Prose Toad Literary Blog

Dawn of the Modern Age

2006-06-07T21:26:00.000-07:00

I believe it was Hemingway that said all modern American literary writing is derived from one book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. You can find an excellent free copy of the great book in Project Gutenberg. There is one section in HF in particular that any English prof worth his salt will pin point in a fierce lecture. To set the scene, Huck has run away from a churchy Aunt Polly and a drunken, abusive father. He rafts down the Mississippi River and picks up Aunt Polly’s slave, Jim. Jim is afraid he'll be sold off from his wife and children. Jim and Huck share various adventures, but they get into real trouble when two thieves, The King and The Duke threaten Jim’s freedom. Indeed, Jim would be sold down the river. The easy way out would be for Huck to write a letter to Aunt Polly. Then Jim would be Aunt Polly’s slave again. In the mid-19th Century, the ownership of a slave seemed most natural. Jim was a nigger and that meant he had no standing. Men and women were sold every day. Children were sent off never to be seen again. The misery of servile labor and harsh conditions seemed the natural order of the universe. In fact, the local preacher would rationalize: God intended the animal like nigger to live under the guidance of Christian whites. The following passage is the dawn of the modern age:

“I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and wea-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up

Deborah Batterman's, Shoes Hair Nails Review by Kim Rush

2006-05-14T08:16:00.000-07:00

Artifacts, Relationships, and Universal Human Value

Joseph Campbell offers, in his interpretation of James Joyce’s concept of proper art, that proper art is a static moment that dissipates one’s ego into that aesthetic enchanting experience. Deborah Batterman achieves this for the audience in her new book of short stories, Shoes Hair Nails.

In a fata morgana effectual story telling structure, Batterman, by an expository, essayistic prose style, carries the reader via the first person female narrative voice through normal, everyday events bound together by simple human artifacts as leitmofifs that also title her stories. These artifacts and perspectives--female in character, as represented by the book’s title, go beyond their simplicity to achieve an universal human value for all readers. The values of love, suffering, desire, and such, are bound together by a masterful median thread of the artifacts themselves--as exemplified in “”Shoes” where a collage of personal connections with shoes quick-steps the reader to the story’s painful ending.

This thread concept works as a foundational connection cord to the tapestry of imagery and human experience expressed in the whole of the book. Batterman, however, adapts the plot structure of each story to enhance each story’s theme. These various patterns of progression move the rising tension in a subtle and unique way to enhance the story, its theme, and movement to the unexpected climax.

With minimal description of the main character of each story, Batterman still presents a main character that the reader perceives through his/her transactional connection to the story, as a well rounded, familiar character.

For the male reader who may be unwilling to go beyond the female title motif, do not fear, for Batterman follows the Aristotelian golden mean—finding the middle between two opposing sides, male, female perspectives, to achieve a fully respected and enjoyed universal human value commonality of human life.

Yuri Lotman said that, “Art is the language of life.” In Licentia Poetica--the freedom of expression of art, the artist is free to express whatever he/she wants in an artistic stylistic form. Batterman joins Lotman’s language of life into her artistic female fiction perspective and gives to her readers an assortment of stories that leave the reader thinking beyond each story’s conclusion. To be successful in this manner, for a writer, is the highest compliment to be given. Batterman offers in her Licentia Poetica a fine story collection achieving Lotman’s and Joyce’s concept of true art.

Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep

2006-05-02T06:01:00.000-07:00

I heard about Prep by way of Arts Journal, Terry Teachout’s blog. I thought, gad another tiresome J D Salinger tome, this time written by a young woman. Oh no! Chick Lit! Before going into full bodice buster alert, I read what Terry had to say, putting the book on my list. Three months later I read and guess what? I loved Prep, and Curtis Sittenfeld, now a thirty-something I think, has written a fine book. She’s the new Jane Austen. Austen's country gentry morph into rich American High School kids. Curtis’s alter ego, Lee Fiora has wrestled a scholarship to a fancy private school on the East Coast. She thinks it’ll be really cool, but maybe she should have attended an Indiana high school and partied with her true peers. The rich aren’t like you and me said an author once.

So overachieving Lee at fourteen is overwhelmed immediately without mom and dad for a prop up. The kids are smart, rich and savvy, and they seem to have a cultural code written in invisible ink. Snafu after awkward embarrassment befalls our heroine and she is beaten down into a sniveling cracker eater. For the next four years, she over-analyzes every social move to the point of teen paralysis. In less weighty hands than Ms. Sittenfeld, Lee would be considered a boring navel gazer which is a step or two lower than a senseless slacker, but her gazing is so insightful and clever, though often wrong-headed, we wonder if her logic would overcome Socrates.

The title brings to mind the young adult market, but Prep is not for kids. You can put an R rating in those argyle socks, because Lee is so passive, the local heartthrob can pretty much write his own ticket on her ass. In the end, I’m paraphrasing Sittenfeld, high school is a golden opportunity of possibility, but adulthood: you are what you are.

I read the author interview included in the Random House Trade Paperback, 2005 and was surprised that Sittenfeld attended, nay, endorses the famous Iowa Workshop where she loved her teachers. How often do you hear that kind of thing, but between preppy school connection and workshop crony, obviously her work has gotten about. She says she is not a fan of precious prose with limp plotting. She’s kind of an old fashioned entertainer though I can assure you she writes beautifully. I hope to hear more from this rising star.

Underground Literary Alliance Protest

2006-04-17T18:37:00.000-07:00

Editors note: I'm late with the announcement. My apologies to Pat Simonelli of the ULA

Our rallying cry:"FREE THE BEATS!"Read all about it:*Top ULA activist Patrick King dishes our beef with the Columbia Howl event in a Monday Report published March 6, 2006....

SORRY, BUKOWSKI by P.L. George

2006-04-04T20:01:00.000-07:00

So I started this experiment that has been bubbling in me for a long time. To submit a legends’ work and see who rejects it. Partly because I wanted to feel better about my own stories and to finally do what most writers have thought about doing but didn’t have the balls to.

So I’d had five big lit journals on my radar for pushing two years, five high cliffs, five on my shit list.

I’ve got all of Charles Bukowskis’ books except for some of his beginning works in small lit journals because I can’t afford them on E-bay. I first took one of his short story collections, “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town”, published by City Lights, circa 1967. As I skimmed through those drunk bard stories, I pick one that’s semi- obscure, something all Bukowski, but without the appearance of the age of when it was written. I picked “Trouble With a Battery”, a story that’s all Chuck, where he ends up fucking a girl in a bed above a bar with her brother alongside them. I submit from a friends’ computer under the name of Chuck Bukow so no one will recognize my email address. The others who don’t accept e-mail submissions I strictly adhere to those guidelines, all those hoops, SASE, title page, some aloof bio, the works. This is all pushing nine months ago.

The first, Paris Review took the longest, approximately eight months. I went to the mailbox and the envelope was thin and light. Inside was the card they always give out, a one-size-fits-all rejection slip. The second, Iowa Review I always liked because Vonnegut used to edit for them now and again. But I always had reservations about them, that workshop cult, that doesn’t let the outside in. I get a rejection letter, but also something in ink. “Too much vulgarity, you need to learn to say things without expletives”. You hear that Charles, you don’t know how to write without a fuck you thrown in now and again. The third, Glimmer Train, I submitted to their contest with my own money in tribute to this dead author whom I respect. They don’t comment, just say that they regret they can’t use it and list the winners. Women editors, they don’t get it. The fourth was Tin House. I don’t really know if they read much of anything. You know how it is, that aura that drips off that little slip they give out all impersonal and what not. Rejection number four. The fifth is Zoetropes’-All Story, extremely heavy competition. They give options for films for accepted stories. They also had given out written comments on the bottom of my rejection slips. I’m thinking film, maybe they’d remember “Barfly” with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, jar their movie archived heads. I’m sorry Chuck, I’ve never received a comment like this. “Too vulgar, don’t submit here, not right, if this is an example of your best,” and I quote all of this. Ouch.

So the poet laureate dies in these big modern lit mags. You five are all indicted. All you writers out there, scribbling in your caves take heart. Old Buck’s been put on the ash heap too.

