Sherry Chandler

William Logan says of Seamus Heaney

…he’s the rare contemporary poet unabashed about being a man, and not creepy or depressing about it…

I’m pretty sure the same thing cannot be said about Charles Bukowski. Our Netflix adventure for the week has been watching John Dulligan’s documentary film Bukowski: Born Into This.

I’m not sure I can talk about my reaction to this film or to Bukowski himself without sounding like Mrs. Grundy. For one thing, it is difficult to disentangle Bukowski from the Cult of Bukowski. The Cult has attracted such followers as Bono, Sean Penn, and Tom Waits. Or was it the writing that attracted them? Again it’s hard to tell when the stuff of Bukowski’s writing is Bukowski. And then of course this film is showing us a construct, too, editing, selecting…

The French, bless ‘em, have a term for this: nostalgie de la boue, which I learned to translate “longing for the gutter.” Or, more simply, slumming.

The romance of a sensitive soul trapped in the body of a drunken thug — Bukowski’s “there’s a bluebird in my heart that / wants to get out” — is a singularly masculine construct. A woman probably won’t find much sympathy for a man who would kick his wife off the couch, shouting Bitch! And all while the cameras are rolling. I’ve been witness to some tantrums like that and I’m not impressed.

But that Bukowski is easier for me to take than the one who sits in front of a crowded hall demanding another bottle or who swills Michelob and then growls at an invisible member of the audience, “Another one of these and I’ll take you on like a m*ther f*cker.” It’s possible that this was part self-parody and part performance nerves. But the crowd eats it up. “Yeah!” yells a masculine voice from the back of the room. It was like watching a roomful of frat boys.

But am I arguing here that poetry should be genteel? academic? I hope not. What disquiets me is a pornography of pain. Or a vampirism. Or a search for a sort of gutter Christ. This man suffered like us, he writes our pain, we love him. In a telling bonus interview, a woman describes the hurtful difference between her somewhat gentle sexual encounter with Bukowski and the aggressive rapelike description of it that turns up in his novel Women. She discovered that he was “just a human being with a lot of problems, like the rest of us.”

And I did get a hint, every now and then, that Bukowski knew just how much of all this was theater.

Bukowski was scarred physically and no doubt psychically by a father whose version of tough love included frequent beatings with a razor strop and by a horrible case of acne that made him a social outcast in his adolescence. I’m not so sure I’m as sympathetic about the eleven years or so he had to spend with a mindless night job at the Post Office. Of course he found it intolerable. How does that make him special? Especially since, at the end of those eleven years, John Martin created Black Sparrow Press and bet his fortune on freeing Bukowski to write. Or at least that’s the story they all tell in this movie.

Bukowski’s poetry is good. It’s readable and honest and funny and moving. It might be shocking, but I’ve read Burroughs and so have a high bar for shocking. He may even be a brilliant poet. And in spite of John Martin’s digs at the New Formalists as a bunch of hacks who fall back on the sonnet to mask a lack of originality, I think Bukowski was a formal poet. The form is Whitmanesque/Biblical, based on repetition and listing, but it is a form.

In a bonus interview, Dulligan says he was out to bust the myth, to show us the sensitive soul behind the dirty old man. But I just always thought that was the myth.

We have diagnosed you as most likely being a member of the:

Cosmopolitan Modernists

Your individual position among the social values tribes is plotted as a dot on our map of sociocultural values above this text. Your individual position plot on the map can be interpreted along two major explanatory dimensions, or axes of social values. The first axis, shown here as the horizontal or x-axis, describes a general orientation of values toward being either socially or individually predisposed, that is, either “Social” or “Individual”. The second axis of explanation of social values, shown here as the vertical or y-axis, describes a general orientation toward the acceptance versus rejection of long-standing social norms in society that is either deferential, labelled “Tradition”, or questioning, labelled “Modern”.

A further description of Cosmopolitan Modernists can be found here. My “icons,” whatever they are, are mostly Canadian and unknown to me except for John Kenneth Galbraith and Pierre Trudeau. My motivations are, supposedly, personal autonomy and experience seeking, and as you can see from the graphic, way, way off center. Probably not an unfitting profile for an aspiring poet. At least I am not a Disengaged Darwinist, which anyway is not even a possibility for some one in my age group (a pre-Boomer).

