Southern Bookman

Memoirs of Punk Glory

I've been reading a cluster of memoirs from the 1960s-1970s on the punk/left wing/hippie era of New York City, from the lower east side over to the Village. All three I downloaded on my Nook, which seems all too easy too do, like another glass of wine when it's going down smooth. I doubt any of them will be on Rick Santorum's list, or that of any other GOP candidate for that matter, although Ron Paul might enjoy the liberatarian spirit of the times.

The first finished, Patti Smith's "Just Kids," about her love affair/friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. As the 60s were burning out, and the '70s came like the horrible morning after, Patti came out with her "Horses," which I quite liked if I recall. The cover photo was by Mapplethorpe, which I'd forgotten, or perhaps never knew, until I read the book. Despite her wild, cutting edge personna, Smih comes across in her book as a shy, nice, small-town girl, an innocent in the big city always finding a new man to cake care of her. The first part of the book talks about her meeting Mapplethorpe and her close early relationship with him, and it begins with narrative energy from the time-honored motif of two kids from the sticks in Manhattan. Then, as they hang on and establish a daily life of trying to become artists, the book's drive dissipates, with too much mundane detail about squalid apartments, bad jobs, folks met and drinks downed. At end end, the book regains its opening power, fnishing with a poingnant account of Mapplethorpe's death.

The lastest I'm reading is James Walcott's account of the same time, wrriten from his jounalist's perspective. Walcott is a more fluid writer than Smith, better able to give dramatic force to the details and anecdotes he recalls, although he often overreaches with his verbal effects. His hip asides are amusing when on-target, but are annoying when he goes amiss. He too hits a dead zone in the middle of the book,which I hope he spins out of soon.

The most disappointing one is Ed Sanders' memoirs about the Fugs and his Peace Eye Bookstore, As with Smioth, he piles on surfeit of details that read more like a private diary without putting them in a broader context for the reader. The book is still entertaining, but too many chapters pile up with unrefined facts about places played, folks met, songs written.

Ed Sanders Remembers the Fugs

I'm finding it all too easy to buy books for the Nook. The cost is less per book than in a bookstore, but clicking that little tab quickly adds up. 

My latest ebook purchase is "Fug You," the memoirs of Ed Sanders, one of America's overlooked cultural heroes. How ironic that I would follow Ed's career into the ebook era, when I first encountered his work on vinyl 33-rpm records when he was the leader of The Fugs and a solo artist who produced one of the great albums, the "Ed Sanders Truckstop." I have also read many of Sanders' books, including "Tales of Beatnik Glory," poems and "The Family," the best book written about the Charles Manson trial. Even when he was publishing iconoclastic works such as his "Fuck You, a magazine of the arts," Sanders stood outside of the bohemian counterculture.

Like another satirical genius of the '60s, Frank Zappa, Sanders has a conservative side that allows him to look critically at the excesses of the philosophies that took root in the '60s. As with Zappa, Sanders' songs take a broad aim, examining middle class conventional society as well as the hippie, left wing culture that brewed its own deadening conformity in rebelling against "the bourgeoise."

Like Sanders, Zappa first produced classics as the leader of a band. Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Sanders' Fugs produced brilliant satire that showed a firm grasp of a range of musical styles, not only in melody but with lyrics. Then both of them produced ground-breaking work as single artists. While Sanders also wrote poems and books, Zappa moved into different realms as a producer on Bizarre and Straight records, with such imporant works as a album of Lenny Bruce's Berkeley concert and Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica." 

While Zappa's music grew more sophisticated and self-conscious with its models on jazz and classical music, Sanders found a similar model in country western and swing. Both found rich troves in early rock and rhythym and blues. Like all great parodies, Sanders "Truckstop" not only makes fun of country motifs, but shows great love and respect for them. As with Zappa making great rock and jazz while parodying them, Sanders makes great country and swing music.

