Performance & Failure - The Sports Beat

 

 

I find myself writing again about professional sports teams. 

 

As a boy, in the household where I grew up, listening to and watching pro sports, on radio and television, was important. My Stepfather, Harry W. Faville, born in 1901, had played varsity basketball in high school in or near Madison, Wisconsin. There was a team portrait made (in 1915 or 1916?) showing him as the center (he was 6'3" which would have made him among the tallest men of his generation). Harry had an athlete's body, and if it hadn't been for his heavy smoking, probably would have remained healthy into his 80's, if he hadn't died in an automobile accident at age 72 in 1972. As early as the 1920's, he had followed professional sports with a keen interest. You Know Me Al [Ring Lardner] was a favorite book, and he liked to talk about the big stars of the 1930's and 1940's. One of my earliest memories was of listening to a baseball game on the radio, hearing the name Pee Wee Reese and thinking it funny. This would have been in 1953 or '54. 

 

When the Giants moved West in 1958, they immediately became the focus of his attention. The 49ers had been formed only a few years earlier, and in 1957 they narrowly missed going to the championship game, losing to the Detroit Lions, who beat the Cleveland Browns 59-14 in a game which I watched on our neighbor's television set. 

 

With both the 49ers and the Giants as home franchises, there always seemed to be another game to listen to, or to watch.

 

Since moving from New York to San Francisco in 1958, the Giants have never won it all. They narrowly missed in 1962, when a screaming liner by Willie McCovery in the last of the ninth inning of the 7th game, was stabbed by Bobby Richardson. A game of inches! Then there was 1989, the so-called "Bay Bridge Series" with the Athletics, which they lost in four straight. Finally, they seemingly had brought it off against the Angels, leading 5 to 0 in the top of the 7th inning of game six, when the Angels suddenly produced six runs in their last two innings to win it, then went on to take the 7th game handily. The 1962 team was by far the best the franchise has been able to put together in those 64 years, so the drought goes on.

 

This year, the team brings one of the most impressive pitching staffs in the history of the game, with three top-flight starters (Lincecum, Cain and Sanchez) backed up with a superior bull-pen, anchored by All-Star closer Brian Wilson (48 Saves in 2010). 

 

The NL West wasn't decided until the second-to-last game of the regular season, in a head-to-head series against the Padres. The first round of the playoffs, pitting the Giants against the Wild Card Atlanta Braves, currently finds the Giants leading 2 games to 1, following an improbable late ninth inning rally culminating in an unearned run on an error by second baseman Brooks Conrad. 

 

The Braves franchise has been moved twice in its history, leaving Boston for Milwaukee in 1953, then moving to Atlanta in 1965. In 1976, the Braves organization was purchased by ambitious media mogul Ted Turner, who made the team a centerpiece of his fledgling network station WTBS. For the first time in history, a single team (Braves) became a regular on the national air-waves. Turner's broadcast booth team, shamelessly partisan, pretended that the Braves were "America's Team" (as the Dallas Cowboys eventually were promoted). The team achieved success in the 1990's on the strength of excellent starting pitching (Glavine, Maddox, Avery, Smoltz). The last 20 years have seen the team regularly in contention in nearly every year. 

 

One very tiresome aspect of Braves baseball is the so-called "Tomahawk Chop"--in which the fans in the stands wave dark red foam indian hatchets back and forth, to a fake indian chant played on the public address system. It's an annoying piece of moronic, racist schlock and makes my teeth ache every time I hear it. I always think the Braves fans must be real rednecks to practice this nonsense. 

 

As I speak, the Braves are up 1 to nothing in game 4, but it's only the 5th inning. Nevertheless, the Giants haven't managed a single hit against Derek Lowe. 

 

  

  

Readers of this blog know well my harangue against Alex Smith, the 49ers 1st round draft pick who has become the Quarterback that never was. Yesterday, against an only average Eagles team, after a key interception and a needless fumble by Smith, the home team fans were booing loudly and demanding he be replaced by second string back up David Carr. Singletary confronted Smith publicly on the sidelines, berating him and demanding to know (according to report) why he shouldn't bench the bumbling QB. Smith stammered his embarrassed determination, and was allowed to finish the game. Despite taking the team on two impressive touchdown drives, he still managed to throw another game-ending interception under a heavy rush, and the team lost its 5th straight to start the year. Everyone keeps reminding us that Smith is very intelligent, has a great arm, and is not a quitter. 

 

However, NFL quarterbacking isn't about talent, it's about performance. Success at the college level is usually a prerequisite to a great pro career, but it isn't a guarantee. Far fewer college All-American QB's become stars in the NFL than wash out, their names fading quickly from memory. It's even rarer for a promising young quarterback to mature slowly into stardom. If a young draft choice hasn't shown some flair by his third or fourth season, he's usually relegated to permanent back-up duties, or shown the door. In Smith's case, the unfortunate shoulder injury in 2008 has been used as a pretext for giving him a bit more slack than would usually be accorded to a journeyman. But Smith's performance this year bears an unfortunate resemblance to his earlier campaigns. Despite four years previous experience (including 2 full years), he's still making rookie mistakes, throwing into coverage or timidly dumping off to a half back in the flat. His passes still routinely sail over or wide of target, and he has bad "eyes"--the quality of seeing patterns and open receivers downfield. 

