Monthly Archives: July 2007

Falling Man Revisited

Posted on
Reply

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a pretty deflating review of DeLillo’s Falling Man. Last Saturday evening, I myself fell down the last four or five of our stairs and banged my left big toe up. Whether or not it was actually broken or just cracked or had a bone bruise or whether I’m maybe just a big old wuss is a matter best left to the doctor (whom I didn’t see fit to visit, as he’d at best have just given me a splint and happily charged me $300 for it). But I did that evening find myself visiting this very blog. As Mleeka glanced over and saw what was on my screen, she asked if I was updating my Falling Man entry to include an account of my own inadvertent portrayal of that character. That wasn’t my intention, of course, but her comment so amused me that I thought I’d make a note of it.

Poetry

Posted on
Reply

No, this is not some abstract rumination about poetry. It’s more a brief review/advertisement for the July/August 2007 volume of the venerable publication of the same name. It’s a really good read, from cover to cover, with very few exceptions. I often find much of the poetry between the covers of the magazine to be not exactly to my taste, but there was enough of a variety of form and semi-form and humor and literary reference and ingenuity in this issue that even where things weren’t precisely to my taste, my overall judgment of this issue’s poetry was one of approval.

Particular favorites were Joan Murray’s parodies of Yeats and Hopkins, of which I’ll quote the latter in full (minus special Hopkins accent marks) until somebody tells me to take it down:

Brush and Floss: To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Since your gums are not yet teething?
Teeth, all the ones you lost, you
Miss, especially those front two?
Ah! as the mouth grows older
It will earn a dental folder
Year by year, nor shed a tear
Though mounds of molars disappear;
And yet your mouth will gape in fear.
Oh the horror! child, the pain,
Though dentists jab novocaine,
Nor mouth knows, no nor gums, can say
The last laugh of tooth decay:
It is dentures man was born for,
It’s your baby teeth you mourn for.

I also really liked poems by Todd Boss, of which one, in excerpt, follows (it’s one of those annoying poems whose title is also the first line, but in this case, I forgive it):

How Smokes the Smolder

at neck, at
shoulder, that

stokes a man
as he grows

older. Nothing
rages, nothing

fumes, No one
races through

the rooms,
alarmed. How

It goes on like that for another dozen lines or so, just yanking you down the page in these staccato phrases packed with oddly laconic but visually rich description. It’s really good stuff, really different than a lot of the abstract, boring stuff I’ve read in the pages of Poetry.

I can’t help myself. Another one, in its entirety, from X.J. Kennedy (spacing screwed because I’m too lazy to make it work, though the spacing makes it better):

Blues for Oedipus

Oracle figured
You’d come a cropper,
Kingdom-killin
Mammyjammin
Poppa-bopper!

Gods dished you the shit
Like you deserves –
Now your eyeballs
Danglin
From they optic nerves.

The prose in this edition is good as well. Many bemoan the space the magazine has dedicated to prose and to letters to the editor over the last couple of years, but I’ve really enjoyed this shift (if only because the poetry often escapes me). One thing I really liked the concept if not the execution of in this issue was a brief Q&A with poets about particular poems. There are a half dozen or so of these scattered throughout the issue, and I only wish the editors had selected better poems to publish and do the Q&A on. Still, the idea of an occasional Q&A interests me.

The issue includes funny story/essay things by Naeem Murr (a probably at least partially fictive memoir-type thing about life as a novelist dating a poet) and Michael Lewis (a faux diary entitled “Poetry In Motion: A Diary of the Collapse of the 2006 New York Giants” that’s funny enough to merit a few quotes below; it’s told from the perspective of a presumably fictive Giants trainer).

I lingered outside long enough to hear Eli [Manning] say, “I’m not saying poetry will make us a better football team.” I’m saying it will make us a more meaningful football team.

Finally! I whispered to myself, a little fire! But instead of throwing punches, they just jabbered away at each other. Words, words, words. I didn’t understand all of what was said but one of the assistant coaches filled me in later. It started when Plaxico refused to rhyme or scan, and our center Shaun O’Hara called him “a narcissist who fails to grasp the artistic power of constraints.” That led all the receivers — even Shockey! — to get pissed off. They gathered into a little group in the end zone and mocked the sonnets the O-line has been working on. The O-line screamed that pentameter was the natural length of a spoken English sentence; the receivers screamed back that pentameter was for fat guys who are easily winded and that the poet in peak condition spoke hexameter, if not octameter.

