Pure Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, so it's time to get ready.  Tonight at McNally Jackson Books, there is a reading with a bunch of great poets: Robert Pinsky, Sharon Olds, Philip Schultz, Mark Strand, C.K. Williams.  It's called Essential Pleasures, which is also the name of a new anthology that Robert Pinsky put together, with a focus on poetry as language to be spoken aloud.  Wish I could go, but I'll be lucky if I'm still standing after an afternoon of carting kids around, following a morning of puppy care.

Somehow last week, though, I did make it to an evening event: A panel up at Columbia of authors/academics discussing crime fiction with great gusto.  The participants were Charles Ardai, Leonard Cassuto, Jenny Davidson and George Stade, mediated by Jean Howard, chair of the English Department.  The Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was also on hand to make some opening remarks; his name escapes me but George Stade calls him Hank.  Even though he is a mathematician, he is well versed in the crime genre, especially the French  --le polar (policier + noir).  I felt almost like I was back in school again--and I mean that in a good way.  One of the first topics was the transgressive, liberating experience of reading crime fiction; a paradoxical way to see murder done safely, with of course perspective on how the genre has changed over time in terms of protagonists, structure, etc.  There was also some discussion of why crime fiction should be considered serious literature, which is to me a moot question, and certainly was to everyone there.  

Stade did a recap of his discussion of Mickey Spillane that I remembered from his course on popular fiction lo these many years ago.  After giving many examples of the laughable hamfistedness of I, the Jury, he asked the question why this book was so popular in the late 1940s.   The beginning of his answer to this question was, "The news is not good."  Indeed Spillane was arguably the most popular American novelist of the 20th century.   An audience member suggested the in the post-WWII era, Mike Hammer embodied a fascistic impulse that the masses unconsciously needed to discharge after having fought against fascism itself in the war.  Hmm, transgression isn't always so great, is it?

I gathered many names of crime authors I must check out, especially the late Donald Westlake, who also wrote under the name Richard Stark, and one of whose books was recently published by the University of Chicago Press.  Jenny Davidson and Charles Ardai are both authors I plan to read; Ardai is also the publisher of the Hard Case Crime books--a great, retro-looking bunch of reissues and new noir titles.  Leonard Cassuto wrote a book called Hard-Boiled Sentimentality that I picked up.  I also have added to my blog list Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, to try to keep up to date with crime fiction.  Too many books, not enough time--that leads to my next topic: libraries!  Coming soon.

Pain

RIP Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Path and Ted Hughes.  He hanged himself.  When Plath gassed herself, she first stuffed towels around the kitchen door to keep the gas from leaking into her children's rooms.  He was one of those children.  He committed suicide 40 years to the day after Hughes' mistress (after Plath died) killed herself and their child.  

Many Minds

I should definitely look up the review mentioned in this blog post on About Last Night about Elfreide Jelinek; I tried reading The Piano Teacher after it was made into a movie starring Isabelle Huppert, but I could not make it through.  I just could not stand it.  Maybe the review will change my mind.

Interesting experiences with words in the last few days--first Laurie Anderson performing in the Third Mind Live series at the Guggenheim, and then kirtan with Krishna Das at Kripalu.  The Third Mind Live series is supposed to illuminate The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia exhibit.  The connection for LA, supposedly, was her experiences with Asian musicians, and their different ways of thinking of time, both in music and in life.  However, as far as the experience of her concert, it seemed to be a convenient way to select a variety of stories from throughout her career.  Looking back, I suppose time played a role in all the stories, but sometimes the connection was tenuous.  It really didn't matter, though, because her stories were often funny, and made fascinating by the multimedia presentation, including music, voice play, and visual effects.  I don't know what the first and second minds are, but if LA's mind is an example of a third mind, I want one like it.