 

Singletary's success as a head coach will depend upon his ability to solve this quarterback problem. If I were he, I would go to management and lay my cards on the table: Smith is a wash-out, and the organization has no choice but to acknowledge this fact, sooner rather than later. They can play Smith, with lowered expectations, and expect to bottom out in the standings, and then use a first draft pick to choose a new star from the college ranks. The other option...well, there isn't any other option. They can't go out and hire a free agent at this point. I wish we hadn't let Hill get away!            

           

HC Singletary seems like a warm, committed personality, who genuinely wants to do the right thing. He wants to inspire, the help his talented players be "the best they can be"--and there is a good deal of talent on this team. But without a dependable quarterback, it's an uphill struggle. It's a recipe for tragedy. 

The Lyrics of Ed Dorn [Part III]

Ed Dorn [1929-1999] had a lean, rugged visage, the kind that Hollywood has always loved, sort of the Clint Eastwood look. The "rugged, lean" hero, the tall, silent type, a loner, wary of compromise, with private codes of honor and simplicity, independence and toughness, secretly romantic, successful in love, a failure in society. 

 

In some fairly obvious ways, the real Ed Dorn, the poet, was a little like this. He was difficult in may ways, sarcastic, severe, cranky, with several personal demons. An uncompromising recalcitrance is often expressed as a gestural flair in his early poems, work in which he appears to have been trying to define himself, while exercising his facility, showing off his talent.          

 

 

This precocious lyrical virtuosity underwent transformations during his middle age, as he became increasingly preoccupied with radical ideation and somewhat disillusioned. As his view of the world became more cynical, the content of his work began to reflect a frustration with the effects of traditional nativist symbols and modes. He had always written and thought about the settlement of the American West, but his sense of its usefulness as subject-matter changed over time. The first phase of his work shows in a poem like--

 

 

Vaquero

 

The cowboy stands beneath

a brick-orange moon. The top

of his oblong head is blue, the sheath

of his hips

is too.

 

In the dark brown night

your delicate cowboy stands quite still.

His plain hands are crossed.

His wrists are embossed white.  

  

In the background night is a house,

has a blue chimney top,

Yi Yi, the cowboy's eyes

are blue. The top of the sky

is too. 

  

  

--from the late 1950's. This diverting, cliché'd, cartoonish portrait might be of a motorcycle dude standing outside a bar in Laramie--all effect and no substance. Which is often how Dorn thought of the American West, a tawdry habitation, scrub and scrabble, cheap and phony, a forlorn aspect. This vision would in due course be converted into the graphic surrealism of his pop Western meta-epic Gunslinger. "Vaquero" in fact seems like a kind of early profile of Gunslinger, a character in search of a story. The dry pan of the plains--Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, Montana, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, Texas--informs many of Dorn's sweetest lyrics, made out of the arid clarity of desert air, the lost expanse of space, the flat bottom basin. 

 

 

Daffodil Song

 

The horns of yellow

        on this plain resound

    and the twist on the air

of their brilliance

                            Say where

say where I will find find

a love

             or an arabesque

of such rash fortune.  

 

 

Love Song

 

        for Lucia

Captured, her beauty

would not leave her

thus inclined by the railing

she never lifted her head

from the waters

a blue gull drifts

         she moves from the rapture

of the ascending fog.

Lost in the moving passengers

she left the ship

and entered the city. 

 

 

Song

 

Oh Gods of my disembarked soul this is sad

a merriment of unteachable waywordness

I tell you the gleaming eye

is a mirror of

                         the green hills

where love struggles

                                      against the drought

in the desert

in the spring

in the quickness

of the fresh bush

                  over the cove.

 

 

As with Cummings, Dorn's twin concerns--romantic lyricism (or lyric romance)--and biting sarcasm (or burlesque, or diatribe)--usually seem mutually exclusive, repelling any resolution, like the opposite ends of a magnet. As here, in

 

 

Parlor Car Beer

 

They look coach, in the morning

pants wrinkled.

And I am coach, CHICAGO spelled out

across my front teeth.

Don't want to be sleeper.

 

     They 

look sleeper

coming in from the other end, the

dirty & tired

have a beer

with the rested & clean.

 

     Get this:

we talked of the all England

ice skating championships, 1959

     How

some skills pass the understanding

of the uninitiated

right in the middle of Nebraska.

 

 

--where the satiric voice dominates an otherwise High American Gothic train poem, complete with sleeper cars and a parlor car scene. The parlor car beer trope, one might say, the symbol of a whole way of life passed inexorably into history, which the hip poet--his prickly hyper-sensitive feelers set to the dud frequency of decadent mid-century dilapidation--summarizes as a Wild Wild West in true television consciousness.

 

The great thing about Dorn, what sets his work apart from 99% of the rest of the poets of his time--especially those domiciled west of Chicago--is his refusal to cash in on, to invest in the romance of, the American Dream of the "West." Even as he abandons the straightforward lyric voice for the camp satire of Gunslinger in the 1960's, his view of America, even when bizarrely exaggerated and weird, is so much truer to its spirit, than, say, the work of William Stafford, or Rexroth, or Snyder. For those other poets, the West was what one might make of it--their effort was not unlike the exploiters and frontiersmen of the 19th and early 20th Centures, for whom the wide-open spaces represented opportunity, raw material, and several kinds of ethical potential which might do service as aesthetic properties. But for Dorn, the West wasn't a mystical notion, or dreamscape of future fulfillment. He saw its ugliness as our ugliness, its ambition and selfishness as expressions of intent, not as the accidental or unfortunate accompaniments of a greater vision, cooked up in New England or Virginia and packaged for immediate delivery to a waiting audience. The pollution and waste were us, we had made them, there was no place to hide, no one to blame, no ethic of "wilderness" and "stewardship" to salve our complacent consciences. 