I found the survey through Kevin Drum’s blog. He explains that Environics does “research into political attitudes based on consumer marketing surveys.”

You can take the survey for yourself here.

Charlie Hughes writes in response to our conversation about noodling, and what he has to say is important enough that I want to make it my major post of the day:

Noodling for catfish may be increasing in popularity in this country. However, I recently have had second thoughts about catching either fish or turtles from Kentucky streams, by any method. Many states including Kentucky, have on-going advisories against the eating of all freshwater fish caught in those states. The Kentucky Division of Water advisory, currently in effect, states the following:

“A statewide fish consumption advisory was issued on April 11, 2000, because of low levels of organic mercury found in samples of fish from Kentucky waters. Women of childbearing age and children 6 years and younger are advised to eat no more than one meal per week of freshwater fish from Kentucky rivers, streams and lakes because of the presence of mercury.”

I’d say that a concentration of mercury that’s dangerous would be a “high” rather than a “low” level — but let’s not argue semantics with something so dangerous. Among the well-documented toxic effects of mercury in humans are severe birth defects and mental abberations.

According to the EPA, “The largest human-generated source of mercury emissions in the United States is the burning of coal…”

97% of Kentucky’s electricity, and 50% of U.S. electricity, is produced from coal-burning power plants. And there are plans, promoted by our government, for construction of many more such polluters in Kentucky and across the nation.

When we humans have befouled the air and water sufficiently the earth will be unfit for human habitation. Loss of a sustaining environment is the primary reason that species become extinct. It may thunder one day and neither turtles nor humans will hear it. ¹

References:
http://www.water.ky.gov/sw/advisories/fish.htm
http://www.epa.gov/envirohealth/children/emerging_issues/fish.htm

¹ Referring to the folk belief that, if a snapping turtle bites, it won’t let go until it thunders.

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Well, Governor Ernie Fletcher has made the NYTimes again, but I doubt if he’s happy about it.

Seems the Fletcher administration decided to inaugurate summer on June 21 by blocking state employees’ access to some web sites, to include porn and hate sites, computer games, shopping sites, and “certain political blogs.”

The problem is that the blocking was selective. State employees can still look at Republican-friendly sites like the Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh. It’s only mostly sites that criticize Fletcher that are now off limits. Chief among these apparently is Bluegrass Reports. The blog owner, Mark Nikolas, was campaign manager for U.S. Representative Ben Chandler when Chandler ran against Fletcher for governor. Nikolas is a proudly partisan Democrat and his site has been scathingly critical of Fletcher.

Nikolas soon mobilized the big Democratic players in the blogosphere: Talking Points Memo and its companion TPM Muckraker, The Daily Kos, Eschaton. Then some of those sites got blocked, too. And now the national mainstream media are catching on.

And instead of losing readership (Nikolas says about 10% of his daily hit count comes from state computers), traffic at Bluegrass Reports has increased tremendously. As Nikolas reported on June 22:

Yesterday’s visits were a record. 15,904 visitors, 31,313 page views. Today is starting off quite strong as well with tons of national traffic.

This kind of political blundering has been typical of the Fletcher administration, which is why Fletcher is now the third most unpopular governor in the country.

I have no quarrel with the state government asking, even requiring, employees to stay off the web for anything that isn’t work related. But I tend to agree with Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write about nannyware:

I think that all nannyware is a bad idea because it abdicates responsibility. If you’re a parent, put the computer in a common space where anyone walking by can easily see what’s on the screen. If you’re a business, simply tell employees that theft of company time and resources will not be tolerated and that web surfing not directly related to work is theft. Fire one or two employees for stealing and the others will get the idea.

These programs are notoriously unreliable.

And this kind of selective blocking is kicking in the law of unintended consequences for Ernie Fletcher.

More here and here. And from the horse’s mouth.

An Old Cat’s Dying Soliloquy

Long years beheld me Patton’s mansion grace,
The gentlest, fondest of the feline race;
Before her frisking thro’ the garden glade,
Or at her feet, in quiet slumber, laid;
Prais’d for my glossy back, of tortoise streak,
And the warm smoothness of my snowy neck;
Soft paws, that sheath’d for her the clawing nail;
The shining whisker, and meand’ring tail.
Now feeble age each glazing eye-ball dims,
And pain has stiffen’d these once supple limbs;
Fate of eight lives the forfeit gasp obtains,
And e’en the ninth creeps languid thro’ my veins.

