Word Blur

Poetry, godammit

I just read a couple of poems by Michael Morse in the debut issue of A Public Space and they were very good.  One of them contained the lines "Here comes Thelonious weather, all elbows and kness" and "my ear, my Alabama, and my Monk."  The other was about Stephon Marbury.  Sort of.  Really beautiful stuff.  Good enough to pull me right out of hiding.

Sample Michael Morse poem: ploughshares

The Biggest Book Club

There was an interesting tiny article in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education about the practice that many colleges and universities have of assigning summer reading (I won't bother linking to it, because the Chronicle has really limited online access). It seems that Smith students were recently asked to read Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom, a volume of poetry about West Virginia coal miners ca. 1920. Apparently poetry hardly ever makes these summer reading lists. I love the idea of large scale reading assignments. I’m fascinated by one-book community reading programs, in which a whole state or city forms a giant book club around a single work on an annual basis. Vermont READS  is promoting Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman for 2005, so I really ought to add that to my list.

In Praise of Anthony Lane

For anyone who wearied of the profiles of media moguls that at times threatened to overshadow all other New Yorker content during the Tina Brown years, there was also (if your tastes run anything akin to mine) the flipside – the ascendancy of Anthony Lane. Lane mostly reviews movies and writes the occasional profiles of literary or artistic figures, or as he said Brown chided him, SLFs (sad lonely fucks), with such humor, warmth, empathy, veracity, and skill that it’s almost hard to believe he’s human.

Lately I’ve been dipping into Lane’s Nobody’s Perfect, which is a collection of his essays, mostly stemming from this period, and a good reminder of why I fell in love with him in the first place. Witness Lane’s description of the scene in Rushmore when Max introduces Bill Murray to Seymour Cassell, his father, the barber, not, as he has previously claimed, a neurosurgeon:

If you want to pick one shot from this year’s movies, try the look on Bill Murray’s face as he shakes hands with Fischer senior: puzzlement, disbelief, a speck of outrage, the quiet rush of truth, and, last of all, a gentle settling of kindness. The entire thing takes maybe four seconds: this is known as acting.

See how all at once he managed to capture what it was about that performance that created a cadre of neo-Murrayians?  His recent bafflement over Yoda's tricky syntax while reviewing The Revenge of the Sith was equally on target:

Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

In the most recent New Yorker comes "The Disappearing Poet," Lane’s profile of the ultimate SLF, Weldon Kees. Kees was a fiction writer, poet, librarian, musician, painter, film critic, and filmmaker, who vanished in 1955, after his car was found parked at the Golden Gate Bridge. While the implications of this seem fairly obvious, Kees also fantasized at times about walking away from it all to create a new life. The inevitable intrigue has dogged his legacy ever since. What I found most devastating was the way Lane described the confines of Kees’ varied successes:

Kees presents a stubborn case; there are few accusations more withering than that of dilettantism, and his own multitasking seems to have been powered by self-exasperation.

What more succinct description of the dilettante (and I should now) could there be?  Jane Austen may have her Bath-trekking Janeites, but it's this sort of prose that has turned me over the years into a devoted Laneite and leaves me praying that he'll have been assigned to the latest blockbuster, even if it's something I have no intention of seeing.