 

If Dorn became bitter and thorny in later age, it may be observed that he had been driven by these realizations into emotional or artistic dead-ends. But these were certainly truer places to have come to, than the easy condolence and tired resolutions of the mildly coerced. If Dorn came in the end to see villains and devils under rocks, that paranoia may be understood in the context of the total annexation of half a continent, by a people selfish and pompous beyond imagining.     

You can see in the man's early lyrics a loveliness and sternness, an innocence and loneliness that are purer than anything.       

Culture Clash - France Outlaws the Burka

Yesterday, the last obstacle to the outlawing of the wearing of veils (or burkas) by women in France was removed by the Conseil Constitutionnel, that country's highest legal authority. In its ruling, it stated  the law "respected the balance between public order and the guarantee of liberties and constitutional rights" and "is not manifestly disproportionate to its aims... given the mild penalties imposed." 

 

After six months, when the law takes effect, anyone wearing a full-face veil – or any face mask, with a few stated exceptions – could be fined 150 euros (or about $208) or sent on a "citizenship" course. Anyone "forcing" a woman to wear a full-face veil could be fined 30,000 euros (or $41,766) or given a one-year jail sentence. Those who are exempt from the ban include motorcyclists, carnival revellers and sportspeople, such as fencers and skiers. 

 

There has been growing tension in Europe over the last decade regarding the cultural conflicts arising from growing Islamic populations, both immigrant and religious converts. The wearing of the burka, under Islamic religious law, is effectively a cultural requirement within Middle Eastern nations, so the imposition of the wearing of the garment goes beyond a mere religious requirement, since religious, political and social spheres are effectively synonymous in cultures or nations dominated by Islamic tradition and Sharia Law. There is some dispute among scholars and historians and contemporary leaders in the Islamic community about whether the wearing of a burka is really a requirement of Sharia Law, or is the residue to a folk custom deriving from age-old practice and habit. But according to sources I've read, the conservative, more strict interpretation is generally dominant in Islamic circles today. In other words, devout, practicing Muslims are expected to follow the custom of wearing the burka in public, and may expect to be disciplined or persecuted if they stray from this law.   

 

 

In the West, stricter degrees of modesty have been much less formally regarded. With the growth of media in the 20th Century, there's been a general breakdown in the standards of "decency" and "modesty" among both men and women, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. In primitive cultures--such as in Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and Oceania--weather and circumstance have mitigated against the wearing of elaborate garments, though in the Near East and Middle East, the wearing of certain garments has been intended to protect the body from the extreme effects of sun, wind, sand, and so forth. 

 

Western notions of equality of the sexes, freedom of the individual, emancipation of women from domination (by male culture) and exclusionary regulation and custom, have proceeded historically over the last century, while in Central and Southern Asia, and Northern Africa, no such pattern was allowed to develop. The position of women in Islamic countries has been strictly interpreted under Sharia law, and women are expected to heed the dress codes.

 

As the influence of Western culture has tended to increase through media and the freedom of movement among Western and non-Western nations, Islamic authority has begun to develop increasingly reactionary attitudes towards challenges to traditional custom and authority. This has caused conflict both within Islamic societies--where women feel the tension between what they're expected to do, and what they may feel, given the example of liberated women elsewhere in the world, and how they might wish to behave--as well as within Western nations experiencing influxes of Arab or Eastern ethnic groups, where direct conflicts develop between immigrant communities and the host national culture(s).

 

The conservative Right in France has been advocating the suppression of strict Sharia law for several years. France's growing Islamic community is regarded by some as a threat to the French cultural and political life, which is based on democratic principles which fly in the face of what some feel is an outdated, unnecessarily restrictive view of the relationship between men and women, and the familiar structures of the family, education, governance, worship, and so on. They felt that a prohibition of the wearing of the burka was a necessary step in the preservation of the rights and freedom of French citizens, a reasonable move to prevent the growth of Islamic control of the lives of its members.   

 

There have been reports that certain elements within the Islamic community are threatening reprisals, even violence, in protest over the new regulation. There are those in the liberal French community, as well, who argue that this prohibition infringes on the rights of individuals and groups to live how they wish, and to practice their religion, as long as it doesn't harm others. 

 

How does one separate the religions from the customary, the individual from the group? Is a devout woman who chooses to wear a burka, in observance of her religion, free to express her freedom in this way? Or is the garment a symbol of the subjugation of women, of the loss of power and choice in their lives? Catholic school children still adhere to rigid dress codes in some places. Certain kinds of religious costumes are common in many cultures. Do traditions in which variance of dress, and the freedom to pursue that variety, constitute a real "right" under democratic conditions, or is that an illusion of capitalist economies, in which the market dictates what people may choose to wear?

 

I was not raised in a strict religious household, but I can well imagine how powerful Islamic customs and laws might feel, growing up inside such a rigidly controlled culture. Doctrinal costume may only be a symbol of what that rigidity means, but symbols are meaning; they define what we are, and signal to the world what we believe. Uniforms, like those for soldiers, doctors, policemen, firemen, are intended to separate the wearers from the rest, both for convenience and to make a statement. 