The defense met to talk about their fourth-quarter collapse. One of the coaches asked Mathias what the fuck he was thinking when he just let go of Vince young. “Coach,” says Mathias, “I couldn’t help it. Just when I grabbed hold of him, a clerihew popped into my head.”…

Vince Young
Your Fu is not yet Kung
Your hop ain’t hip, your juke don’t jive
I’m gonna eat your rookie ass alive

It’s hard not to quote the whole fake diary.

One more rave before I close this out. The issue includes a set of mini-essays entitled collectively “Poets We’ve Known,” of which my favorite was a little piece by Sven Birkerts about informal joke-telling gatherings in Boston of Walcott, Heaney, and Brodsky that itself includes most of a joke that made me laugh out loud and try to re-tell it immediately to Mleeka. Then there’s a little essay by recent newsmaker Christopher Hitchens about meeting Auden’s partner shortly after Auden’s death. James Merrill’s former trainer writes to talk about what it was like to guide Merrill through his workout. The only essay I’d remove from the set is by Joseph Epstein, who laments the self-absorption of poets before going on to drop names and establish himself as part of the literary elite as he makes his way through an otherwise pleasant encomium to John Frederick Nims.

And did I mention poems by Edward Hirsch, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, W.S. Merwin, John Updike, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Wrigley?

All in all, definitely worth picking up at your local library, if your library happens to carry it, Possibly even worth $5.00 for a back issue.

On the whole, I’ve really liked what Poetry has become over the last few years. The editors seem to be trying to promote a diversity of style and content while engaging the magazine’s audience by accepting and publishing letters to the editor. The annual translation issue is always a treat, as is the annual humor issue. The editors also seem to be interested in hearing new voices. For the next two or three months, they’re considering submissions only from poets previously unpublished within their pages.

Every time a new issue comes in, I’m glad I’ve subscribed.

Sitting quietly in the sun waiting for something to happen

Posted on
2

Ten or 15 years ago, when the Major League Baseball umpires went on strike, I became pretty fed up with baseball and didn’t watch much of it anymore. This was after being an avid fan of the Cubs for as long as I could remember. When I was growing up, any time we’d visit my mom’s mom, if there was a Cubs game on, she’d be watching it, and that bled over into my home life. I remember coming home from school many Fall days to find that my mom had turned a Cubbies game on as background noise. This was during the days of Andre Dawson (I have most of his baseball cards, including the rookie card, which at one point looked like it was going to be worth something), Ryne Sandberg, and Mark Grace. The Cubs sucked as always, but boy did I love to watch them; boy did I love to hear Harry Caray bellowing with a week’s worth of hot dogs and beer rattling around in the back of his throat, “Cubs Win, Cubs Win, Holy Cow, Cubs Win!”. I can still hear the rhythm and tone of the patter Steve Stone and Harry Caray exchanged, and I’m hard pressed nowadays to find anything comparable on TV. When I was a teenager, my family took a vacation to (or through?) Atlanta, and we scheduled it so that we could see a Cubs game. We sat fairly close to the field on the third-base line, and I remember thinking every fly ball curving toward the foul pole was going to be a homer. Man, was it ever cool.

But then the umps went on strike, and before long, I was off to college, where I eventually cultivated a disdain for sports. Sure, I went to a bunch of football games my freshman year, and I camped out overnight (literally in a tent) down by the Dean Dome in accordance with the Byzantine requirements for snagging student tickets. My roommate and I even went to a few baseball games, and I went to at least one or two swim meets to support a classmate and friend of a friend who had national standing. But by my junior or senior year, I had grown fed up enough with meeting in crummy classrooms or attending literature-geek events in poor facilities that I harbored this disdain for the wealthy sports establishment. I suppose turning my nose up at these things also made me feel like I was part of some elite class that could do without the celebration of brute strength in an environment that purported to strengthen the intellect.

Nevertheless, my roommate and I took a road-trip between our junior and senior years during which we caught two baseball games. We paid some family I don’t remember how much to park in their yard near the stadium in Atlanta and had very real concerns that the car would be either gone or stripped when we returned. We sat in the outfield at Turner Field and overlooked Tony Gwynn (now a commentator, along with Cubs pitcher Rick Sutcliffe) and his Padres up against the Braves. I don’t remember who won. It wasn’t so much about who won (especially for this baseball fan in self-imposed exile) as about eating those incomparable hot dogs and sitting quietly in the sun waiting for something to happen. Our plan was to drive as far west as we could without rushing too much within our timeframe and then to head back. We made it as far as Houston, where we watched the Astros play the Marlins (a fairly young team at the time, if I remember correctly) in the Astrodome. When I was younger, my knowledge of baseball trivia was near-encyclopedic, and I can still remember that Phillies superstar Mike Schmidt once hit a ball in the Astrodome that never came down because it became lodged in a PA speaker. This was long before our visit, of course, which was just before Enron Field replaced the dome as home to the Astros in 2000. The game wasn’t memorable, and there weren’t many people there at all. I don’t know what tickets we bought, but we wound up close to the field down the first-base line, watching the game over the bullpen.

