Perhaps because social occasions usually feel like a ride in a cart to the guillotine I have developed an odd angle of vision concerning them. I notice, for instance, that the most important people are notable for their absence at funerals, weddings, award ceremonies, etc—mistresses, secret lovers, those who hate us for various reasons, good and bad, lost friends, failed friends. I identify with these people because I’d like to be one of them: absent.

With this angle of vision I guess I was bound to notice that one of our local newspapers, The Independent of Columbia County, New York, has taken to writing obituary headlines profound in their innocence. For example, one recent headline refers to a 94-year-old woman as having “loved the lighthouse,” and another says of a 70-year-old that she loved animals.

The great dailies of our time in their hauteur wouldn’t be caught dead writing such intimate and insightful headlines. What is really important about a person, after all, is what she loved. This elderly woman loved the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse and worked tirelessly to preserve it. And her local newspaper was unafraid to use the word love in a headline. How reassuring in a jaded age!

As a newspaperman it became clear to me over time that we celebrate the wrong people for the wrong reasons. The real heroes are under our noses every day in every town across the land, but we celebrate the gas bags, the obscenely ambitious, the people most successful at picking our pockets and bamboozling us. The heroes are often in the back wards of asylums, in cardboard boxes on the streets, in rest homes, in church soup kitchens.

Our ideas of success are worldly and rancid. So, good for the local newspaper that chooses to celebrate someone’s love.—DM

I was pondering my fate, as I tend to do in dentists’ waiting rooms, when I hit on the idea of distracting myself with all the beautiful people in one of those high fashion magazines that smell of bad perfume. I thought the vacuity might be restful. The experience was worse than burnt coffee.

It had been some time since I leafed through one of those archives of obscene consumerism. I was struck by the ill-making blend of vampirism, decadence and pure coldbloodedness. (more…)

This is the 38th in a series of podcasts for journalism students sponsored by The Student Operated Press.

Editing is not about you

There isn’t a lot of editing in journalism today, and what there is is
often bad. The book industry has suffered a similar fate. And it shows.
And as for television, those quasi-literate crawls are enough to give
you the creeps, provided of course you notice.

I remember the joy of reading the late lamented New York Herald Tribune when I was in high school. It was superbly written and edited. Today I can say the same of The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal, but I wouldn’t say they’re as well edited as they were twenty years ago. (more…)

The news that General Motors, reporting a record $722-million fourth-quarter loss, is offering buyouts to all 74,000 of its unionized employees suggests to me that we need to talk about what nations are for.

Are they for getting out of the way of global corporations? Except when it’s necessary for the sons and daughters of the poor to defend those corporations? Are they for serving as the foreign office and defense department of global corporations? Are they for breaking the unions that speak for workers?

Or are nations to uphold our collective ideals, give us all a crack at happiness and prosperity, protect us from criminals within and without, and nurture the general good?

The problem is we all pay lip service to that last description, but our policies are calling into question our commitment to it. We seem to be buying the idea that everything will be okay if we just let corporations do whatever they want to do. (more…)

There are certain gewgaws, doodads and gimcracks I can’t seem to resist. So over the recent holidays I bought two green-flame candles at The Museum of Modern Art. (More about MoMA later). It turns out the flames are lovely in the near-dark, my usual state, but almost invisible in a brighter environment, and the wicks are difficult to light.

The candles—my wife and I thought it would be a splendid idea to
illuminate our New Year’s Eve in green flame—reminded me of the candles my stepfather Dominick once made. He liked to make things for the enjoyment of it. But somehow he found fireproof string to use as wick. He never lived it down, and enjoyed the joke as much as anybody. (more…)

My mother frustrated galleries by balking at sales of her work at the last minute. She readily gave away some paintings, but often parting seemed like elective surgery. She just needed certain paintings as much as she needed her mirror.

That’s the way I feel about some books. I need them in certain places in my home, on certain shelves or chairs or stools, in certain piles on the floor. They’re as important to me in those exact places as channel buoys are to a sailor. I read some books once and retire them with a fond pat to my library. I may or may not open them again. But others are like my favorite pajamas. I don’t read them, I wear them.

It won’t be a good day if I start it not knowing exactly where the collected works of William Butler Yeats is, for example. I have to see Emily Dickinson’s face on her collected works. I need to know where C. P. Cavafy is sipping coffee. I need to know where Arthur Rimbaud is hanging out. I don’t alphabetize or categorize my books; they know whose company they want to keep.

These necessaries don’t have to be magna opera.