REVIEWS OF FOUR NEW POETS

2006-03-28T18:09:00.000-08:00

· Nancy Guaquier: Words
· Oren Wagner: The Last Redcoat
· Steve Henn: The Seedy Underbelly of the High-falutin’ Oversoul
· Mark Gaudet: Just Another Adolescent Braggart

By: Charles P. Ries
Word Count: 2,189

I was thinking: What constitutes a new or emerging poet? Who fits the definition of young talent? Is it a function of age or how long they been writing; or maybe how long they have been actively submitting work and proving their worth in the market. I see names of many new poets pop up as I read print and electronic magazines. Those with talent and persistence will become as recognizable as Alan Catlin, Justin Barrett, Michael Kriesel, John Sweet, Ellaraine Lockie, AD Winans and Lyn Lifshin. Those who lack talent and persistence will tire out and blow away. It’s the rising and falling breath of the small press. But I wanted to know, what is new, who is young and what is emerging? I thought about this as I reviewed the work of four poets who all began submitting work a few years ago, and who, on average, have fewer then eight publication credits. One is in his 20’s, two are in the 30’s and one is in her 60’s; and for the sake of this discussion I will define all of them as new faces and emerging voices in the small press.

************.
WORDS
By: Nancy Gauquier
12 Poems / 29 Pages / $5
Weird City Publishers
P.O. Box 8245
Santa Cruz, CA 95061

Words by Nancy Gauquier is mind blowingly clever, fast, nimble, insightful and fun. As I read Words, I thought how such new talent could write with this great range and agility? But then I found out this emerging talent was sixty years old and learned she, “flirted with theatre, tried stand-up comedy for a year or two on the gay circuit in San Francisco. They had the best comedy! And they actually let me on the stage!”

She has not been published much in the small press. “I have been published in several mostly local, now defunct, very small circulation literary magazines that very few people have ever heard of. And three publications that are still alive and functioning.” I than asked her how long she’s been writing, “I've written poetry off and on since adolescence, but only in the last few years have I decided to take it "seriously" (only I don't know if that's the right word). To commit to it. To trust myself to just keep writing. To not lose heart.” I asked her how she developed poems in this collection, “Words, Men, and Worried were all developed when I was doing comedy; Get Used To It and Angry Old Women were developed as spoken word at the New College Experimental Performance Institute. Aging Dysgracefully was the first poem I ever read at a slam (The Berkeley Slam, which is totally gung-ho and can be incredibly intense) and it was the first slam I had ever attended (out of curiosity) and I went way overtime, but it was still voted the best poem of the night. So I got reeled right in, and How Are You, The Fence Sitters Ball, My Muse, and Blues for Paul were all performed at slams (along with the other funny stuff, which the slammers love). The thing I love about the slams is -- it is so great to see so many young people caring so passionately about poetry. Any kind of poetry. Or spoken word or humor. It feels so vital and important. I think it has injected some energy into my work.”

Here is one example of her work from Words, it is titled, “Men”: “I just could never understand men! / But then I moved to the Castro, / and I discovered gay men! / Gay men are way easier to understand. / Most gay men actually want their partners / to have equal rights. / Most straight men say, “Oh, I’m all for women’s rights, I just don’t like feminists.” / That’s like saying it’s okay / if you want equal rights, / as long as you don’t think of any way / you might possibly get them.” And further along in the same poem, “I did crazier things than that / when I was young. / I used to wear this black fake-fur mini-dress / with these tight brocade bell-bottoms / and purple high-tops. / And hair down to my ass. / It was so thick, when I wore my glasses, / I looked like It! / I took acid every week! I danced naked in a graveyard in Bolinas. / I lived with a musician. / I fucked a perfect stranger / under the psychedelic puppet stage / at the Avalon Ballroom. / That’s what youth is for! / I should have said, “Yeah, I’m gonna die my pubic hair purple. Why not? No one’s gonna see it. ‘Cept me, and I could use a change.”

Not bad for a young, emerging talent with only a few publication credits

________________________________________________

THE SEEDY UNDERBELLY OF THE HIGH-FALUTIN’ OVERSOUL
By: Steve Henn
15 Poems / 15 Pages (30 Page Book) / $4
THE LAST REDCOAT
By: Oren Wagner
21 Poems / 15 Pages (30 Page Book) / $4
Platonic 3 Way Press
P.O. Box 844
Warsaw, IN 46581

Oren Wagner and Steve Henn are close friends. They are also co-editors along with well known Small Press poet, Don Winter of the new Platonic 3 Way Press. They are 28 and 30 years old respectively. They have been submitting work for about three years and have an average of eight publication credits between them. This is their first book of poetry. They divide the space between the covers; half the book entitled, The Last Redcoat is devoted to Oren Wager’s work and the other half entitled, The Seedy Underbelly of the High-falutin’ Oversoul is devoted to Steve Henn’s work.

I asked Henn about his background, “I don't know that I've started writing in earnest yet. I've been writing a lot more these past three years than ever before, but really I started in high school. There were several years of awful stuff, tho, and then after that several more years of mediocrity. For quite a bit of the last three years I've been thinking of myself as a prose writer who is too busy teaching and schooling to get at the novel I've got about 4/5ths of a complete rough draft of, but lately I've been thinking of myself more as a poet, intentionally trying to expand my abilities and come up with creative subject matter in verse. I don't buy that "find truth and beauty in the mundane" crap. I've always written to entertain, and primarily to entertain myself. Novel subject matter, taking risks with what I write about are what I find stimulating.”

Henn’s poems are direct, narrative, and clear. They are warm hearted and good natured. Here is an example of one of his poems entitled, “Church League Softball”: “Oren and I love softball but we don’t / believe in God, so we decided to collect / a team of atheists to join the church league. / We filed for entry, marking “other” / in the spot for affiliation. Our fake name / was The Church of One, as in one life, / one chance, no soul, nothing to pray / to or for but today and tomorrow until we’re dead. / The rumor spread that we were eastern mystics, / that our experience of Him bordered on the sexual. / Janice, our token woman, got a lot of attention / from opposing men. She’d wave her tight ass / back and forth in the batter’s box, and they / served ‘em up with a slight arc, aiming / for her sweet spot.”

Oren Wagner’s work in The Last Redcoat is equally well written, but has more edge and bite to it then does Henn’s. Wagner writes impressionistically. This may be a bi-product of his years as a musician where song lyrics by their nature are often not linear in structure. I asked Wagner when did he begin writing poetry in earnest? “I've been writing for about twelve years, I was 15 or 16 when I started, you know, sad teenage poetry kind of shit. I was about 21 when I started writing stuff that doesn't make me recoil in shame (retrospectively speaking.)” I asked about his education, “An honor roll student in the school of hard knocks. After high school I was in a couple of touring punk bands. I've lived in Detroit MI, Warsaw IN, Seattle WA, South Bend IN, North Manchester IN, Colorado Springs CO, Zionsville IN and now Indianapolis IN, six of those cities have been in the past eight years, so moving around has been very formative or educational...I spent a year in college in Colorado, and have spent the last three years at a university in Indianapolis. Since I can't go to school full time, I am on the eight year program.”

Here is an example of one of Wagner’s poems entitled, “icons of the virgin”: “icons of the virgin are painted in the etceteras on the wall / surface, texture, erosion. / you don’t know that I can hear assembly line / efforts in your voice. / midnight sky of Braille and Arabic numerals / counting, falling. dot dot dot dash, / immaculate Morse code for V,/not for victory or for varsity / or for virtue. /latitude lines on an uncreated earth / still have their degrees and intervene with longitude / baby born into a cartilage cage / a metaphor for the unspoken / benedictions for the perishing apostle / zodiac, monkey pox , increased rations / assembly line icons of the virgin / etcetera etcetera written on her face.”

This is a very fine set of poetry. Well crafted, clever, mature, visual, surprising – from the minds of two friends, editors and emerging poets.
__________________________________________________

JUST ANOHTER ADOLESCENT BRAGGART
By: Mark Gaudet
28 Poems / 41 Pages / $6.43
Order by going to: http://www.lulu.com/

Just Another Adolescent Braggart is Mark Gaudet’s first print poetry collection. He is 36 and started actively submitting work to small press publications about a year ago. He has a degree in fine art, but no formal training in writing. In his bio he notes his major influences to be Charles Bukowski and William Carlos Williams. His poems are word light and earth bound. I was curious about his use of light-up words such as fuck, sex, cigarettes, booze, blow job, vomit. He told me, “I try not to use a lot of symbolism; usually what you see is what you get. I like it simple, to the point. I want my poetry to stand up, grab a hold of someone and slap them across the face. I like it hard and with an edge, but I also like to mix in some humor.” He went on to tell me, “But my first love is Bukowski. He told it like it was. For some reason his words hold my attention. I'm not reading something and saying to myself what does that mean? Or trying to understand the hidden meaning behind him screwing some woman while watching cockroaches scattering across the floor.”