Sanders with his blue collar characters such as "Johnny Pissoff" showed an early understanding of and sympathy for working class anger that most '60s writers lacked. Zappa understood a different class, a more suburban, California-mall-oriented group, while Sanders captured the feelings and cultural touchstones of truckers and plumbers and carpenters, haunted by Jesus, sex and booze. Sanders' humor is more free-swinging and guttural than Zappa's. The Fugs, who also included the late Tuli Kupferberg, were part of the New York village scene that also produced Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, while Zappa came from the Southern California freeway-oriented musical mix. While turning to country, Sanders and the Fugs kept the Lower East Side influence; while Zappa remained rooted in Laurel Canyon.

Sanders' self styled "investigative poetry" is too programmed and topical, but I'll always remember reading his "Poems for New Orleans," on the abuses in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. His poems put these in a more memorable and compelling form than the countless magazine articles and books about the storm's aftermath. As with all of his work, he shows a jazzy, free-form sensibility along with a deep knowledge of New Orleans' history and culture. I bought that book in Cambridge Square, then spent a nice morning in Harvard Yard reading it. Sanders' poems, like his other works, are viscerally entertaining.

The Fugs' name, like that of his new memoir, comes from the euphemism that Norman Mailer used in his celebrated first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," for the old four-letter Anglo-Saxon f-word . This nod to literary culture is another hallmark that set Sanders apart; he has a strong knowledge of American poetry and fiction, with Fugs songs making references to Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle (HD). He references Homer and the Iliad in "Truckstop."  Unlike some anarchists and bohemian figures, he had a strong reverence for books and writing, a desire to preserve and celebrate the literary culture. That's why his book on Manson displays such deep understanding; Sanders knows and is part of the nihilistic cultural waves that produced Manson, but possesses the disgust and foreboding of a cultural conservative.

At 72, Ed Sanders continues to provoke and entertain. Reading him, I am saddened that Zappa didn't live to see the social media era. But I'm thankful to have Sanders still among us. 

American literature is blessed with writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth who continue producing vital work into old age. Sanders, for all of his idiosyncrasies, can stand among them.

 

Ken Kesey's "Magic Trip"

In one of those serendipitous discoveries, I found that Comcast's On-Demand is showing a documentary on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' psychedelic trip across the United States in a painted bus called "Further." Although the hour was late and sleep called, I had to immediately watch "Magic Trip," the History Channel-funded film.

The film, pieced together from movies taken by Kesey and crew on the trip (the initial motive for the journey was to make a film), was exhilarating and hilarious, although the antics of the proto-hippies now seem ill-conceived, jejune and wasteful.

How wonderful and relevatory to see characters in "living color" I'd only read about previously. Kesey with his physical power and charisma, bursts from the screen. Neal Cassidy, the hero of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," also shows his legendary physical dynamism and electric non-stop raps. Although he was constantly on speed, driving through the night and talking even when no one is listening except for the microphone, Cassidy despite his love of nutty,unexpected adventures comes off as an adult, knowing how to change tires and get out of frequent scrapes with the highway patrol. Cameo appearances are made by an amusingly proper Larry McMurtry,  perplexed when his old Stanford chum Kesey and the Pranksters show up at his home in a rarified Houston neighborhood, a sadly diminished Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A young and beardless Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead play a significant role in the film's look at the famed Kesey acid tests, the subject of a book by Tom Wolfe (not even mentioned).

The less famous members of the crew come off as silly, confused, bewildered, infantile and mentally derangedl. I felt something like pity for them, along with the sick fascination of watching impaired people acting out their delusions. One or two of them show intelligence in commenting upon the experience. Others are just children trapped in Kesey's artistic and social experiment.

Frequent LSD trips mark the cross-country journey. Kesey is an early LSD apostle, although the film shows Timothy Leary and Ram Dass shunning the group when it shows up at Kesey's LSD experimental station in New York. Kesey first took acid as part of a government-funded experiment at Stanford. The experiment is shown is excruciating detail, with Kesey recording his observations in a tape recorder, then in an interview with a nurse who may be a Nurse Ratched prototype. Kesey's psychedelic visions sound pretty much like any other acid trip, showing how mundane and unordinary the so-called "revelations" really were.

