pearled honey bunches of oats.

John Adams and George III

I am no student of history. Rather, I am a lousy student of history, allowing the neat HBO John Adams series to drive me to the David McCullough book itself. And it might just have been Paul Giamatti's swell performance that made it so compelling, but I found particularly moving the moment when Adams goes to England after England has capitulated and surrendered and signed a treaty with the new United States. Adams must face the King in proper form and with due respect, and declare the United States' intention to become, if not at once, eventual fast friends with England.

Again, my poor historicism shows: I can't tell from the book whether Adams' remarks to the King are written down in the first place, and then recited to the King, or whether he just wings it in his audience, then later reconstructs the text in peace. Ditto with the King's words. But it's moving -- on both ends -- the words these two countries seemed to share in order to heal wounds and begin a reconciliation, the kind of moment that often must go forgotten in the forward rush of progress and time and rapid change.

First, John Adams to the King:

"The United States have appointed me their minister plenipotentiary to Your Majesty. The appointment of a minister from the United States to Your Majesty's Court will form an epoch in the history of England and of America. I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow-citizens, in having the distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty's royal presence in a diplomatic character; and I shall esteem my self the happiest of men if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more an dmore to your Majesty's royal benevolence, and of restoring an entire esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor between people who, though separated by an ocean and under different governments, have the same language, a similiar religion, and kindred blood. I beg your Majesty's permission to add hat although I have some time before been intrusted by my country, it was never in my whole life in a manner so agreeable to myself."

Then Adams, who had been closely watching the King as he spoke, noticed the King "was much affected, and answered me with more tremor than I had spoken with":

The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feeling you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister. I wish you, sir, to believe, and that it be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.

LOST it is

LOST has become ludicrous. I was with the bs of the smoke monster, the bs of the hatch, even the bs of the "udders" (as Jin calls The Others). But ya lost me with all the time travelling.

Why? Time travel has a way of snuffing out of the force of narrative. It makes a wimpy, whimsical thing out of causality, the "necessary relationship of one thing (cause) to another (effect)," and so on. It makes a racehorse plot into a silly flying horse: sure it looks cool, but it's hard to believe.

The actors look exhausted from the strain of so much explaining, too, as if they were also reading the crawl along the bottom of the screen of some episodes, where back-story is given "for those just tuning in." Right. Explain explain explain. Jack has lost all of his authority to Sawyer, who now runs the show. Sawyer looks exhausted by the sublime effort of making love to Juliet. Ben continues to be beat up by just about everybody in the cast, his face is always mangled, but no one has the good sense to kill him and end our misery. Hurley can't lose weight no matter how far back in time he goes. Kate looks continually peeved and sunburnt. I could go one, but why bother? This guy's got the whole annoying thing covered.

The Frail Nightmares of the Observer

An extraordinary late poem by Bishop. Free verse, the first person plural narrator turning into a first person narrator, the beach setting, the minute and stunning description ("the color of mutton-fat jade"), the self-correcting, polite diction, the fleeting surreality (the lion sun who batted the kite from the sky):

The End Of March by Elizabeth Bishop

For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
--it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost...
A kite string?--But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of--are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I'd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l'américaine.
I'd blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
--at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by--perfect! But--impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
--a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

Jerome Mazzaro, in his review of Bishop's premature Complete Poems in 1968, remarks on the "isolation" of each of her poems:

"This sense of boundaries... militates against any cumulative effects and keeps her works discrete ... Miss Bishop does not want to create an imagined cosmos to compete with the real world. She wants her readers to return to life, not to escape into some cozy, romantic archipelago which she can create either in Maine or Brazil."

David Kalstone wrote about Bishop for the first time in Partisan Review after the publication of Complete Poems, in an pioneering essay in the history of Bishop scholarship called "All Eye":

"It should be clear that when Miss Bishop writes about nature, about objects, about experiences, it is with a very strong sense of their intractability and challenge. Nature cannot easily be combed for moral emblems. Her poems, every bit as conservative in form as other poems of the forties and fifties, are much stranger than what in those decades we took to be poetry. What the sixties have left behind is a notion, a false reading perhaps encouraged by Eliot's criticism, of the perfect "metaphysical" poem, one in which an observed object or action can be taken securely as an "objective correlative" for inner experience ... Going back to Miss Bishop's poems, one finds it all there without any fuss: the most precise psychological connections made between the needs of exact observation and the frail nightmares of the observer, between the strangeness of what is seen and the strangeness of the person seeing it."

Both of the above are taken as excerpts from Brett C. Miller's biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Also learned from that biography that Bishop attended a wedding for the first time in her life at age 62.