Recently, I’ve found myself interested in baseball again. I don’t know what provoked the interest. But now I’ll channelsurf in the evenings and on weekends for some game or another, preferably a National League game (never seemed fair to me that the AL didn’t make their pitchers hit, so it’s always seemed a weaker league, though the NL feels to me like the underdog precisely because their pitchers have to hit), and especially a Cubs or Braves game. Most any game will do, though. Tonight, off and on, I watched the Cards rout the Phillies 10 to 1 or 2, with six homers (two by one guy, two back-to-back, and three of which landed in one late inning). Ouch. I watch Baseball Tonight if I can get away with it. Mleeka hates this, of course, because she signed up for the lesser evil of computer geek (sports guys tending to consume way too much time and beer) and seems to have gotten the ole bait and switch (or the bait and augment).

When my dad visited a couple of weeks ago, I took him to a Tennessee Smokies baseball game as a belated Father’s Day gift. It was a selfish gift, I have to say, though not entirely so. I couldn’t possibly count how many times we went out in the back yard to toss a ball around, how I’d throw a wild one over his best leap and 15 feet into a briar patch in the woods that bordered our yard, how he taught me to throw a curve, a screwball, a painfully telegraphic knuckle ball. Our going to the game was a revival of those times, now more than half my life ago. We’ll try to go to more games if he’s in town for them.

At the game we attended, we watched the local team (a Cubs farm team!) hand a Braves affiliate a loss. We got tickets just off the first base bag, on the first row. I hung my hand over the railing and took a picture of the inside of the dug-out (and would you believe these seats were less than $10 apiece?). We sat there mostly quiet, noting stats that appeared on the scoreboard for new batters and making our armchair calls. That’s what baseball is about for me. You just sit and watch, sit and listen. It’s peaceful, and the sound of a baseball crowd is like none at any other sporting event I’ve attended, muted and lulling until CRACK and everybody’s watching the ball slicing toward the foul pole hold your breath hold it hold it and there it went foul and the stadium groans and sighs and simmers down again.

From the stands, in my experience, baseball is a game of good will. We watched the Smokies mascot doing his stupid tricks, and I was irritated at first, but eventually I came around and laughed as he pantsed his partner in crime who was pretending to be a base-coach for the other team. A generally understated guy, in the later innings, I found myself yelling and applauding for a good hit on either side (though mob mentality and an unshakable allegiance to the Cubbies made me generally favor the home team). The good will at a baseball game is infectious, for it was surely the laughter of others at the mascot that brought me around. You hear somebody talking about a call or a strategy, and you want to turn around and validate it. It’s simultaneously relaxing and exciting (anticipation!). There are kids running around the field doing contests between innings, and everybody on both sides laughs and cheers for them, and then you stand up and sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh inning stretch. For even someone who tends toward individualism, there’s something very appealing about the brotherhood to be found at a baseball game.

And yet, when that something you’re sitting and waiting for happens, whether it be a bad call or a fielding error or a long ball, that brotherhood dissolves, with half the crowd jeering and half the crowd cheering. Until the next at-bat, when things more or less reset, and you wait for the next flurry of activity and excitement. There’s just not much better than this.

The Phillies lost their 10,000th game tonight. One player got his first home run of the majors after 93 at-bats, and in spite of their 9-run deficit, the Phillies dugout lit up for him. The Cubbies are currently at about 9,400 losses. I’m off to check the Smokies’ schedule to see when I can catch another game.

New site software

Posted on
2

I’ve been doing a lot of work in Drupal 5.1 in recent months. I’ve liked Drupal since I first tried an install of it about three years ago. It’s got an active community and improves markedly with every release in terms of front-end usability, back-end code quality, performance, and the ease with which one can do custom development of the software. It’s also got a very well-documented API, and the methods of extending it to make it do more things than it does out of the box really make good sense to me.

My experience with developing for WordPress, which I’ve used as a blogging platform for upwards of three years now, has been somewhat different. I haven’t tried it out in a while, and things have likely gotten better since I did, but my impression upon thinking back on it is that writing plugins for WordPress was like building a popsicle stick house, where extending Drupal is like using a Construx set with pieces that snap nicely and tidily into place. I don’t do much custom development in Drupal for my own site, but I do frequently prototype things at some domain or another that I’ve got hosted, and I’ve decided finally, with the improvements that have gone into Drupal 5.1, to switch over for my own blog.