 

And it's the uniformity of the Sharia law, which may be the most troubling aspect of its meaning. The veil symbolizes adherence to duty, to an organization of society based on a severe interpretation of the roles of men and women in society. 

 

You cannot subscribe to notions of freedom and equality embodied in our Western laws and customs, at the same time that you believe in strict Islamic practice. Anyone who attempts to suggest that there is no crisis of morality here, or that it is a trivial, private issue, is really being deliberately naive. 

Xanadu: Karpilow - A Study in Descent

The evolution of creative ideas is a fit subject for students of history. We cannot consciously not know what came before; or, if we consciously refuse to know about the past, we risk repeating previous "discoveries" or the mistakes others made before us. 

After returning from Japan in 1986, I undertook a project, to photograph parts of the American West, with my large format view cameras--a project which took about 10 years, but was still incomplete when I abandoned it in 1996, after the death of my son Randall that year. 

 

One of the areas I explored was the California coast. I would drive up and down Hiway One looking for "subject matter"--views or aspects that might repay the time and effort of setting up the heavy tripod, camera, lenses and film holders preparatory to making even a single exposure. One afternoon as I was driving south of Big Sur, I noticed this tree growing in a narrow ravine just off the road. Looking east toward the foothills, I noticed that the property might be part of the Hearst Castle estate skirting the edge of San Simeon Bay (though it may have technically been part of San Simeon State Park). The road-side fence was four-foot high barbed wire, but barbed wire never stopped an intrepid landscape photographer, and trying to get permission to trespass in rural areas is like trying to get an audience with the Pope. "4x5," I said to myself, and lugged the equipment under the top course of wire. The tree was an oak, and the way it stretched waaaaaaaay out over the cropped pasture seemed very artistic to my eye. Only the continuous action of westerly winds over the life of the tree, could produce this windswept profile. The scene spoke to me. I probably was using Tri-X rated at 320 iso, unfiltered with a normal length lens.       

 

        

Some years later, in 1991, when we were building our house, we were referred by our architects (Silverstein-Jacobson) to a local woodworker named Miles Karpilow (pictured below). Miles, as I later learned, had been a book scout back in the day, who had rummaged the West Coast used book network, along with companions Larry McMurtry (the novelist) and David Meltzer (the poet), when they were each struggling and relatively unknown. I wasn't a bookseller in those days, and Miles wasn't scouting books, having (instead) become one of the world's most admired and respected contract custom wood workers, turning out signature furniture and architectural component designs inspired by the craftsman tradition. His doors and chairs were, and are familiar features around the Bay Area. We decided to have Miles make the front door for the new house, an oak behemoth as wide as two men, with carving and leaded glass decoration. The inspiration for the carving was the photograph you see above, taken in 1987 at San Simeon.

 

  

The tree design was right in keeping with Miles's craftstman specialty, and he set about making it while the house was just in the foundation stage of construction. People who've seen it in the two decades since, inevitably say it reminds them of Greene and Greene, and I wouldn't argue with that impression. Miles let his inspiration be guided by the traditions of woodwork design which had come down through the examples executed by masters. Greene & Greene, Maybeck, Julia Morgan. In fact, Morgan had been the guiding architect for William Randolph Hearst's Castle at San Simeon [1922-1939], a project that was as open-ended as any such commission is likely to be, almost a kind of Medieval process.  

   

 

When Orson Welles set about satirizing Hearst and his many triumphant boondoggles, in the fictional cinematic biography Citizen Kane [RKO, 19041], he renamed Heart's Castle "Xanadu" while incorporating many of the characteristics of Hearst's La Cuesta Encantada ["The Enchanted Hill"]). Hearst was so embittered by Welles's damning portrayal of him, that he was able to get Welles blacklisted out of Hollywood for the rest of his career. 

 

Did Welles suspect that Hearst would be powerful enough to abbreviate his career to this degree? Would he have undertaken the ambitious movie, had he understood that it would mar the rest of his creative life, forcing him to work through his prime in Europe, on secondary projects, and expedient acting parts, scratching out a meagre living?    

 

 

Perhaps the most supreme irony is that the movie is considered by many to be the greatest cinematic masterpiece in history, the very height of movie technique, editing, and powerful portrayal--both of character, and of history--a kind of idealized newsreel of the 20th Century. A sad commentary upon America, and the sort of men who've dominated our culture for nearly 200 years. It's likely to remain as the preferred version of Hearst the man for many decades to come. Often times, the embellished portrait is the one history remembers. In this case, one could hardly ask for a more poetic outcome.  

  

In any case, every time I come through the door, I think "Xanadu" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Orson Welles and Miles Karpilow and William Morris and Greene & Greene and William Randolph Hearst and Citizen Kane. Long after I'm gone, when the meaning of the door has faded into obscurity, someone will see that carving and wonder what inspired it. The meaning will undergo transformation and find new life in another time.   

Wieners As Outsider - "Cure the Hurts of Wanting"

 

 

John Wieners [1934-2002] is a curious and mysterious figure in post-Modern American poetry. An unstable, Gay man, who suffered throughout most of his adult life from severe bouts of delusion, he nevertheless managed to cobble together an impressive, if peculiar, body of work. 

 

He lived quietly, but his inner life was rich with frequently bizarre illusions. Immersed in a close reading of pre-Modern English poetry, many of his poems document a tormented emotional progress, by turns passionate, bitter, coquettish, nostalgic, and fatalistic. Often preoccupied by tawdry Hollywood fan magazines, the strange world of trashy Forties and Camp porn, his delusions, also peopled by real lovers and friends, were transformed in his imagination into a private theater of emotional morality plays.          