I asked Gaudet if he could determine a writer’s age by their writing style or themes. I wondered if there was such a thing as young poetry and old poetry. Here is what he told me, “Its hard sometimes; I don't try to make judgments on someone's age. Hell there are kids in High School who write wonderful poetry, and people who've been writing poetry for 40 years, and their stuff is just plain shit. At least that's my opinion. Poetry's a funny thing you could write something half assed in the bathroom stall, and someone can think it's the next Jack Kerouac.” Maybe so, but good or bad writing does not seem to be a function of age.

Here is an example of Gaudet’s writing a poem entitled, “Replacement”: “We met / I found another / cute, naïve, innocent // happy? // Let me peel / her face back / probing through / bone / tissue / bloody pulp // Are you hiding in her?” And here is another example, “Killing Degas”: “Paint / on my pallet // Pretty / yellows / cyan /burnt / sienna // Mash together / biting the brush / not knowing / waiting // Horses over steeple chase / pretty ballerinas glide / across / his paintings // Bourbon and pills / hues / of vomit / green / and yellow / spew / across my / canvas // Voluptuous / women / bathing / in a tub // Slit / wrists / grasp / the shower tiles // French / Impressionist / American / Depressionist “

Gaudet writes in a non-narrative, impressionistic style that is more difficult to master. Some of the poems work and some nearly do. His best work are those poems that don’t push so hard and where he backs off the adverbs and elevator words, allowing his curious world to unfold before us – just as it is. All in all, a solid first book of poetry.

Review: Baby Beat Generation & The 2nd San Francisco Renaissance

2006-03-13T19:08:00.000-08:00

Baby Beat Generation & The 2nd San Francisco Renaissance
Publisher - La Main Courante // France
Editor and Translator - Mathias de Breyne
272 pages / $20
ISBN: 2-913919-24-3 Photo: Kaye McDonough

Order via:
Small Press Distribution
1341 Seventh Street Berkeley, CA 94710-1409
510-524-1668
http://www.spdbooks.org/
E-mail: http://us.f610.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=orders@spdbooks.org

Review By: Charles P. Ries

If you want to taste the Beat Poets and sample the writers who followed them, Baby Beat Generation & The 2nd San Francisco Renaissance is about as good as it will get. The work in this collection is of high quality. I’m not sure why this surprised me. I have read many anthologies and usually come away with a 50% sense of satisfaction, but not this time so I asked Thomas Rain Crowe whose work is featured in the collection and whose preface helped to established historic context. He told me, “Looking back, now I think the poetry that came out of the 2nd San Francisco renaissance is still some of the best, and most interesting, poetry of the last thirty years. These were talented, dedicated, and extremely literate poets, some of whom were 'well educated', but all of whom were very well read and had been writing for quite a long time, even though many of us were only in our mid-late twenties. This was a very diverse group of poets, who wrote in uniquely different styles from one another and from their beat friends and mentors.” The book includes poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Jack Micheline, Jack Hirschman, Harold Norse, Diane Di Prima, Nanos Valaoritis, Michael McClure, Bob Kaufman and David Meltzer on the beat side, and poetry by Thomas Rain Crowe, Ken Wainio, Neeli Cherkovski, David Moe, Janice Blue, Paul Wear, Luck Breit, Kaye McDonough, Philip Daughtry, Kristen Wetterhahn, Jerry Estrin, and Roderick Iverson, as well as pictures and an attached CD which includes readings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Jack Hirschman, Jack Micheline, Thomas Rain Crowe, Michael Lorraine, Cole Swenson and Ken Wainio.

I sensed Crowe’s significant presence in this publication and asked if he was the driving force behind it and how the hell did a French Press become the publisher for an anthology focused on American poets? He told me, “While it's true that I was the main contact and the supplier of much of the raw material that made its way into the anthology, this isn't a "Thomas Rain Crowe" production. Mathias de Breyne was the catalyst and initiator of the project. This anthology was his idea. He contacted me and asked for material--which he then chose from and translated into French. He was familiar with the publisher of La Main Courante, Pierre Courtaud, and it was Mathias de Breyne who contacted Monsieur Courtaud and proposed the idea of such an anthology. M. Courtaud's press, La Main Courante is primarily a press that publishes contemporary French poets. It's a relatively small literary press, and so this project was the largest project that he had undertaken to date. I did write a preface for the book, since M.de Breyne wanted something that would allow readers to get a glimpse into the whole scene in San Francisco during the 70s. And I did assist with problem areas of the translations. But this book was generated in France by a French poet and a French publisher--which is ironic in one sense and appropriate in another.”

All the content in this collection appears in English and in French. As I counted up the contributors to the anthology I totaled 29 men and 7 women. So where were the women? It was the 70’s and feminism was coming of age, yet an anthology focused on the 70’s features mainly male poets. I asked Kaye McDonough whose work is featured in this collection to comment on the state of women’s poetry in the 70’s, “I think the North Beach lifestyle itself was hard on women. You had to be able to live poor and like it -- handle yourself in a bar, walk alone on the street at any hour, and rely on no one. You had to take care that you weren't an alcohol or drug casualty -- and that you could keep up with all those poets and what they read, and they read plenty. You had to be able to read your poetry to rooms full of mostly men who were not shy about giving you feedback. The womanizing was a definite minus. Where I came from, women did not go about unescorted at night, let alone into a bar, so North Beach wasn’t exactly a place to settle down and start a family-- I'm not sure I knew what in the heck I was after – alcohol certainly played a role. I think I wanted to live like a man – a man who was a poet.” (An extended quote from Kaye McDonough can be found at the conclusion of this review.) This excerpt from her poem, “Talk To Robert Creely About It” is telling, “Breast are your bonbons / You suck a lemon fondant / spit out a chocolate-covered cherry / You try on vaginas like finger rings / The pearl cluster is too loose perhaps / the gold band too tight / You collect hearts like paintings / They are nailed to your walls / Skulls ring your house / They are the ivory necklace / fallen from the throat of your latest lady // Women lie around you like mirrors / You pick up one, then another / comb your hair, adjust your features in their glass / Do you see, you grow thin / from wanting some love on your bones?” (Beatitude #24, 1975)
I wanted to hear a male’s take on this gender imbalance and asked Thomas Rain Crowe if he would comment. “No one was counting in those days. There were a lot of women writing and involved in the 70s scene. Not all of whom got into the anthology, just as not all of the male writers in the bay area got into the book. It always felt like there was an equal balance of men and women (masculine and feminine energy) involved in everything we did. There certainly was a very strong feminine voice in North Beach and in the issues of Beatitude during those years. As I say, who was counting? If you look at the posters for Beatitude events and at the issues of Beatitude during those years, you'll see that there were always a healthy, if not equal, number of women represented. It didn't feel like anyone was fighting for position, etc. those that were on the scene and who wanted to take part publicly were the ones that ended up on the reading posters and in the many bay area publications during those years.” I am sure the answer lies somewhere between McDonough and Crowe’s perception of the time, but it presented an interesting back story and sent my mind rambling to today’s small press scene where I often sense a lack of female poets and editors, yet realizing women write more poetry. So why aren’t they publishing? Why aren’t they fighting for an audience?

