Category: Arts & Letters

NY Magazine is having fun with Dan Brown’s latest masterpiece. It’s a respectable lineup, and while one expects fine stuff from Geoff Pullum, I was waiting for Matt Taibbi, who comes into the game in the late innings. Mr T does not disappoint.

Vulture Reading Room

The funny thing about this whole Dan Brown exercise for me is that I agreed to do this thinking that I was going to end up writing a passionate defense of him. Two ideas guided my thinking. One is that I strongly believe that mediocrities are entitled to make shitloads of money. This is America, after all. The other is that I never thought Dan Brown deserved his fame as a terrible writer.
…
But in book form, Langdon is just intolerable. First of all, he spends all day thinking in italics. Even with the most banal shit, he’s adding the italic drumroll. What the hell is this smell? He thought. Maybe I just farted. Then when he wants to really emphasize, he gives his italo-thought its own line:

That was a silent one.

And I have to agree with Professor Pullum. Langdon is always shoving our noses in some encyclopedic minutiae. He’s the most irritating Harvard-educated, mullet-wearing sexless pedant of all time. The breaking point for me was at the beginning of chapter 41, when Sato asks Langdon to tell her “the meaning of these icons.” To which Langdon answers, in italics, in its own line:

They’re not icons, Langdon thought. They’re symbols.

It was at that point that my fantasies took a turn. “Please! Take that giant razor-edged pike out of my ear!” Langdon screamed.

It’s not a pike, Taibbi thought. It’s a gaff hook. Dripping with strychnine and donkey shit.
…

I loved Errol Morris’s 1981 56-minute documentary when I saw it all those years ago. Finally, I see, it’s available on DVD. I thought you might like to know. Amazon tells me it’s been out since 2005…

Here’s Netflix’s blurb. I’m not sure why I’m quoting it, since it doesn’t really come close to capturing what I dimly remember, but here you are.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (famed for his quirky subject matter) stays true to form with this series of interviews with denizens of a small backwoods town. Morris mixes it up with such unique citizens as a die-hard wild-turkey hunter, an elderly couple who vacationed at a nuclear test site and returned with sand they insist is growing, a worm farmer, a 93-year-old man who thinks his pet turtle is a gopher and others.

In my last post I quoted Robert Hass’s Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, but no Hass. So here’s a bit of Hass himself. I love this paragraph, especially the last sentence, which I’m still puzzling over.

Now, I think, free verse has lost its edge, become neutral, the given instrument. An analogy occurs to me. Maybe it is a little farfetched. I’m thinking of balloon frame construction in housing. According Gideon, it was invented by a man named George Washington Snow in the 1850s and 1860s, about the same time as Leaves of Grass. “In America materials were plentiful and skilled labor scarce; in Europe skilled labor was plentiful and materials scarce. It is this difference which accounts for the differences in the structure of American and European industry from the fifties onn.” The principle of the balloon frame was simply to replace the ancient method of mortise and tenon—heavy framing timbers carved at the joints so that they locked heavily together—with construction of a frame by using thin studs and nails. it made possible a light, quick, elegant construction with great formal variability and suppleness. For better or worse. “If it had not been for the balloon frame, Chicago and San Francisco could never have arisen, as they did, from little villages to great cities in a single year.” The balloon frame, the clapboard house and the Windsor chair, American forms, and Leaves of Grass which abandoned the mortise and tenon of meter and rhyme. Suburban tracts and the proliferation of poetry magazines. The difference between a democratic society and a consumer society.

I’ve been reading Robert Hass’s Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. I’m mostly out of my depth, but it’s rewarding nonetheless.

Hass gives us a poem from Nils Petersen. Let me remind you of the Herrick first, a fine, sly piece of work.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!

Here’s Petersen.