For every-day bloggers, WordPress wins out hands-down. It’s great software that makes blogging easy, even if you want features that don’t exist in the default install. The hosted version is very nice as well, and though I’ve never engaged very heavily with the WordPress developer community, I understand that it thrives. So my shift here shouldn’t be construed as a slap at WordPress. I’d recommend it over Drupal for anybody who just wants to run a personal blog. I guess I’m switching because I’ve just personally grown to feel at home in Drupal.

Along with the new software comes a new design (if you can call it that). I haven’t checked it out in IE yet (not sure I can bear to try). It uses the (slightly-modified) markup of the default “garland” theme that ships with Drupal, and I’ve added some graphics and tweaked the styles a bit. I’m not sure the green sidebars work. I’m not sure any of it works, but that’s why I write code for a living instead of pushing pretty colors around the page.

In theory, all the old blog posts will link up as they did previously, though I suspect there are some images for old (pre-flickr) posts that I didn’t pull over. I wrote some code to pull my WordPress posts, tags, and comments into Drupal that I’ll make available to anybody who asks, with the understanding that you get what you pay for, minus any guarantee of support or any assurance that it won’t delete your whole blog and break up with your girlfriend in a most crude and cruel way. I found an importer or two that just didn’t do the trick for me, so I wrote one that you just run at the command line and that seems to work pretty well within its limited scope.

To emulate the functionality of my old blog, I installed the following Drupal modules that aren’t shipped in core:

  • Akismet (spam control)
  • Archive (doesn’t come with a calendar, and I wrote a custom sidebar block for it)
  • Pathauto (for auto-generated friendly URLs)
  • Tagadelic (to show the tag cloud in the sidebar)

So, there you have it. If you’re a regular reader and something’s broken, please do let me know.

Falling Man

Posted on
Reply

Just finished reading Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. A decade or so ago, I got hooked on the work of one David Foster Wallace, and in one of his essays, he mentions DeLillo as an influence. He’s also corresponded with DeLillo, who is sometimes listed as one of DFW’s literary forebears. When I learned about all this, I naturally went out and read a few books by DeLillo. First was White Noise, which was great (the kind of book you push on your friends). Then I read a couple of his other shorter books and was less than impressed. They felt sort of soap-opera-y and just didn’t interest me much. I later picked up Underworld and was captivated at once by the opening scene from a baseball game, which felt really authentic and exhilarating. Maybe halfway through that tome, I lost interest and put it down, and I sold the book when we were downsizing our library in anticipation of a move last year. I’ve since read some comments that make me want to pick it back up; maybe I didn’t give it a fair shake. Anyway, when I learned a couple of months ago that DeLillo had a new one coming out, I was interested in giving him another go, so I got Amazon to send it my way.

After the gripping first three-and-a-half page chapter, the book is mostly boring for the rest of the remaining 242 pages. It lapses into the blah melodrama (meloblahma?) of some of DeLillo’s other short work, and I have a hard time caring about the main characters’ emotional ties to one another and to others around them. With the exception of the parts of the book that dramatize events from September 11 and scenes of a performance artist who flings himself from high places and assumes the position of a person caught on film falling from one of the towers, Falling Man feels like the same old stuff of his I read and disliked years ago, aloof descriptions of people behaving in ways they maybe shouldn’t. Why should I read about this kind of stuff when I can just watch Days of Our Lives and check my email at the same time on top of it?

DeLillo does take some breaks from being dull to consider some fairly interesting things. He writes of Alzheimer’s and exercises performed by some of that disease’s afflicted of trying to write down their memories, for example, and the desire of these sufferers to clutch their memories tightly contrasts nicely with the inability of the rest of us to divest ourselves of the memories and images (e.g. that of the falling man that inspires the book and its performance artist) of an event like the collapse of the Twin Towers.

There’s also much in the book of ritual and its meanings and motiviations and their relationship to particular actions. Considered in the context of destructive religious fervor, this is fairly compelling.

I found myself wishing DeLillo had found ways to flesh out these themes in more subtle and broadly engaging ways rather than doing partial character studies of people whose uninterestingness is painful and whose interactions are classic (to me, at least) bad DeLillo.

I had hoped the book would break my heart.

I’m not sorry I read Falling Man, but it wasn’t a hard enough book (it didn’t require much of a cerebral investment at all, and this from somebody who wrinkles his brow aplenty) or a baseline beautiful enough book for me to forgive its imperfections, and it puts me in some doubt as to whether I should bother re-buying Underworld. It surely makes me look forward to diving into Pynchon’s Against the Day (I read the opening section the other day and it was marvelous), which, love it or hate it or (more likely) not understand the hundredth part of it, will be one helluva ride and anything but boring.