I Get Artsy and Talk About Poetry

At the community college where I work, a truly astonishing number of the adjuncts are poets and writers. Which just goes to show that Paglia is right and the real creativity of academe is not to be found in its upper echelons. Or it just goes to show that poets and writers make no money and must supplement their precarious financial existences with adjunct work.

In any case, they are surprisingly good. I say this because I once attended a poetry reading at the local library, and the poems read were horrible: pretentious drek posing as unique but actually just poor copies of Frost, cummings, etc. The poets struck me mostly as academic poets while the poets I've encountered at the community college are what I think of as working poets: people who write poetry when they aren't driving trucks. Working poets take their writing seriously because writing, the craft, is what they want to do; that is, their poetry isn't merely the approved vehicle for expressing angst.

I really can't analyze it more than that. Poetry is a blind spot in my mind. Writing prose is NOT the same thing as writing poetry. Poetry is much more mathematical, for one thing. I was always reasonably proficient in algebra, but then algebra tells a story. Abstract math like trigonometry completely bewilders me. And yet poetry seems to draw on that aspect of the brain.

Poetry is also much more emotional. Prose is, to a certain extent, about hiding emotion. Or at least, it is about revealing emotion under carefully controlled circumstances. But poetry seems, well, naked to me as well as being much more autobiographical. In my fiction, I may use personal experiences, but the characters are never me. In poetry, it seems the "I" is always the author.

Due to my blind spot, I can't really comment on what makes good poetry good. But, as many a person has said when staring upon a Jackson Pollack, "I may not understand it but I know what I like."

Some favorites:

A.E. Housman: "To An Athlete Dying Young"

Rilke: "The Panther" Okay, I heard it first in the movie Awakenings, but I really, really like it.

Shakespeare: Well, yes, of course. (And actually, that isn't just a knee-jerk famous-guy-must-be-great reaction. He truly is astonishing. A kind of genius of geniuses.)

Keats: actually, I think Coleridge was the better poet, but I've always gotten a kick out of Keats. I have a picture of him on my wall. He was this short, rambunctious, passionate and off-kilter guy who then upped and died very romantically. And he got taken over by the Pre-Raphaelites whom I've always liked, despite their garish taste.

T.S. Eliot: "The Journey of the Magi"

Randy Newman: well, yes, that's music rather than poetry. But I admire Randy Newman.

Ezra Pound's translation of "The River-Merchant's Wife"

Walt Whitman's "Oh Captain My Captain" (but I never much cared for that incredibly long poem he wrote: "America, America")

Yeats, another strange dude: "Leda and the Swan" and "The Second Coming" (it's the one that ends "Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born")

Masefield's "Sea Fever"--I love this poem. I know it isn't great poetry, but it has always solicited an emotional response from me. I've reproduced it below.

Some non-favorites:

e.e. cummings: I liked e.e. cummings for about 2 seconds when I was a freshman in college. It passed very quickly. I can't stand e.e. cummings now. It isn't so much the pretentious writing
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or for that matter
grammar
It's just, I don't think the stuff is very good.

Archibald MacLeish: I adored MacLeish when I was eighteen. Eighteen year olds are very odd. I adored him so much, I bought his collected poems, special order. I still like him, but I don't adore him. He's a tad too heavy handed.

Recommended Anthology:

Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry: one of the few poetry collections I own (T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and Archibald MacLeish's Collected Poems--see above--are the others).

Sea Fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

CATEGORY: BOOKS

Superman Stuff

The movie Superman Returns is a piece of artistry. It wasn't at all what I expected. It is a tribute to Christopher Reeves and the original Supermans. Not only is the music/intro the same, not only do they use the Marlon Brando footage but the star (Routh) does an uncanny embodiment of Reeves as Clark Kent. Apparently, he was a huge Superman fan as a kid. Well, it certainly rubbed off. In his stills, he doesn't really look like Reeves, but as the character, the resemblance is so close, it is somewhat disturbing.

Kevin Spacey does not exactly embody Gene Hackman but he conveys the same ham-it-up villainy. He strikes me as more dangerous than Hackman's Luther, which I think is to the good. And he also has his Miss Kowalski.

