In a certain plot contrivance in television serials and films the conscientious subaltern makes a fool of his pretentious jerk of a supervisor. The gimmick is overused to a fare-thee-well in such productions as the three CSI shows. What intrigues me about it is that, as so often in television scripting, it seems to appeal to a yearning in viewers to triumph over the stuffed asses who run our affairs.

Certain actors, even young ones, seem to enjoy careers playing the jerks we love to trump. My wife and I when watching television often say, We don’t like him, do we? We’re like the cop who can’t resist chasing a red Corvette. (more…)

The gray region between sexism and misogyny is a gloaming filled with turned around street signs and delusions. I ought to know because I’ve been wallowing in it. I wrote in this space that Senator Hillary Clinton was marching like the Energizer Bunny off a cliff. I faulted her for playing the race card. I called her Pillory Clinton for coarsening the level of discourse in her campaign against Barack Obama by talking about his problem with white male voters. (more…)

Sometimes I think the all news all day formula is traumatizing society. The news—if you can call that weird concoction of anchor bonhomie and drivel news—is surpassingly negative, and in the interest of ratings the media rarely lose an opportunity to exaggerate the negative side of the news. News or what passes for it is about bad behavior, disaster, crime, nasty mouths, lies, spin, malfeasance—and a little upbeat story here and there as condiment. (more…)

Is that your start scuffed in your coat? I asked my wife the other day. I meant, of course, to ask if that was her scarf stuffed in her coat. It was a humble example of a spoonerism. I love spoonerisms. I think if we declared one day a week Spoonerism Day and observed it with crazed delight we’d take ourselves less seriously. Listening to the pompous asses who direct our affairs indulging in spoonerisms once a week would be a good antidote for the slavish seriousness with which we habitually take them.

We could mess with the oppressive logic of things and turn grave pronunciamentos all topsy-turvy. We could have a high old time at the expense of talking heads, headline writers, politicians, preachers, and everyone else inclined to telling us what’s important. We could make all the snake oil salesmen in the world reverse the order of their pitches until even they laughed at themselves. We could spend a whole day throwing verbal junk balls at each other and go to bed satisfied that the world might not be safer but it sure would be funnier.—DM

Have you ever wondered long after a party about that certain somebody you didn’t meet but can’t forget? This is the subject of Gatecrasher, my short story in the June issue of The Country and Abroad. The beautiful woman whose image accompanies the story is my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione.

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 43, one of my regular pod casts for The Student Operated Press)

There’s a crucial difference between balanced reporting and insightful reporting. You can listen to this difference by tuning into the Yes Network and listening to color commentator David Cone, the famously versatile former pitcher who once considered a career in journalism.

You can describe the game and gin up excitement with personal mannerisms the way television anchors increasingly do, or you can quietly shed light on the science of the game the way Cone (inset) does. He represents the difference between reporting as theater and reporting as insight.

When Cone tells you wrist and elbow action is as important as finger location in throwing strikes, you know a lot more than when another reporter tells you that you’ve just seen a changeup, which the camera has probably already told you. (more…)

(Meditations on Rising and Falling, Philip Pardi, The University of Wisconsin Press, 87 pp, 2008, $14.95)

A good book of poems is not just a collection of good poems. Conceptualizing a book of poems is like conceptualizing a complex poem times ten. There are ways to play it safe: safe poems, safe structure. You employ what you know about prevailing tastes and show your competence. Nothing wrong with that.

But it’s not what Pardi (inset) has done. In this Brittingham Prize book he has pursued a vision with great intellectual courage and prosodic virtuosity. He has reached far and high. The difference between a poem that is merely pyrotechnic and a successful poem is the poet’s respect for the original sensibility of the poem. You can force an idea into a brilliant framework for effect or you can, as Pardi unfailingly does, work out the relationship between the demeanor of an idea and the metrics that most respectfully animate it.

In the poem The Roofers he tells of a man who is about to fall. He’s probably the hardworking immigrant we pass every day on the way to work. What we will not have noticed, what Pardi does notice, is that moments before the fall that we know is coming the man painstakingly frees a fly from tar paper, calling the insect amigo.

The poem is an alchemy of narrative craft, joinery, precognition and ordinary detail. The fly and the roofer become metaphors for heartbreak. We’re thunderstruck that this gentleman should have fallen to his death after an act of such exquisite compassion.

Pardi’s poems are remarkable for their technical restlessness, delicacy and precision. Among poets, he is a diamond cutter.

In Sonata, a poem appropriately in four movements, he employs different metrics and versifications for each movement. One might think the poem would suffer from being too obviously a tour de force, but it doesn’t. The reason it doesn’t is that Pardi isn’t trying to knock you out. He doesn’t care about the wow factor because he knows it’s cheap. He sings to himself, knowing that if a thing makes sense to him because he has put it well, then it may make sense to us. Poetry is as much gratitude as it is song.—DM

Sexism, racism, agism, smoothies, bumblers, swift-boaters, dreamers—all  flavors in the great American apple pie. As we learn to avoid trans fats so we learn, ever so slowly, to wean ourselves from misogyny, racism, agism and all those other nasties.

The late Democratic primary had plenty of misogyny and racism to go around. It arose among the pundits, the voters and the candidates. But there were triumphs. As Senator Hillary Clinton said in graciously conceding the fight to Senator Barack Obama, there are now eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling, and none of us will forget it. Bless you, Senator. (more…)

Do you remember The Gates (inset) in Central Park in 2005, that hydrology of orange banners installed by Christos and Jeanne-Claude? I don’t think anybody mentioned it at the time but it had a precedent among the Arabs. They used to hold great poetry competitions in which the poems were painted on vast banners. The banners were then carried onto fields, turning them into seas of calligraphy. (more…)

Noah Eli Gordon in an end paper in the Spring issue of Rain Taxi says he recently began to read page twenty-six of every book he owns. The more I thought about this quixotic adventure the more it enchanted me. As I compared it to the evening news, it seemed to me infinitely more intellectually adventurous.

News organizations are like fastball hitters; they fear curve balls and knuckle balls, exactly the kind of pitches Noah Gordon is likely finding on all those twenty-sixth pages. For the average news anchor there’s ping and then there’s pong. There’s ho and then there’s hum. But lord knows what glories, temptations and recognitions are in those books. (more…)