Whenas in silks
Whenas in silks
My Julia goes
My Julia goes
Then, then methinks (methinks)
How sweetly flows
Sweetly flows
The liquefaction (faction) (faction)
Of her clothes
  her clothes her clothes

Current events bring to mind, as they must from time to the, the words of the immortal Lord Buckley. Mr Gates has been at Harvard far too long to be hip, of course (what’s too long? Buying a ticket for Cambridge?), but surely there was a time when he would have remembered Buckley’s critical piece of advice:

And if you’re really hip
You’ll never make a slip
Against Their Majesties, The Policemen

What can count as disorderly conduct in Massachusetts? Among other things, acting “with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.” Don’t annoy us, children, it only makes us cross.

Update: Robin Wells gets it just about right, seems to me.

His Majesty The Policeman

I got to thinking about His Majesty, The Policeman, see.
I figured that must be the draggiest job in the world.
And what a drag it is going out on a good day.
You’re feeling really good.
You’re riding along and your squad car is all polished up,
you know what I mean.
And you’re feeling real mellow.
Along comes some poor stud with a –
loaded with kids, like flower pots all over the place.
Going a little too fast, you know what I mean.
You’ve got to stop the cat.
You’ve got to bring him down and lay one on him.
It’s a pretty tough job
and when you walk up to him you don’t know
whether they’re going to pull out
a French seventy-five or what-the.
It’s a drag. So, I wrote a little thing called:

[sings]
His Majesty, The Policeman,
He’s the children’s friend at every bend,
The Policeman
And you can bet your life,
He’s hip to Mack the Knife
That’s His Majesty, The Policeman

You should never trip a policeman
Or try to hip or even tip a policeman
Get a ticket to the ball
And you can’t fight city hall
That’s His Majesty, The Policeman

So remember their nobility
They’re here, they’re there, they’re everywhere it’s mobility
You can look near and far but they’ll pin you by radar
That’s Their Majesty, The Policeman

Here they come – hewbetty boop
The Man In Blue – hoobbit bop
The Sargent’s there – ribbetty bip
The Patrolman too – hahbetta bop
The Chief looks great – hahbetta bop
The Captain’s straight – ribbetty bip
Hip Hip Hurray – da da da dah
The Royal Crew – Habetta bahbetta bah

You always try to swing with a policeman
And never ring-a-ding a policeman
And if you’re really hip
You’ll never make a slip
Against Their Majesties, The Policemen

The Flatlanders (Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, Butch Hancock) (isn’t that a fine photo?). Terry Allen, Tommy X Hancock. David Byrne(!).

A sweet documentary of the Lubbock-area music scene as exemplified by a bunch of fine musicians, every one a mensch. Great music making, and great movie making. You know I haven’t steered you wrong before; why would I this time?

A while back I pointed to a website publishing Bill Hedrington’s collected poems. For the last week or so, Michael Smith and I have been updating the site, and I think you’ll find the new edition a nice improvement. The PDF is redone as well. Go. Read.

The Voices

I was born on the downhill side,
late in the year, in early December,
in the light’s heavy dip and hesitation,
when the old peoples prayed for beginning
in the snow-salted fields
and scattered bitterness of corn stalks;
but though I came fatly of that gaunt race,
though it was a different end and today that day,
the fields untracked by supplicants,
the corncribs many, and full,
still I carry their disappointed dead
buried in my body,
and am the outspoken child
of the silent generations of my cells—
for O, they call with the old voices,
in a millennium length of words,
in the thousand year cries of the dead,
that their lean voices, lost to these fields,
may be gathered up and justified in me.

—Bill Hedrington, ca. 1968

IOZ on the new Star Trek.

This is the Internet; Ergo, Star Trek

… I would go further. The original crew of the Enterprise were types, and god help us, it was up the actors to invest them with character. Now the filmmakers have attempted to craft arcs of character that will catapult each character firmly into his typewithout throwaway scenes of child-hood bullying, less yet thirty-seven other characters foreboding, “You are a child of two worlds.” Yeah, really? Please remind us before we get to the next reel. …

Say amen, someone.

