June 26th, 2010
As poet, publisher & old friend David Abel, long gone from New York, breezes thru this weekend with a reading on Sunday the 27th at the Zinc Bar, I find myself reading TUNC by Lawrence Durrell from 1958 …
A pheasant stuffed with nominal chestnuts, a fatty wine disbursed among fake barrels in a London cellar — Poggio’s, where people go to watch each other watch each other. I had been trying to explain the workings of Abel — no, you cannot have a computer with balls; but the illusion of a proximate intuition is startling. Like a buggerish astrology only more real, more concrete; better than crystal ball or divining rod.
“Here we have lying about us in our infancy” (they clear their throats loudly) “a whole culture tied to a stake, whipped blind, torn apart by mastiffs. Grrrr! And here we are, three men in black overcoats, ravens of ill omen in an oak tree.” I gave a couple of tremendous growls. Heads turned toward us in meek but startled fashion.
“You are still drunk, Felix.” This is Nash.
“No, but people as destinies are by now almost mathematically predictable. Ask Abel.”
“Almost.”
“Almost.”
“You interest me strangely,” said Vibart dozing off for a second. Emboldened Charlock continued.
“I call it pogonometry. It is deduction based on the pogon [then in Greek], a word which does not exist. It is the smallest conceivable unit of meaning in speech; a million pogons make up the millioneth part of a phoneme. Give Abel a sigh or the birth cry of a baby and he can tell you everything.”
March 19th, 2010
Friend and poet Michael Gushue reports this alleged lost scene from the Citizen Kane script:
Kane stands with his butler/factotum, Raymond in the family tomb. His only son, Charles Foster Kane II, is dead at the age of 31. The year is 1938, and workmen are setting a slab on the grave.
After they leave, Kane looks at the simple inscriptions on the crypts of his father, mother and son.
Above the blank space reserved for him, is an inscription on an ornate, ancient wall imported from Persia.
Kane translates for Raymond (bored and couldn’t care less):
The drunkenness of youth
Has passed like a fever
And yet I saw many things
Seeing my glory in the days of my glory
I thought my power eternal
And the days of my life
Fixed surely in the years
But a whisper came to me
From Him who dies not
I called my tributary kings together
And those who were proud rulers under me
I opened the boxes of my treasure to them, saying
“Take hills of gold, mountains of silver
And give me one more day upon the earth”
But they stood silent
Looking upon the ground
So that I died
And Death came to sit upon my throne
O sons of men
You see a stranger upon the road
You call to him and he does not stop
He is your life
Walking towards time
Hurrying to meet the kings of India and China
O sons of men
You are caught in the web of the world
And the spider
Nothing waits behind it
Where are the men with towering hopes?
They have changed places with owls
Owls who lived in tombs
And now inhabit a palace
We live in affluence
And are blind to where we are
Our concerns and feuds
Fill our time every day
You must ask yourself
What is the worth?
January 14th, 2010
He weeps over Jerusalem.
And yet the city was still standing in its glory, and the temple still held its head high, higher than any structure in the world.
And Christ Himself says, “If thou hadst known in this thy day the things which are for thy good!” But to this he adds, “Now they are hid from thine eyes.” In God’s eternal counsel its destruction is determined, and salvation is hid from the eyes of its inhabitants.
Was the generation then living more wicked than the foregoing generations to which it owed its life?
Was the whole nation corrupt, was there none righteous in Jerusalem, not a single one who could check God’s wrath?
No, its destruction was determined. In vain the besieged city looked in anguish for a way out, the army of the enemy crushed it in its mighty embrace, and no one escaped, and heaven remained shut and sent forth no angel except the angel of death which brandished its sword over the city.
Is this the jealousy of God, that He visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, in such a way that He does not punish the fathers but the children?
What answer should we make? Should we say:
“There have elapsed now nearly two thousand years since those days. Such a horror the world never saw before and never again will see. We thank God that we live in peace and security, that the scream of anguish from those days reaches us only very faintly. We will hope and believe that our days and those of our children may pass in quietness, unaffected by the storms of existence. We do not feel strong enough to reflect upon such things, but we are ready to thank God that we are not subject to such trials.”