But the thing that struck me the most is that the movie isn't really about the villainy. It is really about Superman or, to be more precise, the vision of Superman as conveyed in those early movies. And here I think Routh parted company from Reeves. Routh's Superman is possibly the most introverted Superman on the screen. (Dean Cain being the least, which is the most amusing thing about Lois & Clark: that the most normal, all-American guy in the world, of which Cain is one despite his penchant for bleached hair, turns out to be Superman.) Reeves' Superman was rather charming, even flirtatious. Routh's Superman is remote, self-contained, untouchable. The sense of him as "Other" is much stronger.

As a result, the movie relies much more on show than it does on tell. Which means a complete lack of exposition. We never get inside Superman's head. We are supposed to see Superman, not experience the story from his perspective. At first, I thought this was a failing of the movie, but now, I'm not so sure. I think the movie is supposed to be a visual tribute, and in that it absolutely succeeds.

On to more Superman. I have become a Smallville watcher. I needed a fantasy show! (I love my CSI and my House, but still.) And, okay, I like it. Except for Lana Lang, who is possibly the most useless character ever created. I want to like her since she will keep showing up. But she is thoroughly annoying. She does nothing. Clark does stuff. The Kents do stuff. Chloe does stuff. Lex is always doing stuff. Lana . . . sits around and mopes. Or complains about her boyfriend. Or her life. She has more angst than anybody on Buffy ever did, and they had more reason. (Since dead parents are awful but dead parents and monster boyfriend and vampires trump that any day.)

I think the really bothersome thing though is her lack of humor. She has none of Buffy's one-liners, Cordelia's eye-rolling or Willow's whimsy. Granted, the show isn't really geared towards Whedon's type of humor. But it reduces the character of Lana to mere eye candy.

Now, according to several male acquaintances, Kreuk pulls off her eye candy duties very well. But this show is supposed to be about Clark Kent/Superman. His long-term soul mate is Lois Lane, who also fulfills eye candy duties but does them while being smart, competitive and independent. Why is he wasting his time on this pretty but pointless girl?

Granted, teenagers can be a bit dim about long-term relationships. It would be nice to believe that the creators of Smallville are establishing Clark's disillusionment with Lana's ethereal but ultimately boring personality.

It would be nice to believe that.

In any case, I must give extra kudos to Michael Rosenbaum. I think he ranks up there with Faith as disturbed young person who goes progressively from bad to worse. That is, his villainy is entirely human and understandable. He does a magnificent job of conveying overweening ambition at a disturbingly young age. But then, if you think about it, Alexander the Great and Caesar probably did the same. Of course, we the audience know he goes bad, but I think it is an indication of real ability on Rosenbaum's part that although Lex's offers to protect the Kents are probably sincere, we don't want the Kents to accept. That is, Rosenbaum manages to do what James Marsters did: convey ambiguity (sincerity and intimidation) without weakening either sensation and without making the character just kind of bland. The sincerity and intimidation are both are work at the same time.

I was also mucho impressed by the last episode I saw, the one where a vision of Lex's future kills the woman in the old folks home. Rosenbaum played the scene perfectly: his surprise, then horror followed by a stumbling retreat were more than believable and took him from budding arch-enemy back into disturbed young man territory.

CATEGORY: MOVIES

There are Aliens and Then There are Aliens

While watching Star Trek:TNG recently, I thought about the ways in which we humans think about aliens or the concept of aliens. There are basically three models:

Star Trek model: this is also, kind of, the Star Wars model. Aliens are seen as potential friends or at least potential neighbors. Granted the Star Trek model depends on existentialism, reducing all alien races to a few existential characteristics (so that all Vulcans are logical, all Klingons are warrior-like, etc.). Granted, too, the function of Star Trek aliens is to allow human issues to be discussed that, for reasons of political correctness, can't be discussed about humans. Hence, even though all the humans in Star Trek are rational and vaguely agnostic, they are still able to discuss religion with Bajorans and with Worf.

Star Wars follows this model in that the Star Wars universe is peopled by aliens working side by side with no one much remarking on the fact. I prefer the Star Trek version, simply because I loathe (as in detest to my heart's core) Ewoks. Star Trek aliens may be existentialistic but at least they aren't cute!