I needed to find out about Beatitude. The small press magazine started in the 1950’s and picked up in the 1970’s which became the glue for these new post-beat poets. Again here is Thomas Rain Crowe, “Beatitude was the glue as you put it, for our group, and also for this anthology. Since Beatitude was at the center, the core, of the 70s renaissance, and a catalyst for the renaissance, the editor and publisher of Baby Beat Generation & The 2nd San Francisco Renaissance decided that this anthology would hinge on the Beatitude poets--since we were in closest proximity to the Beats and were working and playing with them constantly during those years, and since Beatitude was the first beat publication during the 1950s. It was us babies that resurrected the magazine. The publisher and editor wanted to cite and establish a viable tradition, with the passing down of the Beat heritage and the Beat "torch" as it were, to the next generation. This book establishes that tradition and documents the history of this "rite of passage." We published usually 500 copies of each issue of Beatitude. It was done in the mimeograph format of the former 50s Beatitude, and was distributed to bookstores all over the bay area, as well as to select bookstores all over the country--including LA, the Northwest Coast, Chicago, New York, Canada, and England. I was in charge of the distribution during those years, and the emphasis was not to make money, but to get the magazine out and as far-reaching as possible. We usually sold enough copies to pay for the next issue. But mainly is was about the poetry and showing others in the states and in other countries what we were doing. The magazine came out as often as was possible. There was no concrete publication schedule, as there is in most literary journals these days. In other words, it wasn't biannual, quarterly, etc. since we used a rotating editorship policy; it came out as quickly as each different editor could accrue text and get it through production.”

“Finally, I asked Crowe to tell me what he viewed as the key style and content distinctives between the Beats and Baby Beats? “While there would be some inevitable similarities, there are also some very distinct differences between us (the baby beats) and the beats. I think that, in general, our writing is much more imaginative and experimental--reflecting the values and cultural politics of the 1960s. I also think that the general oeuvre of the Baby Beats has a much wider arc. Our major influences tend to be more international--since there were more translations of foreign poets available in the 60s and 70s than there had been in the 40s and 50s. Also, we were more politically active, I think, than the beats. Our generation had a history of taking the issues of the time to the streets. We continued that during the 70s in San Francisco, and afterwards. Much of what we did, publicly, was usually for some cultural or political cause outside of the purely literary. I also think that we tended, and still tend, to be more inclusive. Inclusive of women. Inclusive of foreigners, inclusive of different literary styles and persuasions, inclusive of class and race, etc.”

As a reader of poetry, I can often say, I enjoyed that, but not as often say, I enjoyed that and I learned a lot along the way. This is a great collection for many reasons and on many levels. The poetry is outstanding, the bio’s, photos, preface and CD provide wonderful historic context. It also made me reflect on women’s role in poetry in the 1950-1970’s in a wider framework. $20 plus shipping is not too much to pay for this very good, very enlightening read.

Oil Independence -- Are You Kidding?

2006-03-01T10:37:00.000-08:00

Occasionally we comment on political goings on, but the cry heard around dinner tables and State of The Union speeches Dem & Goper alike, the cry for energy independence would destroy us. That's right. Read below:

Analysis from FORTUNE: Plugged In

Energy independence is a disaster in the making
It's been a rallying cry since the 1970s -- but it could doom the economy, the environment and our position in the world.

By Justin Fox, FORTUNE editor-at-large
March 1, 2006: 11:24 AM EST
...Tom Friedman of The New York Times, who has been arguing for a while now that the president should make energy independence our generation's Sputnik -- an excuse to spend tons of money on scientific research and education.

Investing in R&D and handing out scholarships for science and engineering students are good things, mind you, and many of those calling for energy independence are driven by similarly wholesome motives. But I'm a big believer that words count, and the words "energy independence" are potentially disastrous ones.

To put it most starkly: We could have energy independence tomorrow if Congress simply slapped a huge tariff on energy imports (would $250 per barrel of oil do it?). Meanwhile, skyrocketing fuel prices would shift the economy into reverse, throw tens of millions of Americans out of work, and what oil and natural gas we have left under our territory would be rapidly depleted.

Yes, homegrown energy alternatives like wind, solar and ethanol would get a big boost. But the biggest boom would probably be in mining and burning coal -- the dirtiest and least efficient of the fossil fuels, but one the United States possesses in abundance. Meanwhile, the other energy-importing countries of the world would go their merry way, paying vastly lower prices for oil and natural gas and gaining a huge competitive advantage as a result....

Shirley Hazzard, Nice Lady, Bad Book

2006-02-23T10:18:00.000-08:00

Shirley Hazzard won The National Book Award for this her second novel, The Great Fire. Thus, the state of The Novel has come down to this: a modest writer of a certain age with moderate narrative skills, a nice person, is the best we have. Gad, didn’t anybody else think that a stuffed-shirt, 33 year-old should keep his perverted hands off a 17 year-old Helen. In addition, don’t readers think that adolescent Helen a bit learned for her age? In fact she’s as learned as Shirley Hazzard. Moreover, didn’t any reviewers wonder why Peter is just thrown in there half way through the novel? As other critics noted, he is a wimpier version of Leith and he seems unnecessary to the story.

Sure, love stories hold readers when lovers separate, but I still have no idea why Leith wouldn’t want that nice nurse. She’d be much better in bed and just as loyal. Furthermore, Helen’s family is bizarre; Driscol is a caricature of provincials, not believable at all. In fact, everyone that lives in Australia or New Zealand seems to read dusty mediocre books all day and study French. That is bad for tourism.

Novels used to attempt the Big Idea. Does anyone know what Hazzard with all her pretentious prose is getting at? War is bad, really? Love is difficult during war? Yeah, we’ve had 10,000 books about the same subject, so what’s new here? Is there an anti-bomb theme? No, she just passes by Hiroshima with a few hackneyed notions. Again, Shirley clearly is a nice woman and she sells many books, but she’s basically one of the mediocre.

HOOPLA ON FREY by P.L. George

2006-02-19T17:31:00.000-08:00

With the cascading accusations swirling around James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces”, I thought I’d drop in my two cents from dreary little Oklahoma. As writers know, artistic license must be a part of any endeavor of a work of art. Lies must occur because the mundaneness of real life is just not that exciting.

With a memoir, at least for me, the story becomes secondary. With this type of piece, especially with the drinking and pills and how they were brought down like a hammer in the amounts of consumption, Frey was doing something extraordinary. For this I’d like you to consider Hemingway. While he is considered a great writer in academia and in literary history, I find that his stories are at best average. And while I may offend a lot of people that genuflect at his altar, his stories are not what we fell in love with. He was a rugged author that for his time, lived a life, all true or not that most men wished they had the courage to live.

Frey in modern day was and is trying to build a literary legend of himself, though the rehab and redemption makes me take some of this back. Although “On the Road” by Kerouac was a fictional piece, his received legendary position in the literary hierarchy for his way of life. Most believed he’d lived all of it, though those who knew him said pool hall scenes with Neal Cassidy were just that, shooting pool and drinking beer.

Jack London never led huskies into a snowy wilderness. He would sit in bars in the Yukon and listen to the others that lived it every day. But London, as we picture him, is to be extraordinary, a testosterone driven male, the throwback to the hard driven, drunk, liquored up author that we all think he was. And you can’t fault Frey for wanting some of this.

I honestly don’t care if he lied. It’s a damn good book. I know he created a lot of envious energy in New York among the literary elites, which is probably the source of the flogging he’s receiving now. But those cold, concrete, sedate WASP’s needed a fire under them. A good purge of their staunch encampments. I think most of the criticism comes from “why didn’t I think of writing that?” mentality. And then the small fame or infamy (pick your poison) that he enjoys just set his jealous critics over the edge.

Frey can’t be faulted, he’s human, which is all we can expect. Fiction, memoir, whatever, everything that is written is painted with the fine line of subjectivity. In laymen’s terms, no one wants to read boring shit. The world is full of boring books written by boring authors that have received accolades from well-connected peers. It was time for a man like Frey to set the house on fire.

And the Oprah viewers just need to grow up into adults. Shocked and dumbfounded at such lies, I wonder what type of Pleasantville town they live in. No, children need not apply. At least in the real world or in this instance the naked ambition of an author.

Leave Frey alone, he’s only trying to build a myth. Which is secretly how any writer worth his weight would like to be remembered.

Delusions of Intellectuals

2006-02-16T05:36:00.000-08:00

Why do intellectuals, important establishment (everyone in the arts has deluded themselves that they are not of the establishment, ha ha) artists, go off the deep end for extreme solutions, Fascism or Socialism? Christopher Hitchens, a rather complex man of the Left that supports the Bush and Blair initiatives in the Moslem world, writes a review of Robert Conquest's book:

Times On LineRobert Conquest's realities and delusions Christopher HitchensRobert Conquest THE DRAGONS OF EXPECTATION Reality and delusion in the course of history256pp. Duckworth. £18.0 7156 3426 7

"...he points out that many of those who hailed the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were leaders and spokesmen of the hard-line racist Right in the United States and Europe: nihilistic demagogues who thought that any attack on “globalization” (often itself a euphemism for “Jewish world government”) was better than none. Who has not met a cretinized Leftist spouting similar windy militant trash?"

