Ally McBeal

 I saw an episode of "Ally McBeal" and heard one character remark to the other about how they have had a lot of sexual harassment cases lately. And of course, since the entire premise of the show is to sexualize office politics in a titillating way, the reference becomes "meta." You want to say to the characters: it is the writers' fault!  

The premise of "Murder she wrote" is that the main character will solve a murder that occurs in her vicinity, every week.  This means that the murder rate in her small Maine town is going to be far worse than any big city.  At one point, in an episode that doesn't take place in Cabot Cove, a character remarks about how many murders occur when she is around.  Clearly, once you see Jessica Fletcher, you should get as far away from there as possible! 

My third example is Snoopy's dog house. Why does he sleep on top of the doghouse, rather than inside of it?  He gets rained on or snowed on, but doesn't enter the house itself.  The reason is that we need to see him. Visually, the strip does not work if Snoopy is inside the dog house. So jokes about him getting snowed on and never escaping into his house, are also references to the conventional visual language of the strip itself.   

I guess what I'm trying to get at here, is that a fictional universe will have its own rules, ones established by generic conventions rather than by the way things work in our, non-fictional universe.  I think that's what gets Don Quixote in trouble as well.  

 

Biotherm

 Yesterday I attended a lecture by Andrew Epstein, of Florida State, invited here by English dept. I know him a bit, not super well, but he has an excellent blog on the New York School Poets (Locus Solus) that I read. We talked a bit before and after the lecture.  

Anyway, his talk was on "attention" in poetry, and he used a poem by Bishop about a sandpiper paying close attention to the sand of a beach; then some poems by Rae Armantrout; then a book by Harryette Mullen, one that I happen to like a lot.  The talk was exemplary in the way it constructed an argument with those example.. 

My question was about "Biotherm" by Frank O'Hara, in which attention is paid to many things but in a meandering form. It seemed as though attention was always about being attentive to one thing at a time, not attention as attention in each moment to what might be happening.  Now I want to re-read Biotherm and "Ode to Mike Goldberg's birth (day and other days"), poems in which O'Hara develops this new kind of American long poem, that we see also in Schuyler, in "Freely Espousing" and "The Morning of the Poem."  They are acts of attention as process, not attention as shutting everything else down to pay attention to one thing.  This is kind of impossible anyway.  I sometimes try to listen to a song three times, once for the drums, once for the bass, etc... It is great to try to do this, but I rarely succeed because the drum part is not meant to be listened to like that.  

About Bishop's sandpiper: it seemed to have escaped the poet's mind that the sandpiper is staring at the sand because it is looking for insects and other small creatures to eat.  Its lack of concern for looking at other things (the bigger picture) is not a flaw, but a biological necessity.  It's a wonderful metaphor, but from an anthropomorphic perspective.  

How many genders are there?

 The answer is very simple.  There are as many genders as there are boxes on the form to check.  Inventing a new box does not change the nature of reality. Gender is what is socially recognized as such in any given social context. 

If you think having more boxes to check is better, it might turn out that after a certain point having a lot is not so great after all.  The binary tends to slip back in anyway, because gender is a way of socially acknowledging something that is rather binary in the first place. Even the non-binary ends up recognizing their binary, because we don't talk about non-binary rocks.  

I have no problem with social construction of reality... but then it ends up being biologically essentialist in the most naive sense. 

The napkins and the slob

 Does the slob use more or fewer napkins than the neat eater?  A true slob doesn't use any, but generally a messy eater will use many. A very neat person uses only a few. (An obsessive neatnik uses too many!)

So there is a correlation between two factors, messy eating and the use of napkins, but the correspondence is skewed at either end by the messiest and the most obsessively clean.  

Show Tunes or Jazz standards?

Once in the coffee shop at Stanford I was with someone I knew, I think it was Stephen Vineberg? or a similar name, and we were identifying every song that was being played, maybe by someone playing piano there? I don't remember.  And my friend was saying, 'you know a lot of show tunes" and I was like, I don't think of those as show tunes but as jazz standards.  Of course, we were both right.  I didn't know the songs in their original context, as songs from musical comedies, but as songs played a lot by jazz musicians.  

The Knife of the Times

 I pulled off the shelf the volume that contains my 1st scholarly publication, William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet  (1983).  I had remembered that others in the Williams seminar at Stanford, with Gilbert Sorrentino, were in this volume but I am only finding one other essay, other than mine, by my friend Bob Basil.  Anyway, I will read his article soon, but I had someone thought that Joseph Conti was also in this book, but I am not finding him?  Such is memory. I have no need to re-read my own essay.  

Anyway, Sorrentino's own essay is only a few pages long, and analyzes the language of the story "The Knife of the Times." He explains that there are three varieties of language here, none of which is the habitual mode of Williams' other stories or novels. A habitual, automatic language, unmarked essentially. A refined, euphemistic language, meant to disguise reality. And the language of romantic fiction, also euphemistic. Sorrentino shows how each language variety appears, and how it is possible to use "debased" language with no satiric intent, a language unfit for literature but somehow redeemed. 

The story itself is about two women attracted to each other who have no adequate language in which to process their experience. 

Williams's story is a kind of linguistic miracle, in Sorrentino's retelling of it, and Sorrentino's brief essay is itself a critical miracle, for Mayhew. It is so direct, concise, and forceful.  It encapsulates Sorrentino's admiration for Williams, based on very specific ideas about language and its relation to reality. Sorrentino is an interested party here.  It would be possible to disagree, but I would see no point. I wish this were a normal way of doing literary criticism, not a rare exception.  

I SENT...

 I sent my future self a message, years ago

marking poets and poems in an anthology on my shelves 

None of the Above, edited by Michael Lally in 1976

for future reading

Now I am receiving that message,

re-reading these poems I've marked

I am that future self, now, but really

a present one, here and now

The self that sent the message is a past one, now

though present at the time, or so I thought