Like other "happenings" and political street theater projects of the time, the trip of Further doesn't hold up aethetically. Most of the crews' antics while on acid don't appear very imaginative and innovative. Yet, the film, with its comments from Kesey and Cassidy and its constant attempt to show the context of the times, still possesses great charm and energy. As with Andy Warhol's similar aesthetic experiments with a crew of acolytes, Kesey's experiment looks like a grand failure. At the end, he turned against the counter-culture folks who kept showing up at his Oregon farm, and the widespread use of acid, although he kept maintaining the value of its use for select visionaries such as himself.

Kesey says to an unnamed interviewer who sounds like "Fresh Air's" Terry Gross that he kept writing to the end. Yet, at least in posthumous works that have been published so far, he never reached the heights of his earlier works, the classic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and "Sometimes a Great Notion." Kesey wasted much creative energy in the Magic Trip. While the film is amusing, I wish we would have had instead later, artistically mature, books from Kesey.

By the way, I was glad to hear Kesey say he didn't like the movie made from "Cuckoo's Nest," although he liked the Broadway play (Kirk Douglas played Randall McMurphy.) Kesey thought the movie, starring Jack Nicholson, focused too much on the conflict between McMurphy and the Big Nurse. On reviewing the movie several years ago, I hated the misogynistic portrayal of Ratched, although Louise Fletcher won an Academy Award for her performance.

....Note: Terry Daughtery, interviewed by Southern Bookman after his fine biography on Donald Bartheleme, will have a biography out this month on "Catch 22" writer Joseph Heller. A riveting excerpt is in this month's Vanity Fair. 

Wendell Berry's Short-sighted Nostalgia for the Local

Wendell Berry's essay "The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford" in the winter issue of the Sewanee Review left me feeling let down. Berry at the end swerves to a discussion of the loss of "authentic local speech." In his essay, he portrays Williams as a poet of local speech, who based his work on the community of Rutherford. Berry builds his case well, to a point, but doesn't reach a satisfying conclusion before tacking on his coda about the loss of local dialects, and "also of a perhaps indispensable knowledge, propriety and sensitivity." I had a feeling of disloctaion at Berry's sudden switching of tracks, as if the first part of the essay had just been an enticement to a totally different message.

In the essay, Berry compares Williams to William Faulkner, saying that Faulkner, like Williams, was fated to write about the community in which he was born. They both were haunted by place, and crearted their special language to give witness to local history, culture and passions. Berry, though, doesn't consider how critical Faulkner was of his Mississippi home, its tragic prejudices and ignorance.He also contrasts Williams and Faulkner to a writer like Hemingway, who left home and wrote about the expatriate life in Europe. Of course, Berry is right about Hemingway, but I'll point out that some of Hemingway's most enduring work are his locally based Nick Adams stories, which I still love.

While Berry's nostalgia for local speech has validity, he romanticizes the local, embuing it with a presumed wisdom and care for the land. However, the insular and small-town South through the Depression was known for overplanting and ruining local land. Its communities were crippled by prejudice, violence and hostility for fresh ideas, as Faulkner shows. Disease and ignorance were widespread. Berry doesn't mention Flannery O'Connor, perhaps because her work, while vibrant in local dialect, shows the ruin of this stunted culture. Despite the emergence of local artists such as Faulkner and the Carter family, the local communties were more marked by inarticulateness than poetry, myth and music. Despite Berry's championing of local virtue, the achievement of the Carter family and Faulkner was the result of outside influences and education interacting with local customs and ways of living. Some of the best-known Carter songs were actually not local folk music, but Tin Pan alley works that had slowly come to the mountains. And Faulkner's work was enriched by his interaction with cosmopolitan influences.

Berry is right that value is lost when local language disappears under the influence of mass media and culture. Yet, the local communities of the past also imposed a loss of freedom and creativity on their inhabitants. And, local language was as impoverished as the land and economic opportunities. We should strive to recover what was valuable and enduring in local language and culture, but not over-romanticize the past.  