"...The sheer crudeness and coarseness of Stalinist theory and practice still have the power to stun the mind. So does the amazing gullibility of so many “intellectuals”. In a series of sketches of the credulous, from Simone de Beauvoir to John Kenneth Galbraith, he is careful to make a distinction between those who rather relished the “excesses” of the Soviet “experiment” and those who looked for humane or longer-term excuses...."

To this day, whether Hollywood or Paris Intellectuals, it is always siding against the best interests of freedom and democracy. Back in the 50's it was the Rosenberg's innocence that activated the Stalin apologists. To bad the evidence is overwhelming that these two immigrants sold their souls for a false god. But so it goes for the intellectual class of any age.

LuLu finds Moby Dick!

2006-01-31T16:58:00.000-08:00

I suppose talent rises to the top. I want to believe that is true. The next literary lions are working away on their tomes, but walk through your Borders and see the same authors published again and again. You say there are new literary works scattered through the store. I suppose so. Poor fools. Their books will disappear in a matter of months. Hopefully the author's old parents bought a copy for their friends. That's embarrassing since the theme of the book is how horrible the author's parents were. Soon you'll be an outcast. Still, if you have written bunches of agents and publishing houses, receiving scant encouragement, that could be a blessing. After all, the publishing houses keep a whopping percentage of the cost of a book that they hid on a Borders back shelf somewhere that some thorough shopper put in their shopping basket.

If you used Lulu, you could publish today, be listed in Amazon for next to nothing, and begin your publicity tour on your dime of course. Here's some of their sales blurbs:

1.
Lulu is FREE, FAST and EASY
No set-up fees. No minimum order. No delay. No catch. Lulu prints and ships each book as it's bought. The buyer pays the cost, not you. Lulu only makes money if you do.
2.
You're in control
You retain all rights to your work. You decide on design and layout. You set the price and royalties. Lulu's not the publisher, you are.
3.
Sell to the world
Lulu lets you sell your work through Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble and on Lulu itself. Lulu handles all transactions, order tracking and shipping.

My God! Say your name is Herman Melville and you're written a tedious book about whaling and maybe the meaning of life. You've been turned down by everyone. Perhaps Lulu is the answer?

Nonlinear films and the anticausality of Mulholland Dr.

2006-01-25T17:52:00.000-08:00

by Adrienne Redd

warning: contains spoilers
partial list of film discussed:
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Lost Highway (1997)
Memento (2002)
Identity (2003)
21 Grams (2003)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Life's but a walking shadow in Mulholland Dr. and perhaps it signifies — not nothing — but an _expression about the nature of film and art. "Dream logic" was how Roger Ebert characterized the film when it came out in 2001. I think the events of the film are not merely asensical, but anti-sensical. Mulholland Dr. is an elaborate demonstration of a noncausal universe.

Director, David Lynch has taken to the next level the nonsequential time depicted in films like Memento, (2002), 21 Grams (2003), Identity (2003), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). In each of these four, one can piece together the story once one gets one's head around the idea that time is not running continuously or forward as it appears to in our reality; however, Mulholland Dr. presents something entirely different.

In Memento, there some question of whether the protagonist, Leonard Shelby has imagined a man, Sammy Jankis, with the medical condition of the inability to form new memories or whether Leonard has appropriated Sammy's story to mask his own guilt in killing his wife. I believe that the film demonstrates by the end that Leonard accidentally killed his own wife and that there is no murderer upon whom to wreak vengeance once he tracks him down. Even with Shelby's self-deception, we the viewers are not necessarily deceived (Teddy Gammell is not the murderer of Leonard's wife, that much is clear) and the events of the film are logically connected, the backwards sequence and unreliability of the narrator notwithstanding.

Like another David Lynch film, Lost Highway, Identity employs as a plot device the very rare condition of disassociative identity disorder). But here again, even with internal, subjective reality, the causality and logic are not impossible to reconstruct. The character, Ed (John Cusack) who initially seems to be the protagonist of the film, is one of four or more alter egos. A former cop, he is the competent self (like Victoria in the case of Sybil Dorsett). We meet him in the first reality shell and not until the end of the film do we realize that the waking self is an insane prisoner, Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince). There are various other fragments, including a homicidal child (Timmy, played by Bret Loehr) whom we are ultimately led to believe has committed all the murders. The point is that, if we accept the multiple personality explanation, it is possible to reconcile the event, however subjective or jumbled, with a reality like our own.

The ultra-short segments of 21 Grams are presented out of order so that the form of the film echoes its own meaning, which is that we make sense of our lives, that they don’t necessarily have intrinsic meaning. In comparison to the other films here, 21 Grams actually has the most conventional structure.

Similarly, in Eternal Sunshine, aside from the science fiction of being able to erase memories from people’s minds, there is nothing supernatural or unreal happening, and even the subjective events (such as burrowing into Joel Barish's childhood) can be reconciled with our conventional experience. Familiar causality (though with the pieces or events moved around) is still firmly in effect. Though we may be shown events out of sequence, one event causes another in the same way that we understand events to cause one another in our everyday reality.

In Mulholland Dr., it is as though a prankster has printed similar (but not identical) pictures onto wood and then cut up the pieces into similar (but not identically-shaped) jigsaw puzzles, mixed the pieces and sold them as a puzzle that can never fit together to form a single coherent picture. The film offers three pictures which cannot fit together: The protagonist, Diane's wish or dream about Betty and Rita; the "waking" but distorted picture of the last hours of Diane's life and the implied “logical” reconstruction we try to make of Diane's most likely life.

With the experience of movie-logic that we bring to this supposed narrative, we expect the loose ends to be tied up. We expect the "mysteries" to be solved. Who is Rita really? How did Diane Selwyn die? Who wanted to murder Rita/Camilla and why? We only get partial answers that partially fit.

Think also of the work by graphic artist, M.C. Escher, entitled “Ascending and Descending.” The work depicts figures on a never-ending staircase, drawn in such a way that they can be perceived as either ascending or descending. Our brain makes sense of the images but the never-ending staircase can’t physically exist in the space we inhabit.

~~~ Lynch as a surrealist painter

Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and to an even greater extent, Lost Highway were striving toward Mulholland Dr. All three make some allusion to films noir, which were frequently crime dramas, but largely abandon the attempt to solve anything. In Blue Velvet there is still some pretense of trying to unravel the mystery, though the loose ends and motivations of characters are not actually tied up. Lost Highway is even more challenging because we may not realize that most of what we see in the second half of the film is an internal, wished-for reality on the part of the protagonist — an attempt to escape the guilt of having killed his wife. (See my essay of December 2005).

The questions or mysteries in Mulholland Dr. can never be answered, so we must look instead for patterns. David Lynch was a painter before he made films and his films are to a great extent a continuation of the antirepresentational and polemical dialogue of modern art.
One set of patterns is that there are great many pairings in Lynch’s films and specifically in Mulholland Dr. in which these occur mostly among female characters. It is in these pairings that, I believe the viewer can find meaning (rather than just saying, "I saw the weirdest movie…" as Ebert does, though I do agree with Ebert that Lynch “has been working toward Mulholland Drive his entire career.”)

~~~ Pairings of female characters

Rita the amnesiac (later called Camilla) is first paired with would-be actress, Betty, whom we meet in the earlier frame of the film. This is conveyed through the elegant portrayal of their love scene and the fact that Rita (thinking she is perhaps hunted) dons a blonde wig for the scene that follows.

Double identity as a theme is also prefigured in Betty's breathless speech about actresses and movie stars, "Well, I couldn't afford a place like this in a million years... unless, of course, I'm discovered and become a movie star. Of course, I'd rather be known as a great actress than a movie star. But, you know, sometimes people end up being both. So that is, I guess you'd say, sort of why I came here..."

Rita and Betty are paired more subtly in that they are both searching for something; both find themselves in a new place, not their own place. (None of the characters is ever "at home," unless we count the final scene where the director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is throwing a wrap party after The Sylvia North Story is finished. Clearly, he is not "at home" when he find his wife in bed with the pool maintenance man.) Both Rita and Betty are alone in the world and are looking forward in time (and as an amnesiac, Rita can only look forward; she can't look back).