Can anything be imagined more cowardly and more disconsolate than such talk?
Is then the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once in the world?
Or is not this the inexplicable, that it did occur?
And has not this fact, the fact that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even the most explicable events?
If once it occurred in the world that man’s lot was essentially different from what it ordinarily is, what assurance is there that this will not recur?
What assurance that this is not the true thing, and what ordinarily occurs is the untrue?
Or is the true proved to be such by the fact that it most often occurs?
And does not that really often occur which those ages witnessed?
Is it not what we all of us in so many ways have experienced, that what occurs on a great scale is experienced also in a minor degree?
“Think ye,” said Christ, “that those Galileans whose blood Pilate commanded to be shed were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered these things?” It was a providential dispensation, you will say, not a punishment.
But the destruction of Jerusalem was a punishment, and it fell with equal severity upon the innocent and the guilty …
EITHER/OR – The Ultimatum
September 28th, 2009
One can sign up here to have one of Shakespeare’s sonnets delivered daily. Sometimes works to dispel clouded days, or seed them with perspective.
But perhaps you protest: Some of the sonnets are inpenetrably personal and … well, whiny. But even so, I find, the dish often serves, for one without a wife, to flesh out an automated day.
March 19th, 2009
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IT OCCURS to me to mark if not celebrate my birthday with Twittering reports from the frontlines of life across this March 19.
Also: to add a sub-category — Writing — to the Conversation database under Arts & Private Life.
Why didn’t I think of that before?
Because I never write about writing here, it would seem.
Right, then. Well, at the moment:
Going thru paper markup. Best readings are on paper, not screen — as this afternoon, sitting in the 58 degree sunshine on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, overlooking the tail end of the East River and the harbor, Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street melting, melting …
What can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemmed Manhattan, river and sunset and scallop-edged waves …?
The current screenplay, set in Brooklyn, stars Walt Whitman: The heroine, a fifty-year old black woman, shares his surname, his spirit, and perhaps his blood.
This darn script is dear to my heart, being about facing death, which a number of close people have done in recent years. No one ever wins. The story is about not losing.
“Great, great … Sounds like an art film. Black and white? Great, great …”
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I’ve never worked on a script longer than four months before. But this one, the seventh, since … August 2006. Many drafts, each greater spiritually, and now materially, by the latter which I mean the deadly page count, now less than 130, which puts it in the realm of things sendable to strangers in the movie biz.
All the other scripts: Political stories. Character-driven low-key thrillers, one might say. Graham Greene stuff, one might dare.
Was told re these stories in 2003 — when my fine Old School agent, so proudly acquired with much time and labor, threw up his hands and retired to Paris in response to the invasion of Iraq …
I was then told to stop writing novels, and write screenplays again instead, the novel being dead.
Now it seems they all say nobody anywhere reads an unsolicited screenplay — so write it as a (crummy) book first.
To their credit, they don’t say “novel.” As if to acknowledge in tacit passing, hey, it’s not like we sell novels. We sell books. To movie producers.
When asked in the 80s to name America’s important writers, Gore Vidal replied that it was no longer possible for a writer to be important.
This may have something to do with why I rarely read American novelists my age or younger. Rarely can I bear to. (I do mean the real novelists, not the schlock-meisters.) No, I find even our writers of their generation pretty intolerable and at best tolerably interesting.
Television’s to blame, of course, not only for writers’ lack of facility and style and gravitas, but also for a kind of sophisticated naivete that has made high-brow literature, once again, an art of Consent.
I was born roughly on the cusp, in 1958. TV was thin in the 60s, esp early on. And almost all of it was made for adults.
Today the Tube baby talks. And teaches infants and children how to be people. Shallow Consenting chatterboxes. Who go on to produce the crudest blockbusters. The Alienist. The Lovely Bones.
When Klatuu came to visit, he didn’t sit with a great novelist to talk turkey about the fate of mankind. He sat with a technologist. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on our writers. That they’re no longer competent intellectuals. No longer interesting. No longer capable of speaking with Klatuu. Nobody is. And so he talks with the generals.