 

Tom Yuill: "I Want the Poem to Be Itself, to Be a Realized, Complete Work of Art"

      I met Tom Yuill for all of two minutes last summer in the Grolier Poetry Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. In our brief chat before he hurried off to catch a plane, I learned that he was a poet, so I quickly asked if he would participate in a Southern Bookman interview. He heartily agreed before rushing off into the bright morning. I repaired to nearby Harvard Square with Tom's collection "Medicine Show" (University of Chicago Press) and his e-mail address. I spent an hour or so seated on a bench as students and teachers ambled by, finding myself entranced and excited by Tom's poems, which combined formal elements with daring flights of expression. Elizabethan and modernist echoes blended with sounds of the blues, Texas honky tonks and cowboy songs. Themes of rebellion, family loyalty, allegiance to the past and tradition, and the desire for escape and freedom meshed in artistic counterpoint. Since then, we have developed a warm friendship via e-mail. Now in mid-autumn, here are Tom's responses to my questions. Tom teaches at Boston University, where he studied with one of the first subjects of the Southern Bookman interviews, Rosanna Warren. 

Your fine book “Medicine Show” contains a multitude of characters, moods, voices and settings. A key is the poem “Several Histories” (freely after Hikmet) in which you say “into being came three worlds/ Where I still live.” The collection explores these several histories, and perhaps more than three worlds. How do these histories and worlds correspond and interact?

I guess the whole thing together is a strange panegyric. The arc of the book, its plot, is one way the different “worlds” interact. The tongue in cheek swagger, artifice and naivete of, say, “Ode to the Wind” give this sass-laden paean to free will the right tenor for the first section, in which the poet is not yet cognizant of the depth of his confusion. The adaptations of Villon in particular but also of Corbiere and Catullus appear like consoling blues tunes, Hank Williams songs or — to me at least — hymns. They echo present pain and thereby give solace and bring needed empathetic companionship. By the time we get to “Several Histories” the poet character of the book is more attuned to his devastations and to his joys. Hikmet’s wonderful poem is often translated as “Two Loves,” so mine is really an occasion in a little lyric spell to receive the gift of Hikmet’s kind genius and to hear it as I do hear it, through the noise and sweetness of my own disordered memories — “worlds” you might call them — some fairly real, most of them largely imagined.

 I loved the references to the Rolling Stones. How does their music influence you as a poet?

The Rolling Stones are, for me, stunning artists. I was never the kind of person who wanted to rush down to their hotel after the show to try to hang out or the deluded sort who thought he should try heroin because Keith did it. I don’t care what they look like or who else likes their records, whether the new record gets good reviews. It would be my pleasure to meet them I suppose, particularly Charlie, but their music and performances have always been more than enough of a gift, a staggering gift of creative work for anyone who is interested. Keith, Mick and Charlie do something with rhythm that is transformative. Transformative of received influences, transformative to the central nervous systems of people listening, transformative in the highest traditions of art and on a basic physical level. Listen to Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon,” then listen to “Beast of Burden,” for instance. I have no idea if the Stones were trying to do anything in particular there, but the relatively disciplined, infectious cadences of “Havana Moon” seem to me transformed into the peculiarly rollicking, infectious cadences of “Beast of Burden.” Dad taught me what iambic pentameter is so long ago I literally cannot remember learning it. I only remember, at a very young age, knowing what it is.

Where both deliberate the love is slight.

I just knew whenever some teacher asked me about it, what was in blank verse and what was not. So when I write something like, 

The air is hot, it whispers, it has lips.

It whispers like good news…the beer is cold…

I know, having internalized blank verse a long time ago, I have internalized something else as well. perhaps listening to the Stones for 15 years prior to that helped me find my own peculiarities within that pentameter. Not quite iambic, but, for me, for that poem, it’s on the money.   

 
 
You had three different poems titled “Medicine Show.” The way you paced them through the book gave the impression of a wagon traveling to different places. Do you see them as a sequence, perhaps as one poem?