Furthermore, Betty and Rita are each paired with Diane Selwyn, whom we ultimately learn is the protagonist. Betty is paired with Diane because Betty is the wished-for identity of Diane; and “Diane Selwyn" is also a name "Rita" remembers (and thinks might be her own name). As she tries to place a call to D. Selwyn, whose name she finds in the phone book, she says to Betty, "It's strange to call yourself."

In another pairing, Diane Selwyn has also swapped apartments with a woman in her apartment complex, though we don't learn why and don't find out much about the tenant who has agreed to the trade (perhaps it was another unhappy love affair, like that of Rita/Camilla and Betty/Diane).

The central and most disturbing pairing is between Diane Selwyn and Betty Elms. Surrealist painter employed a private vocabulary of images. As is the case in Lost Highway, house (apartment) might be Lynch’s symbol for head. The swap of residences might refer to splinters within oneself and the fact that Betty is merely a fragment of Diane Selwyn, the waking personality.

The possible future identities of actress-and-movie star accentuate the sad pairing of Diane Selwyn, failed lover, bit part actress, murderess, failure and suicide with Betty, her own dream of what she could have been (or once was), full of starry-eyed innocence and promise. (Interestingly, Diane/Betty seems to be and is said other characters to be fabulous in her audition with Chad Everett (perhaps a reference, via casting to bad, hokey actors) and her stellar audition (which doesn’t get her the part) contrasts with the amateurish reading of the same scene between Diane/Betty and Rita).

Rather than through content (such as the dialogue or “text” of the film) double identities and pairings convey meaning through form. The twins, doubles and variously associated pairs of characters in Mulholland Dr. and elsewhere in Lynch’s work signify double vision — the viewer is asked to doubt not only the events but even the framework of the film’s “reality,” and not only this films reality but the reality of all art, the same statement that that another surrealist, René Magritte famously made. Before the eyes of the viewer is a picture of a pipe with the words under it, “"Ce n'est Pas une Pipe" or “This is not a pipe.” Correct. It — the painting — is not an actual pipe. It is a picture, that is to say, an illusion, of a pipe.

The meaning of Mulholland Dr. is that we the viewer are seeing not only illusion but illusion of illusion.

~~~ Illusion of illusion

After the scene in the late night theater, Betty morphs into the murderously bereft Diane, but she is also morphing between life and death and her teeth even become a bit sallow and greenish. Before this, as she sits in the theater with Rita/Camilla, regarding the strange performance on stage, she begins to shake violently (as Fred Madison does in the final scene of Lost Highway).

At Club Silencio, the master of ceremonies intones to the audience, “No hay banda.” The translation from Spanish is, “There is no band [playing the music you hear.]” There are two points to this pivotal scene. The first is to remind the viewer that the film itself, is and can be nothing more than a flickering illusion on the screen, like the recorded music at Club Silencio. There is no reality, only the illusion and the way it stimulates images inside our brains. This scene is David Lynch’s brain sending a telegraph to our brains commenting on the illusion that there is any “reality” in between (our brains).

The second point is that the master of master of ceremonies (and the lyrics of the Roy Orbison song, rendered in Spanish as Llorando) are telling Rita/Camilla that she is already dead and telling Betty/Diane that she will soon be dead, but worse than that Rita and Betty do not exist at all. Not only have all of the events (see my essay of December 2005) up to this point in the film been merely Diane Selwyn’s dying wish fulfillment, but Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla are illusions of illusions. They are images flickering on the screen of a dying woman’s heartbroken desire.

À propos of Lynch as a surrealist, Freud is said to have commented about Salvador Dalí in 1938, "When I look at the work of an old Master, I immediately seek the unconscious, but when I look at a surrealist painting, I look for the conscious.” Similarly, we look for the logical in Lynch (though we don’t find it).

After the fracture point, it is almost as though Betty/Diane is decomposing before our eyes. The scorned and fallen Diane/ Betty is also paired with the waitress while meeting with the incompetent hit man in Winkies, since the waitress's name tag says, "Betty." (One device in depicting dreams in films and literature is that people and objects in the “real” world are picked up and irrationally plugged into the dream frame).

Betty/Diane is also seen riding in the limo and imperiously speaking the same line that Rita/Camilla speaks in the beginning of the film: "We don't stop here." The verb tense of this line is revealing; Betty/Diane doesn't say, "We aren't supposed to stop here" or "We weren't supposed to stop here" or "We aren't stopping here." She says, "We don't stop here," as if her words were the reality, but they aren't. She is saying this line as the car is stopping. The point is that she (and we) are so deeply committed to our own perception of reality that we can't imagine that we could be wrong. She is wrong at the moment she is saying the line and doesn't realize it. (Interestingly, though, the would-be killers (in the previous version of the scene with Rita) are also mistaken about what is going to happen next.)

Rita (Laura Harring) assumes the name Camilla Rhodes in the final 30 minutes of the film; there is also a connection both between her and the other Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George) whom Adam Kesher auditions for his movie. And because they are both auditioning, there is also a connection between the other Camilla Rhodes and Betty (who gives an eerily superb audition in contrast to some of the intentionally wooden acting in the film).

There are numerous other pairing of characters between the wish frame and the waking frame of the film, such as the Cookie Park hotel manager/ and the M.C. of Club Silencio (Geno Silva). At Club Silencio these mirages, time slips and identity confusions seem to be catalyzed by the blue cube. However, just as there are internal wish fulfillment versions or dream manifestations of people, the blue cube is merely the dream version of the blue key which Diane is told (by the hit man) that she will find when Camilla’s murder is complete. This is why she finds it in her purse at the conclusion of the scene at Club Silencio. The cube appears; the murder is complete and we and she are yanked back to the waking frame of the story.

~~~ Who is the blue-faced women?

The blue cube suggests yet another pairing between Diane and the homeless man who literally frightens Dan (Patrick Fischler) to death (the man telling his friend about a bad dream in Winkie's). The homeless person whom we see later with the blue cube affords another pairing of women, since he is portrayed by Bonnie Aarons, a pretty, young actress, not a decrepit man. Yet another mysterious connection between two characters. That this homeless person could scare someone to death is also emphasizing the pre-eminence of dream power over waking life.

Ultimately, the point of the pairings, is that Betty is not really the bum, nor is Betty Elms really Diane Selwyn, nor is Diane Selwyn really a ghost, nor are Betty and Diane alter-egos of one another. There is no "really" or reality. All of these identities are true and none are true. None of the fragments is related to another in a sequential or causal way. It's never possible in our reality, the one that we mostly inhabit, to see one's own rotting corpse, though it might be possibly in the world of nightmares.

Those of us who enjoy non-linear films may anticipate that "Ah-ha" of saying, "Here I am back again at the point of overlap in this circular narrative. Now I see." This is a tease and Diane’s speaking the same dialogue does not explain the confusions of identities. It doesn't work logically in any real, physical, objective world for Betty/Diane Selwyn to have arranged for the murder of Rita/Camilla before or after the director's party. Diane's suicide has neither happened before nor after the party at Adam Kesher's house. There is no clear moment when Camilla (Melissa George) becomes Camilla (Laura Harring), etc.

When the film hasn't advanced and a tree now grows through a child's head on the developed film, it's not that one image is the real picture and that one could scrape away the illusion. "No hay banda." There is no band playing the music. There is no solid reality or a single paradigm to explain what we seem to see. There is only absurdity, silence, silencio and all it can be filled with is more illusion. It is also fitting to set this film in Los Angeles, city of angels, city of dreams, city of the movie-making industry in which everyone wants to be in the movies and every movie star has a dozen identities or no identity. The protagonist’s name may even be a reference to two giants of the industry: “Selwyn” from [David O.] Sel[znick] and [Samuel Gold]wyn. This also underscores the movie poster for Gilda and Camilla's appropriation of this name provides such important controlling images for the film.) Rita Hayworth once said of this defining role, “Every man wants to marry Gilda and [is disappointed to wake up with] Rita.

Lynch quite specifically wants the characters (who can be props of a sort in his films) to escape their embodiment. He wants to remind us that "this is not a pipe.” The character is not the actor or actress but an abstraction created by the making of movies. Lynch begins this work with the numerous pairings in Twin Peaks, continues it in Lost Highway and achieves it in Mulholland Dr.