   

 

His first, famous brief collection, The Hotel Wentley Poems [1958], is notable for its barren lyricism, documenting a shadow world of Gay bars, addiction, furtive assignations, and youthful passion, with a frankness and tenderness that is genuinely convincing. Though he was only in San Francisco for two years, he belongs unquestionably to the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beat phenomenon. 

 

Heavily influenced by Charles Olson, he was initially drawn to Black Mountain College where he studied with Olson and Robert Duncan [1955-56]--and it changed his life. He edited an important literary journal, Measure, and his eventual efforts produced poems of a distinctly late-romantic lyrical bent. Surprisingly, his individual style never seems to have been much affected by these early post-Modernist influences, in the way that Dorn and Jonathan Williams, for instance, (also students at Black Mountain under Olson's massive sway) were. His second book, Ace of Pentacles [1964], is a collection of amorous lyrics and lover's complaints, influenced by Wyatt, Campion, Shelley, Poe, Clare, Swinburne, and Whitman. Like O'Hara, the other great later 20th Century American homoerotic voice, Wieners is a poet of love. But instead of art--the stimulating society of writers and artists and patrons which O'Hara inhabited--Wieners dreamed of the tarnished glamour of movie queens, a private universe ofNational Inquirer archetypes ("Jackie", Lex Barker, "Liz"), and the usual suspects of the Noir world, of misanthropic gestures cloaked in a mocking, masochistic charm.

 

Wieners's poems are decorative and formal, but as his career progressed a psychological involution occurred in which the imaginary world of fan magazines and tawdry, doomed assignations combine in a kind of hybrid fantasy-life, culminating in Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike [1975], an eccentric hybrid poetic masterpiece. But my emphasis here is upon the quality of his verse as such, not his attempt to get beyond poetry as performance into a descriptive objectification of culture.     

 

He adopts the classical straight persona of the female object derived from the Renaissance trope, but refigures it as the receptive bottom of Gay cultural paradigm. The narcissistic yearning for a forbidden fulfillment, denied by official society, is fictionalized as a romantic persona of the neglected, abused, recessive self. Readers coming to Wieners's verse for the first time will undoubtedly be surprised, and perhaps dismayed, by the faux antique address, the often archaic phraseology, the single-minded concentration on betrayed affection, the feminine mystique of seductive vulnerability. On one level, it's the typical frustrated Gay prototypical sexual reversal, the clichés of the outré masquerade, employed in the context of classical metaphysical love poetry. Wieners identifies the Gay lifestyle profile with the persecuted sexual frustration of the seduction of capital, expressed through the idealized fantasy life of Hollywood, media gossip, the commerce of sex, the emptiness of the lure of glamour and pixie dust.     

 

My favorite Wieners collection is Nerves, New York: Cape Goliard/Grossman, 1970. Unpaginated, it contains 68 pages of text. Aside from Ace of Pentacles [New York: Carr & Wilson, 1964], it's probably his best unified book published during his lifetime, a clear presentation of his prosodic styles and persuasions, and a strongly defined self-portrait, the last section of which, Asylum Poems, was written during a period of psychiatric confinement. The two-edged connotation--of asylum as punishment for the sins of delusional thinking--and of asylum as refuge, as safe harbor--is a common triad, so the poems become temporary syntheses, stays against the wanting/having//despair/remorse dilemmas which torment him.           

  

  

A Dawn Cocktail

 

We lie in a pool of blood,

smashed glass all over stone

cut neck, chest, calves

bleeding to death

over moonlit goblets.

 

  

 

The Dark Brew

 

      for Louise

 

At least these wounds were opened

by your love that allowed the deeper sickness in,

yea, they budded lush and festival in the dark

Silence of summer agony; when supposed love wreathed on the hill

these dark lilies grew beneath and polluted the stem

  

So two or three years later, I collapse under the burden,

the dark love grew immense in another's form

And silenced all holocaust in their wake.

Belladonna of morning, autumn grapes for symphony and pansy

Immediately following as birth in place of life of foetid mind

Why go on; the list is endless what these wounds your opened, fed.

  

First hallucination of transient loveliness; second, voices of

self-importance, guiding and cajoling, canceling all

connection to nature; third false vision of love and

its simples; fourth murderous challenge to the

dawn of thought, and envy, jealousy, rage as

accompaniments to artistry. 

   

Some women bathe their hands in these blossoms,

and wear them pinned to their brows, as stars; others

anoint their bodies with the petals, calling a cape of

it perfume and pay enormous prices for its

scent, pollen caught off any extreme as death

but the chaos, culmination, conflagration of

what should be love's union but is not is

simply pest of confusion in the face of order.

  

 

             2

  

What odor called forth by these buds, spring rain under murderous taxi tires,

a store window open to new design; the fresh arousing of debutantes on Madison Ave.?

Who knows the stop signals of their gas, their lightning roar from the cliffs on country roads,

the damp spring we allowed to forget; why stop; the abandoned goats walk from Pennsylvania

Ah there the haven lies in some sweet vision of you collapsing purple amethyst eyes?

within a face not mine to surmise, ringed with outshooting apple blossoms

Oh, who knows the look of false surprise; the badgering pity

the dream of death lives still under morning's sunrise,

despite the clatter of broken bumper and shining festoon

of afternoon's patience for drunk twilight to halo drawn's root cart.

there where I was splattered, now taken in its guise

on field and bed, as one wounded must arise

these dark bruises regard as love defended.     