I don’t see them as a sequence exactly, but I certainly see them as connected. I like the impression you got, Louis — thank you. The poem just needed three versions, and the book needed each of them at different points. Should one see the book as a quest upward, or downward perhaps, up Parnassus or down Mount Jackass, the three versions might simply reflect the poet’s gradual internal and external progress. After all it’s easy enough to feel discouraged not being able to improve society, even one’s own corner of it, and most concerned Americans might feel hopeless enough by now about a war one knows about mainly from seeing it on television, a hideously remote reality for something that serious. It’s not that hard to know burying one’s self in a pile of middle class burdens will be, for some, a realistic way to raise children, for others a form of self-burial. The last of the three, of course, is a healing lyric. Your parents are not perfect, and they love you. How much trading pain for pain might be avoided with such revelations? But the other versions have to be there, too.

 I loved the evocations of your Texas childhood and family, particularly the son’s relationship with the father, with elements of rebellion and conflict as well as love. How did you give these personal narratives such universal power?

Such personal narratives had universal power a long time before I came along. Which is not to say I do not deeply appreciate your observation — such poems are, after all, great opportunities for falling on your face as a poet. Texas will always be profound to me. The places we live when we are little often stay uniquely meaningful. I always think Dad, his Dad whom we all knew as Kewpie, and Mom’s Dad, Granddaddy Bell, are the three greatest guys I’ll ever know. By the late '90s it became the norm to treat your father as ridiculous, like Homer Simpson, but rebellion used to be quite normal — beyond whatever Freud articulated. The best popular music of the 1960s is so incredibly good that a lot of cultural moments which were only really valid then became shadow versions of themselves for kids in the 70s, the 80s, even the 90s. Everyone was supposed to try to have their version of what they thought the 60s were. Kids my age wanted electric guitars for Christmas so they could play Van Halen covers. I always preferred the Stones and the Beatles, and I was captain of the swim team in high school and recruited to swim on a Division 1 team in college, so I was immune to some of that influence, but not all of it. For a while I suppose I thought you were supposed to be mad at your father. He was very patient with it for the most part, and eventually I decided rebelling doesn’t have much to do with originality. We returned to the norm then, which for us meant we were very close.   

Your freely rendered translations of poets like Villon, Hikmet and Corbiere reminded me of similar work by Robert Lowell. Is Lowell a strong influence for you?

Robert Lowell’s “Imitations” is very important to me. After my first day in graduate school at BU I took Derek Walcott’s advice and went to the Grolier to buy it. Also at Derek’s suggestion I started rewriting Rimbaud and Baudelaire poems in free verse. Then I had the profound good luck to work with Rosanna Warren, both in the graduate poetry seminar and in her translation seminar. There I studied Dryden’s essay in earnest, along with the usual classic texts from Benjamin, etc. I still find Mark Strand’s Grade A poem “Translation” perhaps the easiest to sympathize with on this vast subject. I am not an expert in foreign languages but a poet who feels uncommonly indebted to older poets, many of whom wrote in languages other than English. My adaptations and imitations should not be understood too differently from, say, the Rolling Stones’ electric cover version of Robert Johnson’s acoustic “Stop Breaking Down Blues.”

The poem “Dallas Skinheads” stood out, combining the diverse elements that make the entire book so captivating. How did you see such disreputable characters as sympathetic, almost heroic?

The poem’s rhyme scheme is an abbc sort of pattern so it has a sonic fabric holding its various elements together. And it is in couplets, so they perhaps whisper the idea of heroics. And of course there is the organization of the poem, which for me is like the organization of images on a rose medallion vase or the weaving together of elements in one of Robert Pinsky’s poems. I never set out to try to write poems like Robert’s, but BU was the only graduate program to which I applied specifically because I knew I had to work with him. He proved to be every bit the mentor I needed as a younger poet, and more. Some influence is bound to show, I suppose. AS I say in the notes, I owe Robert a special debt of gratitude.