But all that aside, I think I don’t read neighboring novelists because novels are about worlds. This is why they’re so important and thrilling when one is young. They introduce us to the worlds.
But by 50 one has met the world one shares with neighboring writers. Knows its irritating little habits. Very hard at that point for a neighbor to interest one in his bemused account of growing up in an artistic family on the Upper West Side.
So one flees to the foreign writers, whose worlds are still largely unknown, even if one has been travelling and reading there for decades.
And one flees to the past. The wealth of novels in English from prior centuries is …
Yes. My greatest treasure.
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Before this past Thanksgiving the Brooklyn script was 160 pages. A sperm whale beached. Didn’t matter, however, since the sworn intent was to produce it myself. Late 2006. Before Wall Street, where I tend to make my living, blew itself to bits.
So now the page count does matter. Cutting back to the 120s, oi … Wasn’t easy.
One would think it’d be easy to simply sit at computer and type one’s own pen-to-paper comments into Movie Magic Screenwriter. But no …
This wine actually helps — by dulling sensibilities that otherwise would revolt and insist on thinking better about this next comment upon a sentence that has already been retouched a hundred times …
Amid the thickly marked pages, in the third of the heroine’s four scenes with her Death & Dying shrink, a particularly tricky comment repeats four times. And thrice with a Bang:
“Cut the Idle Shit!”
A familiar sort of comment. Not easy to deal with. Would prefer something specific and editorial per se.
And what’s with the caps? Who is this ass?
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I don’t know who painted this last. Let’s say the Midtown Master.
The first, of course, is by Paul Klee: The Twittering Machine.
Then Death and Fire. Also by Klee.
Then a painting by David Dalla Venezia, whom I met at one of his exhibits years ago, somewhere in Italy.
March 10th, 2009
Came across this Times magazine piece by Tim Weiner while musing about Petraeus and Lansdale in Pakghanistan and Vietnam. Adapted from Weiner’s excellent CIA book of 1995, Legacy of Ashes. Touches on Lansdale among other interesting things.
And it takes one back to that fled world, post Soviet Union before 9/11, when dreams of Peace Dividends and calls for the dissolution of the CIA were in the air, the latter from the likes of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The CIA is impossibly inpenetrable and corrupted — ungovernable. Better to start over from scratch …
Fled is that music.
But even way back in 1995 all that was something of a cover story, or, rather, an effect of a cover story — an approach to policy distorted and frustrated by the privatization of America’s covert ops capacity, so to speak.
Journalist Joseph Trento (with whom on points I disagree) touches on this firmly in his book Prelude to Terror – The Rogue CIA and America’s Private Intelligence Network (2005).
The privatization of what had been, since the CIA’s founding (1947), its bread and butter work (intelligence collection being merely its cover — its day job), was touched off by:
(i) the cashiering in 1973 of CIA director Richard Helms, a career spook back to the OSS — the Man with dirty hands Who Kept the Secrets — and
(ii) attempts thereafter to clean the Augean stables by presidents — appointing a string of clean-hands DCIs: James Schlesinger, William Colby (who died soon enough in a boating accident) and Stansfield Turner — and by Congress — with the Rockefeller and Church hearings in the Senate, culminating with the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
But when one cleans the stables, what happens to the manure?
An illuminating side-show result of the attempted purgation: George HW Bush’s prez campaign in 1980 was staffed by a lot of retired guys in trenchcoats.
(And his victory in 1988 was the first signal failure of US presidential exit polls. A problem that then slept until … 2000. And 2004. Bush boys don’t poll properly …)
Here’s a recent interview with Trento — worth reading and listening.
To return to Weiner: The ongoing privatization of the private banking black bag work the CIA did for corporate and other chums in the good old days leaves somewhat moot, even in 1995, the isolated CIA question when considering the problems that come to mind when one thinks of the so-called intelligence community.