What do the ominously grinning older couple have to do with the slippage of logic?• (As clichéd personification of treacle sweetness, they are the reminder to Diane that she has lost the innocence of Betty, and so she shoots herself. Why is the dwarf (à la Twin Peaks) pressuring Adam Kesher to put Camilla in his movie? (Because this is Diane’s convoluted explanation for he “didn’t think too much of [her] as she says at the dinner party. Who is the blue-faced women who closes the film with the one word, "Silencio"? (Perhaps she represented an actress who survived the Hollywood meat grinder, like Ann Miller, who portrays the apartment manager in the dream frame and Adam Kesher’s mother at the end of the film. Such a survivor would have see many "Dianes" try to succeed and burn themselves out as waitresses or worse. And what has the cowboy to do with all of this? (Perhaps he represents an earlier and clearer moral code). Even films as different as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Chinatown (1974) and Phantasm (1979) we get some answers. In Mulholland Dr. we won't ever conclusively settle these questions and that's not because the film is flawed. Lynch wouldn't even try to close every circle as Quentin Tarantino does in Pulp Fiction (1994)

David Lynch announced at the Cannes International Film Festival that he will release a new film in 2006 entitled Inland Empire. If he never made another film, however, he achieved in Mulholland Dr. (2001) what he had been working toward for a quarter century. The purpose of this noirish excursion into the subconscious is not a non-linear narrative but an anti-linear, anti-causal narrative — the quintessentially [though Lynch hates the word] postmodern film.

• With the bad miniaturization, wooden movements and squeaking voices of these two, I am put in mind of an episode of Star Trek (1966 season) entitled "Catspaw.” This is relevant to Mulholland Dr. because the shrinking, dying beings at the end of the episode have only just been revealed as mere illusions of humans — in the moments just before their death.

Literary Taste, Circular Over Time by R A Rubin

2006-01-25T17:11:00.000-08:00

I believe it is true that artistic taste, literary taste are circular in movement over time. The primitive becomes the pet of the Avant-Garde and in turn the intellectuals take hold with these new directions and become the lions of the art world. Then the public craves a yet more spectacular art and the artists strive to fulfill the demand. The naivety of the primitive gives way to the intellectual, the schooled technician, and this group gives way to cynicism and excess. Then the public pines for the simplicity that started the avalanche in the beginning.

The Australian
Hardwired to seek beautyDenis DuttonJanuary 13, 2006

"This craving for novelty is itself a fascinating area of empirical research. There is a tendency, for example, for all artistic genres to develop in the direction of greater emotional content in time. Music moves from baroque to classic to romantic, with modulations becoming more striking, emotions stronger, orchestras larger. Movies go from merely illustrating stories to becoming more graphically exciting.

These patterns toward increasing violence and emotional content can be put down largely to satiation: the process by which we simply get tired of anything we consume and crave more excitement from it.

Such cycles tend to have natural conclusions, with film producers periodically returning to the calm formality of Jane Austen after pushing the boundaries of sex and violence. Such episodes can be charted and studied with perhaps less precision, but certainly more fascination, than can the tides and cycles of ocean currents.

Darwinian aesthetics have hardly got off the ground, and much work remains to be done. Nevertheless, I've already seen a stiff, knee-jerk resistance to the very idea among older academics in the humanities. It's odd that the very academics who express outrage that religious conservatives want to keep Darwin out of high school biology classes in the US are themselves unwilling to admit Darwin into their own seminars."

Can we assume that the 19th Century Americans, Cooper, Crane, Melville, and Twain are the the primitives followed by the intellectuals or craftsmen, James, Dreiser, Hemingway and Fitzgerald; and they are followed by Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth? Ah excess! Now I yearn for the primitive.

Fear and Desire: The Fracture Point in the Films of David Lynch by Adrienne Redd

2006-01-25T16:46:00.000-08:00

Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Lost Highway (1997) are two of the most mysterious films ever made. This essay argues that in both films, as in some other works by David Lynch, there emerges a fracture point between waking and delusional portions of the narrative.

Balanced on either side of the fracture point, there are two story frames in both Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. — an external (but still unreliable) set of perceptions from a disturbed and unstable protagonist and an extended delusion which fulfills the protagonist’s most urgent desires.

Complementary to the understanding of Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. are Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, the first full-length film by Lynch.

Lost Highway concerns a morose and narcissistic jazz saxophonist, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman). At a party which he attends with his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), she flirts with the host, Andy (Michael Massee). A few minutes later, Fred is approached by an ominous man in black (Robert Blake), referred to in the credits as the “mystery man”), who tells him, “We've met before … At your house. Don't you remember? …”

The couple drives home and their conversation in the car reveals Fred’s jealousy. Then it appears to be late at night and tension peaks as Renee calls out with increasingly fearfulness to Fred as she walks through their dark and empty house. Next we see a static-filled, black and white video of Fred having apparently just murdered Renee. The film skips forward to Fred’s guilty verdict and finds him on death row. One night, newly installed in prison, he cries out to the guards for aspirin for the pain in his head; he then writhes in pain, head in hands and experiences an apparition of the man in black standing at the doorway of a shack engulfed in flames. In the morning (from the point of view granted to us through the film) there is a physically different man in Fred’s cell, whom his jailers identify as Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty).

Not being able to continue to hold this new occupant, the jailers release Pete. The story proceeds with Pete Dayton as the protagonist. He is in his early twenties, lives with his parents and works at an automobile repair shop. A customer of the shop, a tough and threatening older man named Mr. Eddy (also referred to as Dick Laurent, and portrayed by Robert Loggia) prizes Pete’s ability to repair his car and seems genuinely fond of Pete. Pete meets and begins and affair with Mr. Eddy’s much younger girlfriend, Alice Wakefield, also portrayed by Patricia Arquette.

Some reference has been made in the earlier story frame, as Fred and Renee returned from the party, to Renee’s former association with or employment by pornographers. Alice has a similar connection and in a noirish plot construct, she persuades Pete to rob a man she knows, who “always has a lot of cash” so that she and Pete can run away together. In a nightmarish scene with amateur pornography projected larger than life onto the wall, the robbery of this man (the same Andy who hosted the party) turns into a murder and it seem as though Alice is poised to betray Pete. He nonetheless accompanies her to a shack in the desert (the same edifice Fred has envisioned in flames). Identities become unstable (with Bill Pullman again portraying Pete/Fred); Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent arrives, in pursuit of Pete and Alice. Fred kills him and completes the circle of the story by going to his own house and buzzing the intercom to say, “Dick Laurent is dead,” (the first line of the movie). Fred then flees into the night on the lost highway, chased by the police.

The first segment of the film, before Fred’s vision in prison, is the waking story frame, or at least Fred’s (incomplete and misleading) memory of the events leading up and immediately after Renee’s death. In the days preceding Renee’s murder, the couple received several video tapes, first showing the outside of their house, then showing the couple sleeping. The third video tape shows Fred covered in Renee’s blood, kneeling by her body, apparently having just killed her. Earlier after receiving the first two videotapes, Fred and Renee summoned two detectives (phlegmatic, dim and caricatured as Lynch’s detectives can be). Renee tells them that Fred hates video cameras and Fred adds, “I like to remember things my own way. ….How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” This clues us in that we are watching Fred’s recollection of the external frame of the story. It may also give an explanation as to who shot these tapes. In Mulholland Dr., as I discuss below, I believe we are watching events as they happen. In Lost Highway, the videotape is merely a metaphor for Fred’s memory of the murder of Renee and the days leading up to it. Perhaps receiving the tapes is also a metaphor for both Renee and Fred’s growing awareness. The detectives, as in Mulholland Dr., may not have ever existed at all, but were merely stock characters.

One possible explanation of Fred consuming headache and his vision of the burning shack is that Fred has disassociated. The medical term for this is disassociative identity disorder and used to be known as multiple personality disorder. Extraordinarily rare and disputed by some psychologists as to whether it even exists, disassociation is thought to occur in childhood when the waking self is subjected to unbearable abuse and plunges into a fugue state while another splinter of self takes over. The relevance here is that Fred cannot bear what he has done and so his waking self (the one who murdered his wife) is pushed below consciousness and an alter ego takes over. This alter is younger, more virile and, most importantly, can start over with Renee/Alice.

