dropping a frog into boiling water

Being back in New York has me grappling once again with the notion of the structure of the city, as enveloping a situation as an ideology. Obviously there are layers within layers of decision makers and when the subway is delayed it is because someone somewhere made it so. And yet the experience of obstructed and facilitated motion is so discombublatingly organic compared to a jog in the woods, where the pace and the mind are in sync on the surface as the muscles and the neurons fire off in teams. Here it's all momentum, commuting in traffic with the laws of thermodynamics. I saw on television an interview this summer with a journalist imagining the world quietly disintegrating and also persisting after the disappearance of humanity, leaving behind a detrits of bronze sculptures and feral housepets; today I read the John Seabrook article in the New Yorker about the Global Seedbank on Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago (where there is excellent terrain for cross-country skiing, incidentally) where they could collect noble heirloom plant seeds that could survive the apocalypse as a great big vegetable blight. (Spill some wine for that future passover.) So which is it anyway: screeching to a halt or skidding forever forward on the old tracks? How is it being involved, but not entirely accustomed?


I've been trying to give Farrah (yay!) good advice as she works on her novel in progress and find myself through lack of practice with fiction no longer acclimated to the basics, such as narration. It's amazing in a way that after a few hundred years of writing these things we just accept the feeling of this person writing with an "I" in which there is simply no context. I feel the same way when I turn on network television after a long time away, or right now as I wander by the propagandistic ad posters glued all over Manhattan: what a completely radical, noisy, totally artificial landscape to feel normal around. Astonishing what you don't even notice yourself getting used to. So I open a book and keep thinking, why are you telling me this. (Italics can be distributed as preferred.) Of course it's taken weblogs about ten minutes to normalize the converse relation of private/public journal. But obviously the mixture of voice and tense in fiction makes the problem all the more glaring--who are you and when did we get intimate, like waking into a marriage of amnesiacs, or at least one drunken one night stand...

I was reminded of this issue today browsing books in the Barnes and Nobles on Lexington at 86th st. (which boasts a surprisingly decent poetry section and should not be confused with the branch on 86th st east of Lexington, which doesn't) and getting sucked into Dorothea Lasky's Awe. It caught my eye because I had just been looking at H-NGM-N's web site yesterday and read about the flipbook-chapbook they made out of poems of hers and my Columbia mate Sam Amadon's. In any case, Awe was a fun discovery for the day and absolutely demonstrates the very unexplored weirdness of talk as a formal device. Lasky sometimes uses tiny emphatic Q and A intrusions into a smear of directed thoughts that suggest arrows shot off at funny angles and bouncing round to smack the archer. Let me answer my own questions, in other words, and with exclamation points. It might be a little slapstick but, you know, "poetic slapstick," as Pauline Kael said, and thus disarming and windowlike. I don't see tricks here so much as personality--there's a fair amount of the word God in the book (goes with Awe, perhaps) deployed I think as a placeholder for why anyone would tell anyone anything. Because, maybe, they already know? Funny, given my instant thought of Q and A in the bookstore that when I googled her name just now I came up with the above video of her literally being interviewed.

The other book I've been reading lately is Joanne Kyger's selected poems As Ever. I loved her poem "Carl Jung Greeted" in Stephanie Young's aforementioned Bay Poetics, which seriously ranges--psychology, politics, the cosmos--to capture a very accurate portrait it seemed to me of how it feels to feel these days. I found it fascinatingly hard to locate a copy of the book, despite its being published by Penguin--no copies for instance anywhere in Boston, so far as I could tell. Strange because it illustrates elegantly what can grow over decades in an Olsonian open field and it seems to me people that people would like that. I like this: "There was a long time in silence. For myself I can tell you that certain things give me limited pleasure for short stretches of time / but I do not know where to put them."