Last fall on a whim I walked into The Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 724 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and bought Frank O’Hara, Poems From the Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1952-1966. I knew and admired O’Hara’s work. I’d read something about this 72-page book and wanted to have it; any Tibor de Nagy book is a collector’s prize.

Sometimes you have to know why a certain writer meant so much to you at a certain time in your life. Sometimes you have to know why another didn’t. This experience, as a reader and a writer, makes me profoundly suspicious of the current vogue to dismiss flip-floppers, people who change their positions. What a pedestrian litmus test, not changing one’s mind. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t. I think there’s some confusion between integrity and ideology here.

I loathed Hemingway when I was in college. More than fifty years later I’m amused by my earlier distaste for him. But I understand it. I took him for a bully, and I had suffered at the hands of bullies.

I was just starting college in New York City when in the spring of 1952 John Bernard Myers, who founded the gallery with Tibor de Nagy, brought out O’Hara’s first book of poems. I remember A City Winter and Other Poems, published only a year after Tibor de Nagy opened its now famous doors. Myers published only 300 copies in pamphlet form. My aunt, I. (Irene) Rice Pereira, was at the time married to the Irish poet George Reavey, and I remember telling George how much I liked the poems. George looked at me pityingly, and I realized he didn’t expect me to become a good poet.

I have never changed my mind about O’Hara. He expressed himself in ways that quintessentially affirmed my own experience of New York City and its art scene. I felt his work was daring and elegant and at the same time as comfortable as my stepfather’s fedora. I had no idea then that I had caught a glimpse of the nascent New York School of poets and artists.

I was instinctively drawn to Myers’ celebration of the marriage of art and poetry.

I remember bringing up the subject of A City Winter with Professor George Nobbe, who for many years taught a wondrous creative writing course at Columbia. He graciously asked me to read a poem to him. “Ah,” he said, “Djelloul, I think you’ve heard your own future voice.” No, no, I thought. I was more interested in placement, in structuralist experimentation. But all these years later I recognize that Professor Nobbe was right.

I’d heard an enviable sociability in O’Hara’s voice. His friends were fit subjects of his poems, while I would have thought him to be tweaking the gods. Unlike O’Hara (inset), I already had a sharp ear for New York intonations, but I never dreamed of using this good ear of mine in my poetry. In a few more years I would break down and quit college, and a decade later I would stop writing poetry. But I never stopped reading and studying it, and I never forgot O’Hara’s particular voice, although I confess that from time to time I wished it had been laced with a shot of stoicism. I revisited O’Hara several years ago when I was making a study of Cavafy. Something in Cavafy’s cafe voice reminded me of O’Hara, especially his sometimes rueful descriptions of his friends.

We can’t imagine having lived without having encountered certain people and things. My most painful thought is that every death deprives us of a mind that has entertained these certain people and things. And my most hopeful thought is that perhaps we are not deprived of these minds.

So walking into the gallery and buying that book was a kind of rebirth. I remembered having shared the 1950s and its exciting art in Manhattan with O’Hara, although we never met. We were called the silent generation. Were we so silent? Maybe a bit less histrionic than what was to come.

—DM

When I first encountered The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1919)  by T.S. Eliot I was in high school. I had heard stories of college students exchanging lines of Eliot over tennis nets as they batted their balls. I found this image strangely reassuring. I live in a world, I said to myself, where college students recite poetry to each other on tennis courts. What a wonderful life this is going to be.

But I was disquieted by the pervasive mood of estrangement in one’s own skin in Prufrock. I could not foresee that it foreshadowed my own college experience. But later at Columbia I had reason to remember Prufrock:

Shall I part my hair behind (Shall I join a fraternity?)
Do I dare to eat a peach? (Do I dare to suppose everything will be okay?)
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
(I’ll try to act like everybody else, even though I know I don’t belong here).
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me…
(No, I never dared to think they would sing to me).

Now, in my seventies, daring to publish some of my own poems, I wonder how the man who expressed the quintessential sense of alienation in his century could at the same time indulge an ugly anti-Semitism, knowing full well the pain of exile and estrangement in one’s own skin, that sense of not being welcome in the very society in which one is constrained to live.

How did Eliot manage this emotional and intellectual acrobatic in which part of him could so well express the very malady of which he was, in part, the cause? I don’t think it was hypocrisy, although it is easy enough to make the case for that. I think it was a divorce of his poetic sensibility and his cultural ambitions. It would have been one thing for him as a banker and later an editor in the British establishment to harbor anti-semitic sentiments, but Eliot associated himself with them. Social climbing and anti-Semitism are certainly not strange bedfellows.

