The predicament of a woman who has Tommy tattooed across her tailbone and ends up marrying Jack is not unlike the predicament of a nation run by ideology instead of common sense. According to current vogue in politics, this woman should not flip-flop from Tommy to Jack, even though Tommy is in jail for raping her kid sister. (more…)

If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?

Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are you look enough like our received idea of how Americans should look to duck the bite of the question. Unless of course you’re Jewish and your forebears haven’t mixed with Aryans enough, by force or choice, to give you that accepted, that approved look.

Things change, for better or worse. When I was a boy Rudolph Valentino’s foreign face had been romanticized into at least as much acceptance as pizza or kielbasa. But the stardom of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jennifer Lopez would have been harder to imagine. Harder still the stardom of Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry. (more…)

We live in a society that has reached an incredible consensus, in spite of all the red state-blue state talk: we agree that it’s something akin to a terror alert to talk straight. (more…)

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…)

John McCain, who knows a thing or two about the Navy, thinks military recruits should be instructed in our foreign policy. But foreign policies fluctuate with our political EKG, while our national ideals, however soiled they may be by scare tactics, hold fast.

My most memorable experience in Navy boot camp in the early 1950s at Bainbridge, Maryland, was being shown the 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident, starring Henry Fonda. Each and every one of us knew the United States Navy wanted us to know that a man may be unjustly accused and lynched and that it was up to each of us to stand, like Henry Fonda, against the terroristic atmosphere in which men may be wrongly accused and even executed. (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.

(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