Monday, March 18, 2024

Worthy Words, Part 2: Albert Murray

Albert Murray (1916-2013), soldier, scholar, teacher, cultural commentator, music critic, and community leader of Harlem, where he lived his later years, came to my attention because of my love of jazz. Murray was a cofounder of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, a beautiful multivenue facility where I have seen numerous shows. So how could I not love him too? Arguably, his most famous nonfiction work is his collection of essays The Omni-Americans (1970). In that book , he writes this 73-word sentence:

In all events, it is not only possible but highly probable that the “cultural dislocation trauma” suffered by Africans transported to frontier America was considerably less than European-oriented polemicists imagine, precisely because the African’s native orientation to culture was less static or structured than they assume, precisely, that is to say, because the African may have been geared to improvisation rather than piety, for all the taboos he had lived in terms of. (Library of America's edition of Murray's Collected Essays & Memoirs, page 158)

This assertion is only one of Murray's many insightful observations in The Omni-Americans, a provocative reflection on Black identity in its many forms as perceived within and outside the race. We see examples of cultural dislocation trauma appearing in the United States whenever refugees land on its shores. But the first Blacks here were not refugees choosing to flee to America for their safety; they were unwilling arrivals subjected to slavery. In casting a spotlight on the Africans' vibrant and organized orientation to culture, Murray forces his reader to imagine not the European's polemicist or the dominant culture 's viewpoint but to reckon with Blacks as equals, human beings who think, create their own culture, and live and die by their own mores. Note the phrase improvisation rather than piety, whose context is better understood by reading the entire essay. As for the taboos Africans had lived in, think first of their past in their native continent, a past over 250 years in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, virtually impossible for any of us to fully comprehend, as well as the interdictions imposed on them in their new continent. Murray fashions a quandary that his readers will contemplate long after they close his book.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Worthy Words, Part 1: Wallace Stevens

With this post, I begin a series of memorable words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, or stanzas by writers who continue to inspire and inform my own writing. 

Ever since I started reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens in 1988,  I have expected surprise. While I understand that by definition, surprise must be unexpected, I hope this post explains the oxymoron of the previous sentence. 

Stevens's poems are so deep in their reaction to experience and their immediacy of feeling that their full meaning might not penetrate my senses until a second or third reading, sometimes ten years apart. When I do capture glimpses of their essenceI doubt I ever get their complete meaning I look back realizing I just was not ready to accept his message, I misunderstood it, or I dismissed it too quickly. For sure, I can read any one of his poems a dozen times wondering about what he was trying to accomplish. 

Take "Chocorua to Its Neighbor," his 130-line poem comprising 26 quintains. The title of the poem itself is laden with ambiguity. Does Chocorua refer to the 3,500-hundred-foot mountain in New Hampshire or the 500-person community at the mountain's base? Is Chocorua talking to its neighbor, is Chocorua's neighbor forming an impression of it? Is Chocorua's neighbor the closest mountain to it? The sky? The forest embedded in it? Is it the poet or the mountain speaking? Or is it we who are perceiving what the poet describes? Consider the first verse of the poem:

To speak quietly at such a distance, to speak

And to be heard is to be large in space,

That, like your own, is large, hence, to be part

Of sky, of sea, large earth, large air. It is

To perceive men without reference to their form.

After a recent reading of this poem, nearly four decades after reading it for the first time without much of an impression, I emerged from this stanza feeling larger than humanity itself, a maker of mountains, an omniscient being. Perhaps not even a being, but something that comprehends without availing itself of senses.

Let's look at the oft-referenced nineteenth stanza, which struck me in an entirely different way after reading the poems decades later:

To say more than human things with human voice,

That cannot be; to say human things with more

Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;

To speak humanly from the height or from the depth 

Of human things, that is acutest speech.

Upon first reading, I took this stanza at face value, interpreting it literally. I assigned great worth to its denotative meaning. Once I reread it, the eighteen stanzas preceding it as well as the seven following it, brought a greater metaphysical, existential connotation to my consciousness.  

I do not see my job here as clarifying any of Stevens's poems, but simply (or not so simply) as explaining my reaction to them in the hope that you might read some of his verse as well. Reading his brief poems "The Reader," "Debris of Life and Mind," or "Human Arrangement" would be a good starting point.

Monday, March 04, 2024

Linking Writing Theory and Practice

Since I am a big proponent of using transitions sensibly, I am sharing an interesting and useful teaching aid, "Linking Theory and Practice" from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. The two-page handout takes no more than five minutes to read but days to absorb. 

My intention of presenting this tool is to orient writers not only to the links between writing theory and practice but to employ linking ideas in their own writing. I have long taught that we writers need to stop thinking of transitions as simply words (and, but, therefore) or phrases (as a result, in effect, in the meantime), but also as sentences, paragraphs, and documents. The writer of this resource evidently supports my position.

Monday, February 26, 2024

BOOK BRIEF: An American Original

True West: Sam Shepard's Life, Work, and Times by Robert Greenfield. Crown 2013. 448 pages.