But, much as I admire Eliot’s poetry and continue to study it, I cannot help but feel that Prufrock, at least, is compromised by what we know about Eliot. We can say it is a disengenuous poem, or we can say it is an important poem that expresses the very estrangement that pagans and Christians alike have inflicted upon the Jews for more than 2,000 years, and we can afix the footnote that Eliot, for whatever reason, was willing to live with the irony that he had given voice to the very pain he was himself causing.

—DM

Two of my short stories, Charm City and Yo Sheherazade,
made it to final rounds of judging in New Millennium
Writings competitions in the past year. Charm City is
about a high-flying investment banker who takes a walk
on the dark side in Baltimore one day and then loses
his wife, his daughter and his job when he makes a speech
about piratical capitalism. Yo Sheherezade is about a man
who tells his wife about his dear friend once too often and
finally has to face the fact that his dear friend was perfectly
willing to watch him die one drunken afternoon.
Thanks to New Millennium. I hope you readers will
get to savor these stories one day.—DM

What is all this blogblatt about too many writers? What
silliness. Did the Victorians worry about teaching everyone
to draw? Do we worry about too many baseball players, too many pretty girls, too many movies?

Who are these self-appointed gatekeepers who spout this nonsense? If you write a good poem and it makes your day or somebody else’s day, what’s wrong with that? Who says W.W. Norton has to publish you and you have to win the Nobel Prize? That’s just our crazy horse-race mentality talking.

I’ve seen blogheads fret about print-on-demand encouraging unwarranted literary ambitions. So what? Are we worried about a proliferation of ice cream vendors? Are we worried about the millions who buy lottery tickets when the odds are stupendously against them?

Will a proliferation of writers change the literary scene? Probably. How I don’t know. Nor do you. But the Victorians weren’t worried about crowding the art field and I think it loony of us to worry about crowding the literary field. Who knows, all that writing might encourage some reading?

Are the people who fret about such things worried about the poor
conglomerates who run the publishing industry? How can they possibly deal with so many literary ambitions? Oh sure, we’re all worried about the poor dears, about as much as they worry about us.

The fact is there has always been a modest profit margin in publishing, but if the big guys still want to keep on trying to squeeze blood out of a nickel, who cares?

I’m worried about my neighbor getting sick and not being able to pay for health care. I’m worried about his children not being able to go to good schools. But I’m not going to worry about too many writers and I’m not going to indulge any bloggers who do. Fatheads and big money groupies, the lot of them.

—DM

Hand-wringing in literary circles about poetry’s lack of readers is familiar. But in two important ways the plaint is bogus:

1) The magnificent poetry of the Bible and Qu’ran, to mention only two great religious works among many sacred texts, continues to top best-seller lists all over the world;

2) rap music in America and rai in North Africa and European, both forms of poetry, are astonishingly popular.
What the hand-wringing is about is the poetry of the academy and the literary establishment. Not that there is anything lamentable about it, but simply that it is only one kind of poetry, which is mistaken for being more inclusive than it is.

That said, there is poetry of the literary establishment that rises to the level of the great religious works, but the vehicles by which it is conveyed to the public are inadequate to the task. And there is outsider poetry that will eventually find its way into the canon.

When we read Revelations it has the authority of a world religion, of ecstatic utterance and vision. It has an historic following just as it had a certain predisposition when it was received. And it has going for it the human thirst for divine intervention, for heaven. Those are unbeatable market conditions.

The Qu’ran is the very word of God conveyed by His angel. Its tidal sonority and grandeur bring to us the word of the divinity for whom we hunger. None of the publishing houses can touch this for market potential.

But it is poetry—the Qu’ran, The Bible, the Zohar of the Qaballah—all poetry of the highest order, and so we can’t really say that the market for poetry is poor or small. It is in fact immense and enraptured.

When you read the wide strophes of the Book of Revelation concerning the appearance of the new Jerusalem (inset, Gustave Dore’s New Jerusalem) it’s not hard to understand why the apocalypse has played such a large role in our foreign policy, beholden as the present administration is to fundamentalists. The vision is compelling and gorgeous. And it’s pure poetry, poetry moving the policies of a superpower.

The Qu’ran is equally moving and compelling. Christian and Muslim literalists can read these monumental poetic works and find God’s writ for war, for jihad. Others can read the same lines as moral instruction. But literalists and liberals alike read the same lines for their glorious poetry. There is no disagreement between them about that.

So here we have Qu’ranic and Biblical poetry moving world events, rap and rai enthralling cultures, and yet we accept as inarguable the idea that there is only a tiny market for poetry. We need to re-examine how we think about poetry. Poetry is far more than what we find on the shelves at Barnes and Noble marked poetry. That’s not even half of it.

—DM