The problem is now larger and more insinuated throughout the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower’s term now ringing somewhat quaint) than during the days of Gentleman Spy Allen Dulles. Post 9/11, instead of following Moynihan’s lead by simplifying (to clarify) the National Security Apparat, a stampeded Congress slapped on several more layers of bureaucracy. And meanwhile the private sector in this growth industry expanded as never before, under Cheney’s guiding hand in particular.
Today’s rather cleansed CIA, then, is something of a front, more akin to the straight-shooting Pentagon than the dirty-tricks outfit of the golden age.
The dirtiest business — the most unpatriotic business — has been outsourced. To small and mid-sized firms owned and operated by ex-CIA, DIA, FBI, ATF and SS agents, ex-Army Rangers and ex-Navy Seals …
Prouty’s Secret Team in teeming blasted bloom.
January 27th, 2009
Has died. The best American novelist since 1945.
A radio interview from 1984.
I read The Coup a year or two ago. Marvelous pitch-perfect comedy, set in a place like Nigeria in the 60s as big oil came on the scene.
A fool in the Times today, while recommending Updike reading, suggested that people might skip the second of the four Harry Angstrom novels — Rabbit Redux — in my humble opinion his single greatest novel. Â Set in 1969, written soon after, now reading as a great historical novel furthermore filled with his intense, precise evocations of inner and outer worlds …
Here’s a bit from an upcoming book of his final poetry:
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!â€
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.â€
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
As if to emphasize the loss, I find myself reading The Da Vinci Code. The gargantuan bestseller.  The writing: embarassing garbage. The thinking: adolescent. What we’ve become.
Also today: The Washington Post announces it will junk Book World, its Sunday book review section.
November 12th, 2008
The Strong Man, a biography of John Mitchell, Nixon’s atty general and campaign manager, and one of the first and largest bodies to fall from the heavens as the Watergate scandal unfolded, came out earlier this year.
Jim Hougan (author of two important books, Spooks and Secret Agenda, the latter about Watergate) and others commented on the new Mitchell book at the Education Forum, which across the years has housed perhaps the best discussion of inter alia the JFK murder.
I posted a comment in response to Hougan’s overview of the book, and asked him three questions. He replied. All visible here.
The discussion may not be entirely rooted in nostalgia. There is a tenuous Bush family connection that reaches, yet alive, into the present day. If looking for a quicky — here.
September 22nd, 2008
I’ve never yet been able to get into DFW, although the problem is general: I’m rarely able to enjoy any American novelist my age or younger. Perhaps something to do with the fact that I’ve tried to be one myself.
But both he and his recent suicide certainly deserve notice. The world is poorer that he’s gone. And I intend to finish something he left behind.
I haven’t seen anything to indicate why he hung himself, aside from family reports of chronic depression. I recall that when Hunter Thompson checked out, in February 2005, he left behind a note indicating great distress that football season had ended.
September 19th, 2008
John Le Carre’s novels about the infighting and turncoating within MI6 (the British secret service) during the early cold war years feature the antagonist Bill Hayden, based on life’s Kim Philby, the most spectacular of Russia’s moles within.
Le Carre was himself an agent of MI6, until Philby outted him to the Reds. He then turned to writing.
In the novels, George Smiley of MI6 (based perhaps on Peter Wright, author of the spectacular memoir Spycatcher) manages to nab Hayden in the end, and then subjects him to genteel debriefings as to how and why.
One can read Philby’s own account of his motives in his memoir, My Secret War.
But, more briefly in Le Carre, Hayden explains to Smiley why he decided to support Moscow:
“Do you know what’s killing western democracy, George? Greed. And constipation. Moral. Political. I hate America very deeply. The economic repression of the masses, institutionalized. Even Lenin couldn’t foresee the extent of that.
“Britain? Oh dear. No viability whatsoever in world affairs. Until the mid 50s I still had hopes. Lingering loyalty to what we represented. Self delusion, of course. We were already America’s streetwalkers.”
In life Philby avoided arrest and lived out his golden years in Moscow, loyal to the end.
2. Â I see that le Carre published an opinion in 2003 about the American invasion of Iraq.