 

 

In the second poem, degrees of incoherence alternate between luminous impressions--of words employed almost as stereotypical specimens ("budded lush...dark silence...summer agony...love wreathed...dark lilies...polluted stem...dark love...Belladonna of morning...autumn grapes...foetid mind...endless wounds...First hallucination...transient loveliness...murderous challenge" and so on)--which resonate and evoke vague but intensely imagined feelings--and a passionate indignant protest against loneliness, betrayal--enumerated in a descending order of decadent aesthetic illusions, from ideal love...to vanity...lust...dissolving into a catalogue of sins endemic to the case--  

  

First hallucination of transient loveliness; second, voices of

self-importance, guiding and cajoling, canceling all

connection to nature; third false vision of love and

its simples; fourth murderous challenge to the

dawn of thought, and envy, jealousy, rage as

accompaniments to artistry.          

   

Wieners's theme is repeatedly the quest for knowledge through love's possession--its empty conquests--and a decadent susceptibility to the richness and fulfillment of indulgence. Self-pity vies with insolent sarcasm in a relentless argument whose outcome is routinely concluded in a wounded resolve. 

  

   

The Patio

  

I created eternity

to bind you within it

A scheme worthy of the pope

to keep my prince

  

An ivory wall, have you seen it? there

as we travel on the road, together'd

shadows flit at twilight

we will not be one of them vespers

  

failing in confinement.

I built it. Where are you?    

 

   

Severe as this kind of utterance may seem, it's like a shield against the blandishments of attraction, against disillusionment, the temptation to guilt, the inebriation of self-deception, false hopes.  

  

Wieners, a native of Eastern Massachusetts, spent the last decades of his life in Boston, a city whose history, both personal and imaginary, meant much to his sense of identity. 

  

  

 

After Symond's Venice

 

            for Allen Ginsberg

  

  

Boston, sooty in memory, alive with a

thousand murky dreams of adolescence

still calls to youth; the wide streets, chimney tops over

Charles River's broad sweep to seahood buoy; the harbor

With dreams, too; The Newport News has arrived for a week's stay

Alan on Summer Street sailors yet stride along summer afternoons

  

and the gossamer twilights on Boston Common, and Arlington Street

adrift in the mind, beside the mighty facade of convent and charnel house,

who go through those doors, up from Beacon Street, past the marooned sunset in the

West, behind Tremont Hill's shabby haunts of artists

and the new Government Center, supplanting Scollay Square.

  

Who replace the all night films; and the Boston dawn

in the South End, newly washed pavements by night's horses.

  

What happens here from the windows on Columbus Avenue

to Copley Plaza, and the library, Renaissance model, the Hotel and smart shops down

Newbury Street's lit boutique, lept by Emerson College,

who triumph light over dark, the water side

endures beside the moon and stars of Cambridge's towers

 

...past Park Square pavements so wide for the browser, drifters

from Northampton Street behind the Statler, by the bus stations and slum tableaux

Finally to return to the Gardens, and the statue of George Washington

appealing to later-day shoppers to go home, in what dusk

what drunken reveling matches this reverie

of souvenirs, abandoned in the horror of public elevators

as this city is contained time, and time again the State House

from Bulfinch's pen, over School Street and Broad down the slope of Federal mirages over blue grass

to the waterfront; Atheneum holding all the books of men, directed

against the foe, hapless Pierre churns through the Parker House coming to the Vendome mentally

over the Brunswick, eternal in the mind's owl of phantoms stretching from boyhead.

  

When vows first establisht were to see this world and part all within it

You, Boston, were the first, as later San Francisco, and before that

New York, the South and West

penetrated, hard holds the Northwest, Chicago, Detroit

much in the same manner of industrial complexes

covering the rising cigarettes of patriots. 

  

The Park Street Steeple as painted by Arshile Goky zooms higher.

Slumbering city, what makes men think you sleep,

but breathe, what chants or paeans needed at this end, except 

you stand as first town, first bank of hopes, firsts envisioned paradise

by the tulips in the Public gargoyle's crotch, Haymarket

Square included spartan business enterprise and

next to South Station, the Essex evoking the metropolitan arena hopes entertain. 

 

 

It's interesting to try to place Wieners among the competing trends and influences of the post-war period. Though he was clearly influenced by Olson, with whom he studied at Black Mountain College, and under whom he worked at SUNY Buffalo, the accurate function of this relationship is obscure. There is also the indirect influence of Allen Ginsberg or Frank O'Hara, two Gay writers whose approaches were both less restrained (than Wieners's formalist styles), and more "sensible" than Wieners ever would be. Undoubtedly, Wieners would have been a different writer in the absence of any of these figures, but his creative focus really lay in earlier models of the lyric. Aside from the expected figures--Campion, Wyatt, Jonson, Shakespeare--one might add Shelley, Byron and Poe--but the central position behind Wieners would seem to be occupied by Baudelaire, with his interest in vice, sensual sophistication and indulgence, cynical and ironic; his commitment to the principles of embarrassment and shock, violence and dissolution; the dedication to art as a pursuit independent of conventional morality; the corruption of the city; the interest in prurience and vagrant sexuality. 

