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David Foster Wallace, nonplussed My friend Sara McWhorter found nonplussed, correctly used, in Infinite Jest. Thanks, Sara.

Tiny Furniture

Tiny Furniture (dir. Lena Dunham, 2010) might be the only Criterion Collection film I’ve seen that was an utter disappointment. The film’s characters are blanker than blank: alienated, inarticulate, self-obsessed, devoid of such human resources as empathy, self-awareness, and skepticism. The protagonist Aura (played by Dunham) is a new college-grad with nothing to show for her education. She makes choices that are beyond bewildering, and her mother Siri (played by Dunham’s mother Laurie Simmons) seems beyond caring. There’s very little that’s engaging here: the film’s ninety-nine minutes pass at a very slow speed. When I imagine how my college-grad children and their peers might respond to Tiny Furniture, I suspect that they too would be unimpressed and exasperated. Dunham’s work does not look to my eyes like a portrait of a generation.

I found Tiny Furniture via the New Titles list at my university library and did not know until last night that Lena Dunham is now Big, the creator of the HBO series Girls. This week’s New York Times Magazine has a short interview with Dunham, just one of many Times appearances in the last few months.

[Roger Ebert is a national treasure, but his taste in movies often baffles me. He likes Tiny Furniture, calling it “well-crafted.” Well-crafted: yipes.]

Neologism contest continues unabated, expected to last several more days, but experts predict an end “soon”

The challenge: to devise a word that means a “foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit.”

The neologism contest that began on Monday continues to continue. There are now seventeen entries. The contest ends on Monday, June 11, at 11:59 p.m. Central.

Ralph Nader turns into Andy Rooney

From an interview with Ralph Nader:

Do you have a computer?

No. No computer. No iPhone. I do admit to an Underwood typewriter. When the lights go off and the electricity is ruptured, I am still working. My colleagues are not.

Enjoy yourself figuring up the mistaken assumptions and faulty bits of reasoning in the above response.

[How did I ever vote for this guy?]

Separated at birth?

Former United States Senator Blanche Lincoln and television star Elaine Hansen.

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Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

Beans Spasms returns

Bean Spasms has returned, still crazy after all these years. From the Granary Books website:

Originally published in 1967 by Kulchur Press in an edition of 1,000, and out-of-print for more than 40 years, Bean Spasms is a book many have heard about but relatively few have seen, and which — until now — has been shrouded in legend. The text is comprised of collaborations between poets Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, with further writings, illustrations and cover by artist and writer Joe Brainard. The three began collaborating in 1960, and kept a folder of their works titled “Lyrical Bullets” (a humorous homage to the well-known collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth, “Lyrical Ballads”). As Ron Padgett describes, in his introduction to this new facsimile edition, their collaborations included “plays, a fictitious correspondence, a picaresque novel, goofy interviews and poems of various types and lengths, as well as mistranslations and parodies of each other’s work and the work of others.” Poet friends dropping by during writing sessions would also add lines, and although Berrigan and Padgett also contributed visuals, and Brainard contributed texts, all works in the book were intentionally left unattributed. Full of wild wit and joy in experimentation, competition and collaboration, Bean Spasms is a classic document of the New York School.

I have large portions of Bean Spasms on xerox: for me, the cost of a used copy has always been prohibitive. There are four originals now at AbeBooks, starting at $500. The Granary Books paperback reprint: $39.95.

[Cover art by Joe Brainard.]

A few related posts
Canon-formation
“A FINAL SONNET”
Good advice on looking at art
“Pikakirjoitusvihko”
A poem for New Year’s Eve
Separated at birth?

Neologism contest continues to keep going, expected to continue “for days”

Needed: a word that means a “foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit.” The neologism contest that began on Monday continues to keep going. There are now sixteen entries. What’s missing: maybe yours?