She can tell me, and I can tell you.

stitches, sunspots

During this last quiet week in Sudbury Mass I went to a whopping two movies in the theater: "The Invasion" and "Sunshine." Sunshine is probably the easier to talk about, and was quite instructive in gaining a better handle on the pros and cons of a certain strand of wonderment sci-fi--think of 2001. I never had much use for 2001, particularly its clammy psychedelic vista of eternity as played by Lullabies from the Womb, but now I see what happens when you replace hermetic Kubrickisms with a ecstatic drenched quality typical of Danny Boyle: still the snag of Plot. Like Boyle's previous movies with Alex Garland a stately aura in the first few acts degenerates into Mansonland for the climax where the secret chthonic truth of heroism as a death cult wraps up the thesis. It's a tight but fairly conservative attitude as hippie peace leads to an open field leads to violence: Antonioni (Vive le!) deposed by Charles Manson.

Still, the violence here falls under the shakiest category of the movie, a gambit of "alone-in-the-universe-I-am-the-mad-king" seen previously in most sci-fi thrillers like Walter Hill's disavowed "Supernova" or "Event Horizon" to justify bloodlust for no good reason besides 'is that what people want?' Hollywood executivism. In other words, we have another chapter in the endless story of not trusting the image. And what stays with me, days later, from "Sunshine" is images and only images: Mercury seen from a near orbit, or the sun through filters as a giant, broiling orb. To see is to scorch: shades of Phoebus wanting to see the true image, or Icarus. And of the essentially suicidal nature of this mission to save the solar system, flying purposively into the sun. It has not been lost on many reviewers that there are shades of "Armageddon" here--plucky humans save the world through outer space know-how--but patriotism has been replaced with a kind of existentialist aestheticism. It is and it deserves to be because it is beautiful, which is what's best about art I suppose always.

Of course, then, the movie is also an allegory for movies, which is always interesting to see in movies: sitting in the dark hoping to see something gorgeously beautiful and dangerous. In any case it far transcends whatever broken idyll structure we might impose upon it.

The other movie I saw, interesting for entirely other self-conscious reasons, was "The Invasion," famously the subject of intensive re-shoots and re-imaginings that transformed an early cut perhaps based on claustrophobia and distrust into a schizophrenic movie that has no patience even for cause and effect (the editors in an attempt to shave blood from the stone of the film's running time, jumble up even something so simple as saying goodbye and getting into a car so that we have the whole rest of the movie seemingly happening at once). The strangely central image of the movie is of the muffler of a car, leaching condensation and exhaust.

It wasn't, in any case, possibly to describe this as a good movie per se, but it was fascinating watching something so utterly hybridized as a narrative, the stitches so obvious, and scars of editing so raw. I was almost made to think of it as an objectivist experiment in the undermining of story. A few critics snarked that the movie itself was the pod person sucked clear of personality, but it brought more to my mind images from John Carpenter's "They Live," where the magical sunglasses show you the truth behind ideology, the stories of capital as an alien with no skin.

And still there is personality here, even if it is a clash of middlebrow ideas--fascism begins at home versus technology as the saving grace from technology. The movie stayed with me a little like a cento or a found poem project reminiscent of Ronald Johnson's "Radi Os" which I was looking again at excerpts of when I found his out-of-print selected poems TO DO AS ADAM DID in Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge this week, an extremely happy find. It's interesting how Johnson's technique, whiting out his way through Milton, oscillates between trick and miracle, whispering the secret ecstatically and then being spoken past. You can hear through it but also hear it in and of itself. That is of course the brilliant double-ness of the title swept away from Paradise Lost: we have both a radius around which we are orbiting, radios tuning into the frequency of the transmission, and the radiant light-giving image somewhere close by of whatever sun is shedding light on this. So little saying so much.

Farrah claimed that our cat (living indoors with no experience of other cats and quite indifferent to the minks, deer, hedgehogs, chipmunks, dragonflies and goldfinches trotting past the windows here in the Sudbury woods) sees only us as giant leonine cats. I imagined a machine to generate the experience of voices interpretable by the technology of his little feline ears. Big lionish sounds, their cadence and melodies, murmuring and tintinnabulations. We can understand emotions behind language even with the words blotted sonically out. In "Sunshine" the possessed keep demanding less filters, turn up the sun.