All in all, this model is remarkably inclusive. It is one of the better side-effects of liberal humanism. Aliens, however problematic they prove at first, can be loved and understood in the long run.

Interestingly enough, however, even in Star Trek, the scariest enemies are bug-like creatures. The Borg is Starfleet's main enemy, but the Borg are still comprehensible. When Star Trek wanted to created a worse enemy than the Borg, what did they do? They brought in the bugs.

Which leads us to model 2: Independence Day. In model 2, the aliens are buggy and evil. They can't be reasoned with. They don't seem to have reasons, just superior technology (that can, nevertheless, be brought to a standstill by a mild, little earth-created computer virus. Yeah, right.) And well, thank goodness for Will Smith, I say.

The X-Files model: In the X-Files model, the aliens are big and bad and buggy, BUT they aren't the real enemy. The real enemy is the government that hasn't told us, the American people, about the big, bad, buggy aliens. In fact, in X-Files, the aliens, or rather the existence of aliens, represent for Mulder belief and hope. The problem is the humans who get in the way of that belief and hope. Men in Black is this model turned on its head. (Yes, the government isn't going to tell you, but they aren't going to tell you for your own sake.)

Personally, I don't know. I think it is possible aliens are out there, although I don't spend a lot of time tidying my apartment for a possible visit. Like any good Star Trek fan, my own sci-fi universe follows the many-aliens-functioning-together-in-the-same-universe scenario (although I leave open the possibility that said alien societies are a tad more complicated than they appear on the surface).

But truthfully, in my heart of hearts, I think Douglas Adams is right. If there are aliens, they don't pay us much mind. They are no more good than your average pompous liberal (such as the Vulcans of Enterprise). And no worse than your average bureaucrat who wants to build a bypass through our galaxy. And if they do make contact, they will be Ferengi wanting to trade. Face it, they won't go looking for the Dalai Lama or George Bush or Al Gore or sincere Hollywood stars or even Queen Elizabeth. They're going to be dialing Donald Trump's number.

CATEGORIES: TV

More X-Files

I've spent the last three weeks teaching unappreciative students at the local business college, but I'm not going to rant about that. (Other than to remark that some people never leave Junior High--sad, but true).

I've actually moved on from X-Files back to Lois & Clark, but I recently watched episodes from the sixth season of X-Files. I'd heard that some fans felt that Season 6 was a cop-out, the season when--gasp, gasp--X-Files got popular and just went downhill and gave up the, you know, truth and all, man.

Usually, I disregard that kind of complaint. In High School, I had these friends who got SOOO upset when people who hadn't been listening to U-2 before Joshua Tree became U-2 fans: Like, they are so fake, like, you know. I would stand there, feeling bemused, thinking, But aren't you happy that now more people like what you like?

As I've said, some people never grow out of Junior High.

Having said all that, I have to confess that the Season 6 X-Files episodes I saw, although I enjoyed them, didn't have the grittiness . . . no, that's the wrong word, the oddity, the off-kilterness of the earlier seasons. The cases were bizarre, and there was a great deal of humor, but everything else was kind of . . . normal. It was like watching Mysterious Ways, which, don't get me wrong, I liked* but which was not exactly filled with the X-Files mystique.

On the other hand, it is usually so difficult for a show to last beyond its fifth season with any credibility that just the existence of good storytelling in X-Files Season 6 is fairly impressive.

*I really like Adrian Pasdar, although I don't watch much of the stuff he has been in recently (Judging Amy, for instance). Mr. Pasdar is THE GUY who played the psychotic businessman in the short-lived television show Profit. I saw about one episode of Profit when it first came out. I really liked it (it was the episode where he sticks nails in his shoes to pass the lie detector test), but I promptly forgot the show's name and completely disassociated the actor from that Mysterious Ways guy (I mean, Adrian Pasdar showed up on Touched by an Angel!--I just didn't make the connection to psychotic businessman). Nice to know Adrian Pasdur is something of an oddball when it comes to picking parts.

CATEGORY: TV