I should point out the young skinhead is not a neo-nazi but a social misfit trying to find a way to affirm himself. There is something at least poignant, if not necessarily heroic, in the struggle to affirm one’s self in the midst of confusion. The older lyric from “Streets of Laredo” is often thought of as a light little cowboy song. The Smothers Brothers did a pastiche of it. But it’s about a young man who’s gotten himself fatally wounded for no particularly good reason, and is trying to ask before he dies for some modest funeral. The Mom character in the poem experiences the sudden death of her own mother and begins to slowly destroy herself. The Americans in the Midwest, whose children may be rebelling for reasons unclear to them, may themselves be voting for a president who wants to make possible a winnable nuclear war. Unconscious, destructive impulses are not the private property of the young, even if the young may be the most obvious sufferers of such impulses. And of course, it is a poem about influences. We have free will, perhaps. The question is, do we use it? 

Like Lowell, you have a gift for memorable, striking individual lines that click into the mind like gold coins. Do you work and rework these lines, or are they products of sudden inspiration?

Well, thank you for a great compliment. I compose all the time, always have a pen and scrap of paper in my pocket or by the bed, so sudden inspiration must certainly be part of what I’m doing. But I work on the lines, the stanzas, the poems, all of it, over and over. I have spent years listening to a poem over and over, trying to make sure the rhythms I have on the page are right for the poem itself. I take great swaths of lines, pull three of seven out and fuse them with one or twelve more I wrote at another time. No rules, really, except that I want to the poem to be itself, to be a realized, complete work of art. And, sure, for me part of that is giving it the right lines, not the flashiest lines, not the strangest lines, not the most formally strict lines, none of that. If the lines are memorable I give credit to the poem, that is to say, I said it aloud so many times it must have wrung from itself whatever wasn’t ringing true. As Shakespeare, Lowell, Sidney, Villon, Fulke Greville and Frost teach us, what rings true artistically IS often memorable. Thank you for the kind compliment to those poems.

 What direction is your work taking these days?

My next book of poetry is called “American Bull Terrier.” It has begun as a book about force, Being as Force I guess, in the Heideggerian sense. But it will certainly go from there to become more complex. Dad is one of the heroes of "Medicine Show" — Mom and Dad. Mom is an ethereal presence reappearing throughout, and Dad rests in a big poem right before the last section. So far Kewpie (my father’s father) appears to be one hero of the new one. And my wife, of course, remains a Muse and a beacon. I never worry about formal strategy or such things. I learn about the form of the book as I write, revise and organize the poems.  

 

 

 

Looking at Faulkner's Relationship to Film

After flying from Boston to Memphis, I rode down the interstate to Oxford, Miss. for the Faulkner and Film conference at the University of Mississippi. The speakers, from across the globe, strongly support how writing for the movies influenced Faulkner's fiction.

Tonight, we're supposed to see a Russian film from 1991 based on Faulkner's obscure short story "The Leg." The film takes the story from World War I to the Russian incursion into Afghanistan. Last night, we sa Howard Hawks film written by Faulkner and Joel Sayre. The film, "The Road to Glory," starred a young Frederic March, Lionel Barrymore and familiar Hollywood character actors of the 1930s. The film was disjointed and quite slow at times, but had some interesting visual scenes, including some cannibalized from a French film that 20th Century Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck bought and ordered Hawks to create a film around. The conference makes clear that Faulkner at times was a much more proficient Hollywood survivor than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who nevertheless used the Hollywood experience much more explicity, especially in "The Last Tycoon." 

The lectures are next door to the Music Building, where today I found an unused piano to play for a while. The conference is quite stimulating, especially meeting teachers. It's amazing that Faulkner's work is at the center of a vast global universe of academic work and speculation.  

That concludes the brief, disconnected update. I'll write more on the Faulkner conference upon returning to Atlanta.

Recalling Christopher Isherwood

Watching the movie "The Single Man" with Colin Firth and Julianne Moore brought back my Christopher Isherwood phase, 25 or 30 years ago, when I read several of Isherwood's books. That was also the time of my Graham Greene phase, but that's another story.