Monday, February 19, 2024

FILM FIND: "All That Jazz"—Those First Six Minutes

Countless times I have seen those first six minutes of All That Jazz, the surreal 1979 Bob Fosse  masterpiece film. Most of the opening shows more than a hundred dancers auditioning for a Broadway musical accompanied by George Benson's version of "On Broadway," yet so much happens in the first 80 seconds preceding the audition scene. 

The first 22 seconds displays a multi-angle view of the film title formed in stage lights with a jazzy orchestra setting up what would seem to be a traditional, glitzy tribute to the Broadway musical. 

The next 38 seconds shows something entirely different, alerting the audience that this will not be a typical paean to the intersection of Broadway and Hollywood. We see musical director Joe Gideon, the central character amazingly performed by Roy Scheider, turn on his tape player to hear Vivaldi's "Concerto alla rustica" as he showers and ingests Dexedrine to start his day.

The next 20 seconds features the first line uttered by Gideon to his angel of death played by Jessica Lange. As we watch an acrobat on a wire, perhaps Gideon himself, Gideon says, "To be on the wire is life. The rest is waiting," before the acrobat falls from the wire. We are now prepared for a drug-fueled artist about to expose his life. We then return to Gideon's bathroom, where, well supplied by his amphetamines, he looks in the mirror and matter-of-factly says, "It's showtime folks," offering a sharp contrast between musical comedy and personal tragedy that Fosse explores throughout the next two hours. 

The next four-plus minutes shows what Fosse himself in an interview called a "cattle call" in documentary style" to"show an audience exactly what happens" during auditions and in Gideon's life as a Broadway power broker. The Benson song is a natural accompaniment to the work and drive and disappointment that come with the curse of wanting to be a dancer/singer/actor. Those rejected fail at achieving their goal, at least temporarily. And those selected are in for more painstaking, physically demanding work than they can possibly expect.

Monday, February 12, 2024

FILM FIND: "Pollock" Studies Five Serious, Convergent Issues

Last night I saw on TCM the Ed Harris 2000 film, Pollock, for the second time. I first viewed it 24 years ago, the year it premiered. I remember thinking of the film as an outstanding directorial maiden voyage for Harris, who portrays the American artist Jackson PollockI was pleased when he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and Marcia Gay Harden won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her interpretation of Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife and, in my view, an equally talented artist.  On this viewing of Pollock, I realized how much I had missed the first time. This biopic tracing Pollock's life and artistic times simultaneously examines five vital issues concerning the human condition: the history of American art, which always reflects its times; the business of art, which determines what is art and what is not; the creative process, which rarely has been covered so brilliantly as here in any medium; mental illness, with all its psychological and social manifestations; and matrimonial conflict, inevitable in all marriages but compounded by mental illness. This singular achievement belongs to the screenwriting genius of Barbara Turner and Susan Ermshwiller, as well as the superlative, pensive direction of Harris. 

The film starts in 1941, during World War II, when Picasso reigned as the supreme global artist, and social realism clashed with surrealism, profoundly affecting what and how American artists produced their work. Although the term abstract expressionism was not coined until 1946, Pollock reveals events leading up to it and beyond, when this movement brought worldwide attention to American artists.

Art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim and art critic Clement Greenberg play key roles in the film as Pollock's professional supporters and confidants. (Amy Madigan and Jeffrey Tambor radiantly deliver these roles.) Throughout the movie are several dialogues about what constitutes twentieth century art and how the public acquires its aesthetic taste in the modern world. These dialogues run in tandem with Pollock's decades-long physical and emotional decline. 

The creative process is at center stage whenever we see Pollock at work, or even when he is thinking about working. His breakthrough drip method of painting gets a visually stunning introduction, and the stunning visual contrast of Pollock's gritty New York City and idyllic East Hampton residences by cinematographer Lisa Rinzler is pure art in itself.

Pollock suffered from reclusiveness, personality disorder, and alcoholism throughout his life. Harris shows how these maladies gradually destroyed the artist and the man, estranging him from his family members, closest friends, and eventually his wife. It also contributed to his death behind the wheel with two other passengers, one of whom died. The film shows his inner circle of collaborators shrinking as his conditions worsen and surface more frequently, profound effects of mental illness.

The real fireworks in Pollock are in its depiction of the artists' marriage. Krasner is unconditionally encouraging and supportive of Pollock, who is lost in his own world, unable to relate to people on any level other than art. During certain moments of the story, it's hard to draw the line between where Krasner was a champion of her husband's work or an enabler of his bad behavior. Ambiguity always promises great drama, and Pollock overflows with the mystery of being as well as the perplexity of human relationships.   

A movie as important nearly a quarter century after it was released is one worth watching. Pollock is a must-see for viewers interested in learning something about themselves and their world.

Monday, February 05, 2024

Excellent Case Study on AI

For a captivating case study on using AI to write successfully, read "Confessions of a Viral AI Writer," a fascinating, detailed essay by Vauhini Vara in the October 2023 issue of Wired Magazine. The author explains how refining her prompts in ChatGPT enabled her to write a published story in 2021 that "quickly went viral." 

Vara does not end there. She discusses the downside of the turgid, politically correct "AP English" and "corporate style" that AI programs generate when it comes to poetry and fiction. Her concluding thoughts on the impact of AI on writing, reading, culture, and society. This 4,600-word article shows that AI is a revolutionary and inevitable way of writing.