OK, now I get it: The first mind is western/European/American, the second mind is eastern/Asian, and the third mind is realized when western artists adapted Asian art forms and ideas.  So I guess a westerner like myself experiencing kirtan would be an example of the third mind struggling to become.  After the first chant with Krishna Das the other night (Seetaram), he stopped and said something along the lines of, "Wow, nice chant.  Wouldn't it be nice to know what the words meant?"  He's obviously very aware of the difficulty the educated, liberal, urban American would have in kirtan, because we are hyper-conscious of what words mean.  What do the words in kirtan mean?  Well, some do have specific meanings, and others are supposed to be names for different aspects of God, so probably out there in the world somewhere is a source that would purport to tell you what it all means.

But frankly, I don't care to find out what they mean; the whole point of the experience is to sing in response to the leader, and let the physical vibrations take effect.  As KD described it, after singing the chants together with a large group, hearing the music, and moving to it, people tend to get happy.  When you get happy, he said, "Your life is ruined."  What he meant was, you will have nothing left to strive for, no trying to be happy left, no unhappiness left to try to shrug off.  Just happiness.  That's insane, right?  That couldn't possibly, logically, rationally work.  And that's the point.

At the close of the concert, KD said: "As we say in India, [beat] take it easy."  Would that be an example of the fourth mind?

Good Reads, I hope

Here's what I just added to my Goodreads to-read list: Steer Toward Rock by Fae Myenne Ng, Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno (finalist for the Story Prize), and The Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernieres.  What is Goodreads, you ask?  Well, I'll tell you.  It's a website that functions a little like Facebook, in that you have friends who can see what you post, but the posts center on what books you are all reading, what you thought of books you've finished reading, and most importantly, what you want to read.  Judge me not on what I've read, but on what I plan to read--my motto.  It's a way to keep track of your reading, and also a way to see what your friends are reading, get recommendations, etc.  It's a funny little world, Goodreads--sometimes lists pop up that are just absurd, like the list of best books of all time.  Guess what was number one--The Book of Mormon , of course.   Hmm . . . I mean, it was good and all, but .  . . weren't the characters a little flat?  To Goodreads' credit, though, they have come up with interesting bits of participatory webbiness, like a contest to write a short story solely through status updates.  That kind of got me thinking.  More on that and everything else later--in the meantime, if you would like to be my Goodreads friend, please let me know; I'd love to know what you are reading.  If you are on Facebook, you can add Goodreads as an application; if you're one of the last three people left on the planet who are not on Facebook, you can join Goodreads independently at goodreads.com.  

Literary longings

For quite a while I've been longing to go to a reading in the Eat, Drink & Be Literary series at BAM.  Just think: Dinner, live music and a great author reading to you.  This Thursday, March 12, A.M. Homes is appearing, and wouldn't you know it, I actually have something else to do--I'm going to see Laurie Anderson at the Guggenheim.  (When worlds collide!)  Well, the only consolation is that I've had the pleasure of hearing A.M. read before, and have even spoken to her my own self!  I wonder what she will read--possibly her recent story in the New Yorker.  In any case, I'm sorry to miss hearing something from her fertile mind.  I will make a great effort to make it out there one of these days--there is a great bunch of authors appearing in the next few months: Germaine Greer, Richard Price and Ha Jin.  Ha Jin is one of my favorite authors, so I'd really like to make that one, on May 7.  

Having read David Gates' review of The Kindly Ones, I feel that my view on what fiction does is somewhat quaint--of course, it does other things than teach us about human nature, depending on what fiction you're talking about.  His example of Lolita is apposite; we read it because of its obvious artifice.  It is clearly not about what real people are like.  But the fact that a real person wrote it, well, doesn't that enlighten us in some way about human nature, and make us think about the mysteries of the creative process?  But I readily admit, my taste in fiction is old-fashioned, much to Zadie Smith's apparent displeasure.  

I also felt Gates' point about the extreme sexual perversity of the main character of The Kindly Ones was right on target; by making him so abnormal, it seems to suggest that only abnormal people could commit atrocities such as the Nazis did.  But in reality, isn't it more frightening to think that it was ordinary people who committed the atrocities, or allowed them to happen--i.e. the banality of evil?  Gates mentions an article by Ron Rosenbaum, the author of Explaining Hitler, that pleads, brilliantly, for an end to the fascination with Hitler's sexuality, as it only serves to exculpate everyone else.