 

Whitman's literary side seems absent in Wieners's imaginative space, as does the work of almost any Modernist writer one might think to name. A faint echo of Stevens can be detected but only in a thematic or sense, in much the way that Crane stands symbolically behind every homoerotic writer since the Twenties. Wieners's tortured moral-aesthetic struggles, within the framework of his Catholic upbringing, produce resistant declarations and prayers for an emotional release.

 

Queer

Do I have to accept his

repetition of rival thrust   

use of assholes and bitches

to gain entry of a youth's kiss?

run by alcoholics and fakes

to penetrate each night

with the tenderness and pride

from ambition's sneer.

 

Supplication

 

O poetry, visit this house often,

imbue my life with success,

leave me not alone,

give me a wife and home.

 

Take this curse off

of early death and drugs,

make me a friend among peers,

lend me love, and timeliness.

 

Return me to the men who teach

and above all, cure the

hurts of wanting the impossible

through this suspended vacuum.

 

This is only a snapshot of a poet whose work and significance are difficult to describe in brief. The attention paid to the Hotel Wentley book has tended to obscure Wieners's career, as if the only value in his poetry was his participation in a very short-lived, and poorly delineated "movement" which occurred in San Francisco in the late 1950's. The neglect and generally cool reception accorded Wieners's later work suggests a misapprehension of the meaning of his aesthetic, and a dismissal based on prejudicial regard. Wieners's work is on one level like an exploration of trans-sexual archetypes, which comprises the ostensible subject-matter of his compositions. His effort to build a castle made of fetishized autotropes--in which a private language, fractured by delusion, instability and aesthetic license is given free reign--is an important contribution to post-Modern poetics. 

___________________     

 

For those interested in a probing and informative look into Wieners's life and work, Andrea Brady's brilliant essay, "The Other Poet: John Wieners, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson," can be accessed in Jacket online magazine #32, April 2007.  Her analysis of the relationship between certain thematic elements and the primary biographical facts and specimens is among the best I have ever read, a model of care and insight:         

 

 http://jacketmagazine.com/32/brady-wieners.shtml                        

      

Life is Meals

 

Here's another fan letter to James Salter. 

 

Salter and his wife Kay Eldridge in 2006 published a food lover's daybook, Life is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days [Knopf]. 

 

Anyone who has read and enjoyed Salter's novels and short stories--A Sport and a Pastime, Solo Faces, Light Years, Burning the Days--knows how important sensual appreciation is to his aesthetic, as well as what a devoted Francophile he is. As one might have guessed, he and his wife are serious amateur cooks, and love the social occasions, as well as the sensual pleasures, which eating (and dining) make possible. 

 

Life is Meals is a collection of notes, anecdotes, recipes, historical accounts, descriptions--worthy of M.F.K. Fisher, or James Beard. Gastronomy--or the experience of eating--is rather like the trade of book selling. Larry McMurtry once remarked--though it was not a particularly original idea--that the older a book seller gets, the more knowledge he accrues in his field, and the better he becomes. The same might be said of "eaters" or of anyone who studies food--its qualities, its sources and preparation, its occasions. But careful and perceptive eaters may not always be good at expressing what they feel, and think, about food. 

 

Since Salter has always idealized experience, and all those aspects of life which may be fully appreciated--i.e., life as a kind of feast--a book about food, for him, is the occasion for thoughts about places, special memories, certain people (and not just cooks), the odd scrap of information and knowledge, tidbits of sage advice. It's the sort of book, in other words, which can only be written in later age, when the accretion of living, tasting, savoring, listening, reading and experimenting has reached a kind of critical mass, a point at which we can be said to have attained whatever wisdom we may possess, that may be summarized, and offered back to the world, as a regurgitation and final accounting: This is what I learned, felt, and saved.    

                

 

 

Salter is a shrewd observer of human foibles, frailty, vanity, but he's at his best in describing the thrall of ultimate release, the giving over, the surrender to desire or pleasure, the sense of the richness of things. The jeopardy, one might observe, is in mistaking affluence for value, juicy fat for protein. In our world, mouth feel commands shelf space. But our senses provide a more accurate guide to what's worthwhile in living in the present, than our moral compass. One needn't be rich to eat reasonably well. And it is true that life is a kind of meal, partaken regularly, of necessity, under conditions of familiarity. If we are willing to address how we eat intelligently, independently, actively, the life we lead can be immeasurably improved.       

 

        

Often the simplest repast is the most satisfying. A drink of spring water after a long hike on a hot day is an indescribable pleasure. The water of life, the life of the mind.  

Giants on the Verge - Two Games Left

This has been a weird year for the Giants. When it began, the rap was that they had great pitching, and would have to scratch for every run, using heads-up base-running, bunts, and great defense to win close, low-scoring games. 

 

The great pitching has come through, though it's been spotty at times. Cain, Zito and Lincecum started out fine, but Sanchez was uneven. Then Lincecum went into a funk (in August), and Zito went into a nose-dive too. Over the last month, the staff's ERA has been unbelievably low, with opponents batting well under .200 collectively. 

 

Meanwhile, the hitting has been feast or famine. SF's power, suspect in the beginning, was bolstered with the acquisition of Pat Burrell (18 homers as a Giant), and the mid-season addition of Buster Posey (SF's rookie-of-the-year candidate). Huff, overjoyed at joining a winner, and Juan (monster-swing) Uribe, have both supplied plenty of yard. At the same time, Sandoval and Rowand have both had off years, and Sanchez, Renteria and Torres have all had significant injuries. If any two of these five (except for Torres) had had good or better years, the Giants would probably have been 10 games ahead by now. At least three games were stolen by bad umpire calls, and the strike zone has never been flakier. (Can anyone recall another year in which most home plate umpires seemed chronically uneven, not having a clue as to what was, and what wasn't a strike?)

