Mental Status Report
REGRET
I surely would never have been as brave as the T-P staff, but this LAT series on their Katrina reporting recarbonates my old journalism juices.
"We got within two miles of my house, at the edge of an ocean of water. I put on a life jacket, climbed into the kayak and shoved off down I-10, taking my usual freeway exit, steering the tiny boat past the rooftops of my neighbors' homes, hoping they all had made it out alive."
Also galvanizing is Jeff Antebi's photo-essay on Port-au-Prince after dark (Paris Review). He walked the vast areas of the city that even pre-earthquake lacked electricity, lit only by bonfires:
"Some of the fires are tiny, small enough that they’d require only a little bit of fuel to ignite. Others are massive, and engulf the middles of large intersections. I never see any Haitians tending to them—the fires seem almost like sentient creatures coming alive of their own free will, and staying awake as long as they care to.
What was a lively marketplace in daylight is utterly apocalyptic after dusk. Shoddy wood structures that held wares an hour ago are now makeshift whorehouses, white sheets thrown over planks. Teenagers-turned-street-pharmacists hold up buckets filled to the rim with long-expired prescription drugs."
Verified and freely-disseminated facts are objects of public utility and beauty. The private utility and lipgloss-on-pig manipulation of much legal fact-finding hardly feels a life's work, in comparison. Of course, now journalists apparently have no life's work. The rest of us must dash between the flicker of bonfires, as Rupert Murdoch, Sam Zell and their ilk extinguish the light with copious streams of piss.
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REASSURANCE
The Paris Review interviews Ashbery in 1983:
"This is the way that life appears to me, the way that experience happens. I can concentrate on the things in this room and our talking together, but what the context is is mysterious to me. And it’s not that I want to make it more mysterious in my poems—really, I just want to make it more photographic. I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too."
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DISAPPOINTMENT
The Body purports to be the theme for the upcoming iteration of lectures and events at the Chicago Humanities Festival. Organizers every year manage to shoehorn an off-topic talk by an academic from the University of Chicago's Divinity School, the result of some dark pact with a provost at the Quadrangle Club. I thus was surprised by the pertinence of the listed Divinity School lecture on The Lingam Made Flesh.
The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
I share dismay at the state of journalism today :(
ReplyDeleteI share some agreement concerning your poetry and have wondered sometimes if even you know "what you mean" but if I may, I return here again and again with enthusiasm for your word play, often sheer delight at the music in your words.
The lingam is of course first and foremost an erect penis though it is stylized and it is that whole complex of stylization and representation which symbolizes the male fecundity of Shiva. It is not actually Shiva Himself that is represented but His fertility and also ours in Divine form. That the Divinity School is unwilling to say so in its description is amazing to me. That suggests actual incompetence if not impotence.
V. funny, and exactly what I deserve for my Ashbery-snideness! Pride goeth before a blog comment.
ReplyDeleteI've never doubted that you knew exactly what you were saying in your poems, though I have been myself confused at times. Which is the exact opposite of my experience with Ashberry -- I often think I know what he's saying and he does not :-)
ReplyDeleteImagine squandering the chance to identify as the don of dongs! Such opportunities don't come often.