Invasion of the Neutered Sprites

… The traditional habitat of the Sprites today, of course, is Nonprofitland. Finding them isn’t hard. Look for logos for organizations dedicated to community-building, or health-supporting, or any kind of relentlessly positive thinking. There you will find these little figures by the dozens, prancing around, holding hands, embracing their families, and generally celebrating the universal themes of wellness, happiness, and goodness.

Unfortunately, they have come to have the opposite effect on me. They make me sour and depressed, not least because of my dim memories of having personally contributed to their proliferation. So, I hereby take a sacred pledge: with Da Vinci, Corbu, and Otto Neurath as my witnesses, I swear I will never create another Neutered Sprite. I invite you to join me. Together, we can defeat this epidemic!

Enjoy this, please.

The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra is the national high-school-age youth orchestra of El Sistema, made up of the best young musicians from throughout Venezuela. Gustavo Dudamel, himself a product of El Sistema, is the new musical director of the LA Philharmonic.

The music here is Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, 2nd movement, and Arturo Márquez’ Danzón No. 2.

Leonardo’s reputation as a sculptor rests on a statue of a horse that he never finished. His patron, who was to have eventually been portrayed on the much-greater-than-life-size Gran Cavallo, had war and money troubles and swiped Leonardo’s bronze for cannon-building.

Leonardo thought that a giant rearing horse would be cool, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work structurally, and he ended up showing the horse in a trot (left), after an antique horse sculpture in Pavia that he admired. “The movement is more praiseworthy than anything else. The trot almost has the quality of a free horse.”

The modern Regisole, shown here on the left, dates from 1937, as the original was destroyed in the Jacobin uprisings.

Fritjof Capra, whose The Science of Leonardo I’ve been reading, has Leonardo meticulously measuring “several superb thoroughbreds” for his design. Oops—not in the fifteenth century he wasn’t. (Perhaps a kind reader would speculate on the breeding of the horses in these pictures.)

The statue was finally cast, without a rider, which Leonardo intended to add later, in 1999 and stands in Milan.

Today is, of course, the fiftieth anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death in a plane crash in Iowa. A lot of rockers have died too young, but it’s hard to believe that any of those deaths represented a greater loss to music than Holly’s.

Even with his incredibly short recording career (first single in mid-1957, first album in 1958, death in February 1959), Holly had a profound influence on rock, and his recordings are timeless. What might have been…

Rave on.

OK, it’s not actually a statue of Bush.

(Sofa-sized?)

Saddam’s hometown unveils statue dedicated to man who threw shoe at President Bush

Many Iraqis considered it poetic justice when a journalist tossed his shoes at President George W. Bush last month.

Now the bizarre attack has spawned a real life work of art.

A sofa-sized statue of the shoe was unveiled Thursday in Tikrit, the hometown of the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Baghdad-based artist Laith al-Amari described the fiberglass-and-copper work as a tribute to the pride of the Iraqi people.

The statue is inscribed with a poem honoring Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who stunned the world when he whipped off his loafers and hurled them at Bush during a press conference on Dec. 14.

In the Arab world, even showing someone the sole of a shoe is considered a sign of disrespect.

Al-Zeidi was charged with assaulting a foreign leader, but his lawyer is asking prosecutors to reduce the charges. The trial has been delayed.

The shoe attack spawned a flood of Web quips, satire and even street rallies across the Arab world, where Bush is widely reviled for starting the war in Iraq and backing Israel against the Palestinians.

A Turkish shoemaking company also claimed its sales skyrocketed after some reports said it made the shoes that al-Zeidi tossed at Bush.

John Mortimer has left for that great Pomeroy’s Wine Bar in the sky.

As it’s impossible to think of Mortimer without thinking of Horace Rumpole, it’s impossible to remember either without remembering Leo McKern, who was born to play the part. McKern died in 2002.

Lift a glass of Chateau Thames Embankment to the memory of all three.

More remembrances here, here and here.