 

Last night, Cain served up two gopher balls to Gonzalez and Stairs, and that pretty much sealed our fate, despite a late rally. This afternoon, we give the ball to Zito. I'm apprehensive. Zito's had flashes of brilliance--the old Zito, mixing his big round-house curve with a deceptive fast ball--but he's been unreliable in important games, walking batters and giving up the occasional clutch double or home run. 

 

Given last night's result, it wouldn't surprise me if the Padres, desperately trying to salvage what had been, until three weeks ago, a great season, sweep us, forcing a one-game play-off in San Diego. The Giants have been heart-breakers this season, but whose team hasn't? 

 

The Phillies had been up and down most of the way, until a late-season surge put them out of reach. Among the three contending teams in the National League, any combination of outcomes is possible. Even the Giants--currently ahead of both San Diego and Atlanta--could end up losing both the division and the Wild Card, if they were to lose three more. After leading by three with three to play, that would be tragic indeed. If San Diego were to win all final four games, it would go down in the annals as one of the great upsets in the history of the game.  

 

The Padres and the Giants have similar kinds of teams. Both have great pitching, with unreliable offenses, though the Giants have surprised everyone with the home run numbers. San Diego has only Gonzalez as a legitimate threat. Nevertheless, the Giants have only scored 31 more runs for the whole year. (The Phillies, for instance, have scored 758 to the Giants 692.) 

 

Which brings us to off-season speculations. Most people think that the Giants would go down zip in the playoffs. But Atlanta and Cincinnati don't stack up particularly well against San Francisco, and I've heard rumors that Philadelphia is more worried about the Giants than they are of any of their other three possible foes. Great pitching almost always wins out against great hitting in a short series, and three or four games of great pitching is always a possibility given a staff like ours. The question is, which guys show up? Those capable of one-hitting you through 7 or 8 innings, or the ones who lose focus by the third? In the play-offs, it's about who responds best to pressure. The Phillies have been there before, so the smart money's on them. 

 

But in a short series....

 

We'll see today which Zito shows up.         

  

___________________

Addendum:

Post-game review. Just as I feared, Zito wasn't up to the task, and ended up giving the game away, beginning with two unearned runs in the first inning, courtesy of walks. He was pulled in the beginning of the fourth, after walking the opposing pitcher. Not to take anything away from Stauffer, who pitched masterfully before being relieved after 7 1/3 impressive innings. The Giants could still have given the Pads fits, if they'd managed to get just one more hit in the ninth off Bell, but Guillen grounded into a double play before Ford, pinch-running for Sandoval at first, could steal second. I'd have given Guillen the take sign, and sent Ford on the first pitch, but Bochy was already in the club-house, having been summarily tossed for arguing the strike zone. Which brings me to my final frustrating snipe: Umpiring this year has fallen to what seems like an all-time low, with dozens of terrible calls, and a strike zone that wanders and wobbles around like a jack on a spring. There were two missed base-line calls which were sheer howlers, the second apparently as "reparations" for the first.  The home plate umpire called at least a dozens balls 6 inches off the outside corner strikes, culminating in a third-strike call that had Buster Posey standing dazed and incredulous in the bottom of the 7th. 30 seconds after Posey hit the dug-out, Bochy was bounding onto the field to get in the face of Mike Everitt, who promptly thumbed him 3 seconds later. Everitt should be given the heave-ho, or simply sent back to the minors for three more years of "seasoning." A little less pepper might be indicated. Maybe the guy has hemorrhoids.              

_____________

 

 

Post-Addendum:

As everyone by now knows, the Giants defeated San Diego on Sunday, behind Jonathan Sanchez, whose 3-hit pitching over 5 innings, followed by five lights-out relievers culminating in Wilson's n0-hit ninth, bringing the curtain down on the Padres once-optimistic season. These two teams, which seemed so much alike, finally were defined by their starting pitching, and raw power, as the Giants hit 162 homers (slugging percentage .408--compared to the Phillies 166 homers, and .413  slugging percentage--both the Phillies and Giants trailed the Reds in both categories), against the Padres 132 homers and .371 slugging percentage. The acquisition of Huff and Burrell, and the blossoming of Torres and rookie catcher Buster Posey, had the greatest impact on the potential of this team, which was already a contender on paper from the beginning of the season, based on the quality of its starting arms.

 

The Giants will probably be fairly matched against the Braves, in their first post-season series, but if the Phillies stay on their late season roll, it's doubtful they can get by them to reach the World Series. Next year, however, given no great fall-off in their offensive production, they could easily run away with the National League. Imagine what three 20 game winners (Lincecum, Cain and Sanchez) could do for this team, and Bumgarner just a few wins behind these three. They'd be like Atlanta was, when it had Glavine, Maddux, Smoltz and Company.

 

The Giants entertain Atlanta on Thursday evening at AT&T park, with Lincecum on the mound. I give the Giants an even chance to take the series, especially if they win game one in nine innings. Posey is the odd-on favorite to win Rookie of the Year honors; voting is completed, the playoffs won't factor into that judgment.