After the movie "Caberet," I read Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," with the famous beginning "I am a camera." Then I read as much of his work as I could find, including "A Single Man." I liked his taut, old-school mandarian style, its sardonic, stylish tone unable to stop heartbreak and despair from breaking through. The interplay and conflict between the main character's high literary culture and British eduction and the glitzy, unrooted culture of Los Angeles and Hollywood charged the books with tension and foreboding.

Directed, written and produced by Tom Ford, the movie version of "A Single Man" gets closer to the heart of Isherwood's work than the overly sentimentalized "Caberet," which I still love. Colin Firth's perfomance as the grief-stricken professor George Falconer deserves the praise it received. Julianne Moore again shows herself a marvel. 

The story takes place in November 1962, in the aftermath of the Cuban missle crisis. A major theme is the pervasive fear at the time over nuclear annhiliation, with the global Cold War with the Soviet Union reaching its zenith. Despite the characters' anxiety, the movie made me longe for the era. The movie evokes the time with its well-designed, lovely products, such as the vintage Mercedes that Falconer drives. The clocks, the furrniture, the clothes all speak of a sense of aesthetics and elegance soon to be blown away.

Firth's face changes from scene to scene. His English drawl recalls Michael Caine, and his thick glasses and lovely suits made me think of George "Superman" Reeves as Clark Kent. He also reminded me of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who would be slain exactly a year after the events of the movie. Like Kennedy, Falconer represents a world of culture, learning and refinement swept away by the '60s counterculture. This new cultural energy is brilliantly shown in the outstanding scene of the sad dinner party between Falconer and Julianne Moore's lovesick Charley. The tipsy couple get together to dance, and Charley changes the record from the jazz classic "Stormy Weather" to Booker T. and the MGs' "Green Onions." They awkwardly, then increasingly abandonly, do the twist, then collapse in exhaustion to the floor. That brief sequence embodies the huge cultural and social swifts of the next few years.

The film is loaded with literary references. One striking one is that George's class is studying Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan." Aldous Huxley, also a member of the Britisith literary expatriates in Los Angeles who would dabble with psychedelic drugs and mystical religion. That whole mileu is fascinating; acute sensibilities bred in tradition and literary culture captivated by sensuality and psychic experimentation. Also there in the L.A. scene were such worthies as Thomas Mann and the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, seeking to transplant European culture to the far Pacific coast.

Isherwood's old chum W.H. Auden, who also left England for the New World before World War II, would remain in New York and cling to the old culture, finding solace in traditional Christianity. Watching "A Single Man" bids me to reread Auden's poems of the era, which evoke the same despair, the same sense of the poetic and literary mind beset by America's consumer culture, love of speed, power and new money. The two worlds could reach common ground: I first heard of Auden when I saw him on the Johnny Carson show.

 

A Bomb Worth Detonating

I recently discovered the art/literature/film/music quarterly Bomb, although it's apparently been publishing since 1981. With the vagaries of newsstand display, I just noticed the mag showing up at my neighborhood Barnes & Noble.

In contrast to literary journals, Bomb has a full magazine format, with glossy pages and a big helping of colar art and photographs. The editorial theme is "conversations between artiststs, writers, actors, directors, musicians." The magazine includes "First Proof," a literary supplement with original fiction and poems.

I picked up the spring 2010 issue, number 111, because of interviews with Sam Lipsyte and Charles Bernstein, because I'd recently read Lipsyte's bleakly funny novel "The Ask" and Bernstein's selected poems collection "All of the Whiskey in Heaven."

The Lypyte interview is conducted by the writer Christopher Sorrentino, whose works I've been wanting to read for some time. I was a fan of his father, Gilbert Sorrentino, a master of postmodern fiction. The conversation betwqeen Chris Sorrentino and Lipsyte is an interesting meditation on fiction and writing techniques.

I haven't gotten around to the Bernstein interview, but I expect it to be an in-depth discussion of postmodern poetry, especially Bernstein's Language poetry school. Bomb also has an interview with actress Patricia Clarkson, known for her work with Woody Allen. Although the introduction doesn't mention it, I also liked her work on "Six Feet Under" as the neo-hippie sister of the funeral home matriarch played by Frances Conroy.