Natasha Trethewey, poet laureate

The New York Times reports on Natasha Trethewey, the new poet laureate, with a sampling of her poems. The four samples become more interesting when one looks at them in light of Marjorie Perloff’s recent commentary on the “well-crafted” poem (also known as the “workshop poem”). For clarity: “well-crafted” is not a term of praise. It’s meant rather to suggest a formulaic and deeply restricted sense of what poetry might be. Perloff describes three main features of the “well-crafted” poem:

1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself or on what the Russian Formalists called “the word as such”; 2) prose syntax with lots of prepositional and parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor (the sign of “poeticity”); 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany, usually based on a particular memory, designating the lyric speaker as a particularly sensitive person who really feels the pain, whether of our imperialist wars in the Middle East or of late capitalism or of some personal tragedy such as the death of a loved one.

The one “well-crafted” poem Perloff quotes in full in making her case: “Hot Combs,” by Natasha Trethewey.

I’ll consider the first six lines of one of the Times’s sample poems, “Limen”:

All day I’ve listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the
    catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,

his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother’s face.

“Irregular lines of free verse”: yes, though there is a ghost of iambic pentameter in several of the poem’s lines, and three instances of rhyme or off-rhyme. But the lines do appear to be what I call chopped prose. Notice too the many prepositional phrases, beginning to, of, outside, at, to, of, and in.

If these lines suffer when turned into prose, it is because their false insistence and strained metaphor become more evident when the line breaks disappear:

All day I’ve listened to the industry of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree just outside my window. Hard at his task, his body is a hinge, a door knocker to the cluttered house of memory in which I can almost see my mother’s face.

False insistence: would you, reader, really listen to a woodpecker peck all day? When it’s just outside your window? Wouldn’t you go the library or a coffeeshop or something? Strained metaphor: the bird’s body is a hinge but also a door knocker? And that makes the tree a house of memory that the bird is trying to enter? A treehouse in which the poet can almost see her mother’s face?

As the poem continues, the mother turns out to be elsewhere, “beyond the tree,” hanging sheets on a clothesline, “each one // a thin white screen between us”: another strained metaphor. And then “the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany”: the woodpecker is looking “not simply” for “beetles and grubs,” “but for some other gift / the tree might hold.” The poet is “sure” about it.

There’s nothing wrong with making something of a bird: John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop (to name a few poets) do so in poems that enact imaginative discovery and invite the reader’s participation in that discovery. What I see in Trethewey’s poem is a too-facile application of “poeticity” to a scene, an application that invites the reader to nod, Yes, it’s poetry. When it comes to poetry and woodpeckers, I’ll stick with Ron Padgett.

[That title — “Limen”? A word to look up. And yes, I’m aware that the presence of the poet’s mother in the poem involves a family tragedy.]

Neologism contest keeps on going, shows no sign of stopping

Needed: a word that means a “foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit.” The neologism contest that began on Monday runs through Monday. There are now fifteen entries.

The toast sandwich

I just learned about a bit of cookery that sounds like something from a Bob and Ray sketch: the toast sandwich. The ingredients: bread, butter, toast, salt, pepper. In November 2011 the BBC reported on this sandwich, billed as the United Kingdom’s cheapest meal. As the BBC notes, the recipe may be found in Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), which happens to be at Google Books:


[From The Book of Household Management; Comprising Information for The Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper And Under House-Maids, Lady's-Maid, Maid-of-All-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nursemaid, Monthly, Wet And Sick Nurses, Etc. Etc. Also, Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda; with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of All Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort. (London: S.O. Beeton, 1861).]

Here’s a review, from a writer who dubs the sandwich the BBC Austerity George Osborne Toast Sandwich.

A related post
Beeton on French coffee

[The BBC does not mention that the recipe comes from the chapter “Invalid Cookery.” Bob and Ray’s Harry and Mary Backstayge ran for a time a House of Toast, which offered toast, buttered on the far side or the near side, and prune shakes. The toast sandwich would have been a fine addition to the menu.]