Much, sure, of good the future has in store,
When Lucy basks on Patton’s hearth no more,
In those blest climes where fishes oft forsake
The winding river and the glassy lake;
There as our silent-footed race behold
The spots of crimson and the fins of gold,
Venturing beyond the shielding waves to stray,
They gasp on shelving banks, our easy prey;
While birds unwing’d hop careless o’er the ground,
And the plump mouse incessant trots around,
Near wells of cream, which mortals never skim,
Warm marum creeping round their shallow brim;
Where green valerian tufts, luxuriant spread,
Cleanse the sleek hide, and form the fragrant bed.

Yet, stern dispenser of the final blow,
Before thou lay’st an aged Grimalkin low,
Bend to her last request a gracious ear,
Some days, some few short days to linger here!
So, to the guardian of her earthly weal
Shall softest purs these tender truths reveal:
Ne’er shall thy now expiring Puss forget
To thy kind cares her long-enduring debt;
Nor shall the joys that painless realms decree,
Efface the comforts once bestow’d by thee;

To countless mice thy chicken bones preferr’d,
Thy toast to golden fish and wingless bird:
O’er marum border and valerian bed
Thy Lucy shall decline her moping head;
Sigh that she climbs no more, with grateful glee,
Thy downy sofa and thy cradling knee;
Nay, e’en by wells of cream shall sullen swear,
Since Patton, her lov’d mistress, is not there.

— Anna Seward (1792)

If you want to raise the minimum wage, your best bet seems to be a senator who is either an Aquarius or a Scorpio. Avoid Virgos.

And why would the Washington Post break down a vote by astrological sign?

Maybe they miss the Reagan years.

Link from War and Piece.

From yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle:

AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers’ personal data with government officials.

The new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.

Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service — a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers’ recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others.

The company’s policy overhaul follows recent reports that AT&T was one of several leading telecom providers that allowed the National Security Agency warrantless access to its voice and data networks as part of the Bush administration’s war on terror.

Sez Have Coffee Will Write, where I found the link:

And now that [AT&T] has completed the resurection of Ma Bell with the reabsorbtion of Bell South, the bitch is back and she’s kickin’ ass and takin’ names.

Do we really want the telephone companies in control of the internet?

Radio Open Source is featuring this quote from Jeff Nelson, editor of the newly published Encyclopedia of American Conservatism:

Really one of the big differences in contemporary conservatism as it has developed in America is the increasing polarization of the conservative movement. Sort of almost devolving from ideas and discourse and debate to where it’s an ideological crusade. [Conservatism] has always been a way of life, a habit of thinking, with certain fundamental perspectives among them, like the importance of the transcendent or religions, government operating best at the localist level and being the least obstructive…[But] we’ve become more a shouting class than a thinking class.

The Open Source consersation that airs tonight will ask Jeff Nelson and others these questions: “How do the ideological roots differ from the contemporary political manifestations? And what is its future direction? ”

Currently available for download: America’s Dirty Elections and Steal This Election.

Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack. Attack without humor, or pure denunciation, forms one of the boundaries of satire. It is a very hazy boundary, because invective is one of the most readable forms of literary art, just as panegyric is one of the dullest. It is an established datum of literature that we like hearing people cursed and are bored with hearing them praised, and almost any denunciation, if vigorous enough, is followed by a reader with the kind of pleasure that soon breaks into a smile.

…

For society to exist at all there must be a delegation of prestige and influence to organized groups such as the church, the army, the professions and the government, all of which consist of individuals given more than individual power bythe institutions to which they belong. If a satirist presents, say, a clergyman as a fool or hypocrite, he is, qua satirist, attacking neither a man nor a church. The former has no literary or hypothetical point, and the latter carries him outside the range of satire. He is attacking an evil man protected by his church, and such a man is a gigantic monster: monstrous because not what he should be, gigantic because protected by his position and by the prestige of good clergymen. The cowl might make the monk if it were not for satire.

—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism