let it be remembered that America’s literary pantheon
is full of nuts and felons
“Great Balls of Fire”: Wake Up, Country Music Hall of Fame!
Peter Guralnick makes his sharpest case yet for Jerry Lee’s Lewis’s genius and backs it up with two great videos in this piece, which he originally posted at his soul-deep blog www.peterguralnick.com.
Two Joes and a Jill
On December 12, 1942, The New Yorker published a 7000-word profile, entitled “Professor Seagull,” by Joseph Mitchell. The subject was Joe Gould, a 53-year-old Greenwich Village eccentric, who was said to be writing an “Oral History of Our Times,” consisting of a record of conversations he had overheard over the last decades and essays related to these conversations. It was, Gould claimed, several times the length of the Bible and, most likely, the longest book ever written.
Irrevocable
During the last years of her life, Diane Arbus visited institutions for the mentally ill to photograph the residents, people often physically as well as mentally disabled. I remember being repelled by these photographs, and gathered that Arbus had by now crossed a line in her own mental state, becoming engulfed by a spiritual/emotional darkness from which she would never recover. She committed suicide by slitting her wrists in 1971 at the age of 48.
I happened to come across a French edition of the photographs while I was reading Diane Arbus: A Chronology 1923-1971 and they didn’t look the same. Arbus writes in A Chronology of the gossamer quality of the light in these images, which were taken mostly outdoors at sunset, and the photographs now seemed suffused with the deepest tenderness. It’s as if Arbus is photographing the soft underside of the human psyche — the pre-rational child that can scarcely navigate. It isn’t a pretty picture except that it looked now like only another natural part of the whole operating system of reality, including the light in which she finds it.
Love in the Western World
“I have a confession,” he said to his wife. The children were watching something in the other room. A cooking show. A cooking show about cupcakes. “I am besieged with artifacts and associations and they are cluttering my mind to the point of not being able to function.”
“Does that mean you are ready to throw them out? Because they are cluttering the house.”
“Let me tell you about one of them, ok? An artifact in my head. One example. Then we can see.”
Open Source (Poems from “Hammer & Consort”)
Horse History
My father said he was a horse:
strong, stupid, black.
He used to make a fist
like a colt’s muscled knee
when he spoke such verities.
Prodigal Fathers
Fathers are universal. We’ve all had one, and some of us have had more. In my case I had the same one three times. By that I mean…Well, maybe I ought to start from the beginning.
Trump and the Media
“Let Trump be Trump his aides has always insisted. And let his convention serve as an unapologetic tribute to his singular, erratic, untamed persona. ‘I want,’ the candidate has often said, ‘to be myself.’” (“In Trump’s Voice, It’s a New Nixon,” Michael Barbaro and Alexander Burns NY Times, July 19.) But who is that myself? If one looks to his political identity in the views that he has expressed over the years, one is baffled by their contradictions, incoherence and vacuous expression, unless, that is, one sees them as symptoms of a mental condition.
Like, A Prayer
“To the victor belong the spoils!” That was Camille Paglia’s reaction, reported in a May Salon article, to what she referred to as “the sexiest picture published in the mainstream media in years”—a photo showing a besuited Donald Trump looming possessively over his seated date at a banquet in the early 90s, his pendulous necktie practically tracing the word “phallus” in the air for the benefit of all easily impressed onlookers. Paglia apparently being one of them, although she wasn’t invited to the banquet—for her, the tie is a “phallic tongue” and Trump resembles “a triumphant dragon,” his “spoils” worthy of Rita Hayworth comparisons.
Gabby Douglas (Fifth Goddess from the Sun)
More than a hand
not pressed obediently to a heart.
More even than my muscled ass
still seated when my teammates soared.
My purple-lipsticked pout
My messy (read “Black”) hair.
My face
honest with disappointment.
A Revolution is Not a Dinner Party
Does the word “revolution” mean the same thing to the Kurdish liberation movement and to American leftists who supported Bernie Sanders? A little history…
Norton’s Big Check
This story poem about a working class hero’s lost weekend, which First originally published in 2012, is a favorite of Mark Dudzic and it brings home class struggles that inform Dudzic’s analysis of Trumpism. (See Mr. D.’s post below.) Like Dudzic, Smucker is alive to the difference between the collective idea that still shapes aspects of working class culture and the ethos of “The Golden Boy on the Way Up.”
Smucker finds lyricism in lives at risk of being trumped now, if only in the society of spectacle. Whenever this editor re-reads “Norton’s Big Check,” I’m reminded of Hemingway’s memorable mockery of proletarian lit in the bar scene late in To Have and Have Not. But “Norton’s Big Check” is no joke. Though it’s not solemn. It even has something like a happy ending. While Smucker isn’t beamish, that finish is a sign he believes in more than Hem’s nada. B.D.
Democracy in the Streets
Chauncey DeVega first posted this piecce about a Chicago Black Lives Matter demonstration last month. But his report has gained resonance since the Republican and Democratic Conventions instantiated opposing visions of the American condition.
Telegraphing the Future
Johnny Cash’s cover of “Sea of Heartbreak” fades out with the guitarist in his band (the Heartbreakers) locked on the familiar, insinuating riff from Bob Dylan’s “I Want You.”[1] Cash’s endgame mixes up his story of lost love with fanship. It’s a rootsy, Prousty lesson in counterpoint that hints what Dylan’s song owed to Don Gibson’s 1961 hit, even as it bows to what Cash’s old friend found down by the “Sea.”
Top of the Fox
They tore down the Fox Theatre on Market Street in Philadelphia in 1980.
The Art of Dealing
You and me better spend some time wondering what to choose—“Deal” (Hunter, Garcia)
I once read a bit of one of Trump’s books off a display table in a bookstore. If it was Art of the Deal, I would have been in my mid-twenties. The story I read stuck with me.
Overkill
Hard to argue with lefty sportswriter Dave Zirin’s point that players should be free to determine their own venues, but Kevin Durant’s move to the Warriors strikes at the heart of what makes professional sports interesting; dare I say “worthwhile”? Competitive balance and team cohesiveness.
Sexual Politics
I don’t know what to make of the Trump thing. I don’t think anybody does—not even Trump. Its agenda is as yet unformed, but the model of a racist strongman is already there. Economic anguish, racial distress, status anxieties, terrorism—all play a part. Some of the anger is real, and some of it is a fantasy projection. Taking this apart will take some time, at which point it may be too late.
But let’s begin with sexual politics, not just because it’s such a powerful force to begin with, but because it’s clearly a motivating factor in this election.