Fred’s vision of the burning shack is the fracture point of his life and his consciousness. This film as in many of Lynch’s films (and, in fact, in the work of other surrealists, such as Buñuel and Dali) employs a private vocabulary of images. In this case, house equals head. When the man in black, also a fragment of Fred, exchanges words with Fred at the party, he tells Fred, “As a matter of fact, I'm there [at you’re your house] right now… You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.” Consistent with the mythology of vampires, the man in black has been invited by Fred, whose jealous has been aroused by Renee’s tipsy flirtatiousness. If we identify the man in black as jealousy personified, his saying that he is “at [Fred’s] house means he is in Fred’s head. Perhaps he is the trigger to Fred’s jealous rage at Renee or perhaps he is the fragment who commits the actual murder.

The second portion of Lost Highway including the affair with Alice is then extended wish fulfillment, but Fred’s memory of violence and death cannot be suppressed for long and emerges in the final scenes. Fred’s flight into the darkness concludes with his death throes behind the imagined wheel of the car as the electric chair ends his life.

~~~

Mulholland Dr. concerns a perky, starry-eyed actress named Betty Elms, who wins a jitterbug dance contest and arrives from small town in Canada to stay in her aunt’s Los Angeles apartment and try to be a Hollywood star. Into Betty life (and apartment, just as it is being vacated by the aunt) stumbles Rita (Laura Harring), a lovely brunette who has just narrowly survived a car crash (and failed assassination). Not being able to remember her name, Rita seizes upon “Rita” from a poster of the 1946 film noir Gilda, with Rita Hayworth.

Thinking that she is friend of her aunt’s and tenderly welcoming her, Betty invites Rita into her bed, saying it will be more comfortable. They make love (in the only sexy sex scene in all of David Lynch’s work) and at 2 a.m. in the morning, Rita entices Betty to the Club Silencio, where, during the performance, Betty begins to shake and weep and opens her purse to find a blue cube. The setting snaps to another frame of the story, in which Betty becomes Diane Selwyn (a name Rita had remembered as possibly her own name)

Mulholland Dr. is more fully realized in terms of the double frame and there is a much more coherent statement to the film. The first point to the scene in Club Silencio is to reveal that up to this point in Mulholland Dr., what we have seen is merely the internal wish of Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms. The second point is that not only are the images on the screen an illusion of projected light, but what they seem to portray is also an illusion. At Club Silencio, the master of ceremonies intones to the audience, “No hay banda.” The translation from Spanish is, “There is no band [playing the music you hear.]” David Lynch is speaking through the master of ceremonies and he is reminding you that you are only watching a film.

There are actually two fracture points in Mulholland Dr., the first during which Betty reaches into her purse for the blue cube — and the second one is when the Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) the director of the film (who has rejected Diane/Betty) announces at the party at the end of the film that he is going to marry Camilla. This second fracture point takes place in the more real of the two frames is the trigger that precipitates the events of the film — Diane/Betty’s hiring a hit on Camilla and subsequently killing herself out of guilt and despair.~~~

The entire narrative of Blue Velvet remains at the waking level, but there is one fracture point revealing the protagonist’s deepest apprehension (which is being sucked into the corruption of the other characters whom he encounters.)

Blue Velvet is a noirish crime mystery in which a charming young man, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) undertakes to solve a kidnapping in his seemingly idyllic small town in the mountains, Lumberton. The film is an extended exploration of the nature of innocence (another film essay for another day) but the film also contains a fracture point.

Jeffrey becomes involved with Dorothy Vallens, whose husband is being held prisoner to ensure her submission to a demented drug dealer, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) who has a sexual obsession with her. In a pivotal scene, Dorothy invites the much younger Jeffrey into her bedroom. As they copulate, Dorothy whispers, “What do you want to do?”

“I’m doing it,” replies Jeffrey.

“Are you a bad boy? … Do you want to do bad things?” She asks and implores him to hit her.

“No,” he protests. “I don’t want to hurt you. I want to help you.”

He tells that he knows something of her situation and asks her to go to the police.” As the word, “police” leaves his lips she roughly struggles with him. To subdue her, Jeffrey strikes her with the back of his hand. Flames (another Lynchian motif) of internal desire flare. Jeffrey is aroused and strikes her again and the camera comes close on her red mouth. She is also aroused by the violence. This scene is Jeffrey’s break with his illusion of the goodness of the world and his own good intentions (though he returns to the illusion of innocence at the end of the film, symbolized with the animatronic (but actual stuffed) robin holding a bug in its mouth at the end of the film.

~~~

The narrative of Eraserhead is an extended nightmare but it also contains a fracture in one set of perceptions revealing an even more primal fear below, that of being subsubsumed by the life energy of one’s offspring. No moment of Eraserhead (1977), David Lynch’s eerie expression of a man’s apprehension about fatherhood, takes place in external reality. The film is rendered even more difficult to understand because its disturbing scenes rely on a private vocabulary of symbols — squirting, oozing body fluids, sperm-like wriggling creatures, a bare bush that rolls into the room, etc. Nonetheless, given the context of three other Lynch films, one can make sense of the psychological meaning being conveyed.

The film begins with a sickened anthropomorphic god who pulls levers to bring into physical reality the (sexual) desire of the protagonist, Henry Spencer (Jack Nance). Henry receives an invitation from his an estranged girlfriend (Charlotte Stewart). He goes to dinner at her parents’ to be asked by her mother, “Did you and Mary have sex?”

Apparently Mary has given birth to something. “They’re not even sure if it is a baby,” says Mary’s mother. The film proceeds to show the travails of having a newborn, who wakes in the night and whose needs and ailments are hard to understand and contend with. Out the stress of this experience, Mary leaves Henry and goes back home to her parents and Henry is left alone to take care of the thing (that looks very much like a fetal horse).

The film is deeply hallucinatory, so the scenes don’t necessarily follow with much causal order (see my discussion of Mulholland Dr.) After Mary has left, we find Henry standing nervously turning a horizontal rod at the side of a room as a bare bush on a papier-mâché mound rolls into the center of the room and begins to spew dark fluids. As Henry stands there, his fingers twirling the rod, his head pops off and up through his neck thrusts the head of his malformed issue.

This decapitation impels us into a street scene in which a boy eagerly snatches up the head and takes it to a factory where erasers are apparently made out of heads.

The “fracture point” of Eraserhead is the physical depiction of both Henry’s horror at his offspring (the puppet was affectionately called Spike by the crew and cast who worked on the film) but more significantly at his own mortality. When a man (or woman) has a child they are literally and metaphysically replaced... Conversely, to kill one’s child is to deny the flow of time, to deny mortality and to become godlike or at least, inhuman. (See the future essay on the subject of patrifilicide — the crime of killing one’s children).

It is not Henry but Spike who is the eraserhead. Having a child will erase your head because when you reproduce you simultaneously become truly mortal and the inexorable cycle of life will be completed with your death.

Arguably, the fracture point could be called the central event of any narrative, whether that be a film, opera or novel. In Lynch, it takes on a distinctive significance because it is a break between one reality frame and another. This hypothesis is not a conclusion but a starting point and I look forward to exploring it further as Lynch makes more movies.

~~~

This essay is based in the research done for a film lecture given by Adrienne Redd at the County Theater www.countytheater.org in Doylestown, Pennsylvania on May 10, 2005 and again on September 29 and October 5, 2005 at the Ambler Theater and Bryn Mawr Film Institute respectively.

I’d like to extend my enthusiastic gratitude to John Toner, Pam McCloskey, Michael Lunney, Richard Bunker, Michelle Folkman, David Briggs, Alan Charlesworth, Chris Hartleben, Ethan Holland, Lori Mukai and Oliver Assiran and everyone who allowed me to test out ideas on them, who shared their ideas with me, who extended moral and logistical support and who tolerated my talking interminably about (and occasionally compelling them to watch) David Lynch for more than a year.

If there a fracture point, or series of fracture points within a greater dream (composed of sub-dreams of differing narrative cohesions) in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) they are the extended montage from Agent Chet Desmond's disappearance through Philadelphia, and the room above the convenience store, up to and possibly including Agent Dale Cooper's time at Deer Meadows, if one accepts a theory articulated in Wrapped in Plastic that the first frame of the film is dreamed by Dale Cooper. This is too elaborate a set of arguments to explore here, so I toss it out for further contemplation later.

Unless one counts Wild at Heart, the sexiness of which is destroyed by its humiliation of woman at both the narrative and metanarrative level.