With its focus on our most notable artists, writers, actors and directors, Bomb will be a worthy addition to my relenteless reading menu.

"Fences" A Magical Day of Theater

I was supremely lucky to acquire a ticket for the revival of August Wilson's "Fences" at the venerable Cort Theater in New York City. The classic Broadway play made me remember why I fell in love with the theater all of those years ago.

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis are superb in the starring roles, and the rest of the cast is splendid. Washington radiates power in the dynamic role of Troy Maxson, first made famous by James Earl Jones. As John Lahr said in The New Yorker, the audience at first loves him as a star, but in the end admires him as an actor. Viola Davis as the sensual, giving, heartbroken Rose gives one of the all-time great Broadway performances. Also marvelous are Stephen McKinley Henderson, Russell Hornsby, Mykelti Williamson, and Chris Chalk. The young Eden-Duncan Smith captivated my heart as the little girl Raynell.

As the performance kept delivering higher and higher levels of dramatic power, I found my admiration soaring for director Kenny Leon, one of Atlanta's artistic treasures. Leon understands the play's subtleties, and the actors are perfectly attuned. The set by Santo Loquasto was breathtaking, and Branford Marsalis' bluesy music captured the mood of the 1950s black culture in Pittsburgh.

Towering above all was August Wilson's script. Regrettably, I'd never before read or seen any of his work, although I was aware of his stature. The play, full of wonderful lines, unexpected turns, and finely modulated plot elements, was that of a master artist. I'm looking forward to immersing myself deeply in  his work.

Southern Music's Greatness

My most recent post, in which I sought to explain my Southern heritage, neglected music, as a loyal reader and old friend pointed out. Actually, he said that "I forgot Elvis."

"Southern Bookman's" primary subject is literature, but music, especially Southern music, has played a major role in my life, and deeply influences my consciousness.

Elvis was one of my earliest musical icons. When Elvis first arrived on the national scene, I won a kindergarten talent contest by impersonating him. My mother drew sideburns with mascara, and I used an old tennis racket for my guitar as I tried to shake my hips and pelvis the way Elvis did as "Hound Dog" or "All Shook Up" spun on a record player.

"The King" didn't write many songs; yet his ability to give new life to old songs like Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky"  shows that he was a major musicologist. His voice, with major contributions from colleagues like Scotty Moore, brought a fresh new sound that shook the world. Elvis represents a Southern archetype, an adventuresome, reckless youth who leaves the country for the city, yet never loses his love for speed, danger and fun.  He's also generous, fun-loving, kind, and soulful. The archtype returns often in Southern writing.

After Elvis, I discovered his progenitors, Hank Williams and Jimmie Rogers, the singing brakeman. Both were known for their songwriting as well as their performing. They took the South's oral tradition, covering story-telling as well as song, and spread it through the culture. Elvis' new sound didn't rise from a void; to me, Hank Williams' "Move It on Over" is the prototypical rock and roll song, with a beat that echoes in Bill Haley and the Comets and Buddy Holley and the Crickets. And Rogers, with his blue yodels, provided a twangy, r and b model.

They are closely allied to Southern black bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lightning Hopkins. They too drew on the South's oral traditions to write haunting songs in which lyric and melody join to make an aesthetically powerful whole. While Hank Williams and Jimmie Rogers' words might show a bit more sophistication, the black bluesmen's music is more complicated and virtuosic. The white and black traditions are different streams, yet intertwin. Hank Williams was tutored by the black street musician Tee-tot, and one of the greatest white guitarists, Mother Maybelle Carter, also received lessons from a black player. Jimmie Rogers welcomed Louis Armstrong on his recordings. The blues, jazz, rock, rhythm and blues and bluegrass come from the same rural culture, cross-pollinated by big-city influences.

The categories don't matter in the long run. Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, Jelly Roll Morton, Willie Nelson, Wynton Marsalis,Mose Allison and countless others have inspired and entertained me. Southern music is the mother source, the oceanic stream, of Southern literature.