Gene Tanta's Unusual Woods

Whose woods these are I think I know: they're Gene Tanta's, and they're strange, or at any rate unusual.

Yes, people, it's time to celebrate the appearance of Gene Tanta's new book Unusual Woods, just out from BlazeVox. Gene's an interesting guy: born in Romania, he arrived on our shores in the 80s, and has been spending his time writing poetry, drawing, painting, and hosting Chicago's own "Writing at the Movies" — a writing shindig inspired by the old Surrealist game of moving from one movie theater to another, making one's own show in the process (you can just see the straight line leading from Breton's Surrealism to the Situationism of the "dérive" and "détournement," can't you? It's a line that also leads straight through Gene Tanta's apartment).

Anyway. Here's the blurb I wrote for Gene's book:

Where are we, in Gene Tanta’s Unusual Woods? We’re where Charles Simic would live, if he’d been born a few decades later, under the signs of ellipsis and disjunction. These are woods with at least two borders running through them. The first of them divides the surreal anecdote from the elliptical meditation, and along this border we find deformed aphorisms, slippery allegories, cryptic personifications, and parables bent out of shape and away from meaning. This is a zone filled with almost-expressive artifacts like faceless dolls and faded photos. The second border runs between Tanta’s Romanian past and his American present. Both Eastern Europe and the United States appear in fragments of iconic figures: Stalin, fortune-tellers, gypsies, elders with samovars, spies, and Paul Celan; or Black Hawk Indians, Gulf War veterans, teenagers dancing the funky chicken, and Ernest Hemingway. No one but Tanta lives at these exact poetic co-ordinates. You’d be wrong not to visit.

Check out the Blazevox site for Unusual Woods, or cruise by Amazon.com, or see the online gallery of Gene's artwork. He's good.

New Look

No, people, no, there's no need for rejoicing. I haven't gone in for a makeover. You'll still recognize me by my grubby tee-shirts, rumpled jeans, and by the urgent sense you get to take a weed-wacker to my hair. It's the blog that has been rehabilitated, thanks to the techno-savvy Valerie Archambeau, who once again rescues me — or at least my online emanation — from utter disreputability.

I think it'll be easier to navigate to old posts, too. But let me know if you run into any problems. I'll refer them to my stylist.

Reflections on the Age of Citation

Randall Jarrell said his generation lived in the age of criticism; we apparently live in the age of citation.
          —David Orr

Citing David Orr's recent citation of Randall Jarrell is probably a bit too arch a way to begin my own little excursus on the meaning of citation in contemporary poetry, but I couldn't help myself. If Orr is correct about the currently dominant use of citation — that it has become a means for poets to affiliate themselves with those with whom they'd like to "hang out" — then apparently I'd like to pull up a chair at whatever dingy café puts up with poet-critics who want to jawbone the night away with their observations on the state of their art. That sounds about right, so I'm giving Orr's point a lot of credence.

Orr argues that the new emphasis on citation as a means of affiliation with one's contemporaries is, in some degree, a function of the migration of poets into academe. I think he's right. But I think there's another way, beyond that mentioned by Orr, that the migration of poets into the academy affects the use of citation, a way I can best get at by citing some recent observations about creative writing and literary studies made by my colleague Josh Corey over at his blog.

Orr's recent article in the New York Times (in which the present humble blogger's most recent book of lit crit gets a brief shout-out) argues that epigraphs have been proliferating at the start of poems and books of poetry. "[W]hile epigraphs have always been a part of poetic tradition," says Orr, thinking of T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, "they do seem to be unusually thick on the ground these days." This jibes with my own experience as a reviewer, a reader, and as judge for a first-book poetry contest. But Orr goes beyond mere observation, and moves into explanation.

Orr mentions the great narrative theorist Gérard Genette, who classified the function of epigraphs into four categories: as a comment on the title of a work; as a comment on the main body of the text; as the invocation of a kind of patron saint (in this instance, “the main thing is not what [the epigraph] says but who its author is" says Genette — or, as Orr puts it, the point of citing, say, Karl Marx, "isn’t Karl Marx’s wisdom, it’s 'Karl Marx'"); and finally, the epigraph as a signal that one is part of a certain kind of culture — here, the epigraph-slinging author “chooses his peers and thus his place in the pantheon.” This last one, says Orr, has become the main mode of citation in contemporary poetry.


When Eliot cited Dante and Heraclitus, says Orr, it was to position himself as a peer of the Great Dead Poets. It was, I suppose, a way of acting on the principle Eliot articulated in "Tradition and the Individual Talent": that the past and the present are in some way simultaneous, and in conversation with one another. Eliot wanted to pull his chair up to the table — not in some local coffee joint, but in the celestial realm where Homer and Virgil and Milton walk around together, like the philosophers in Raphael's "School of Athens."

But now most citation is different, says Orr: "once a symbol of ambition, the epigraph is now more likely to be an indication of community. It tells us less about whom a poet hopes to equal and more about where he’d like to hang out." That is, citation has become less about fitting into some trans-historical conversation, and more about fitting into a niche in the contemporary scene. Orr explains:

Partly as a result of the art form’s academic attachment, poets are increasingly knit together in complicated patterns based on mentorship, instruction or just basic university proximity. These structures can encourage a kind of association via pedigree that greatly resembles association via epigraph. [It is at this point that Orr gives a shout-out to Laureates and Heretics, a book in which I write about some prominent poets like Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky as they emerge from the same graduate program, but only a boorish self-promoter would bring up the mention, and only a truly shameless cur would link to the Amazon.com page for the book, which really does make a great gift for all occasions, and should be in your local library and on your coffee table.]

There's much truth to this: citing one's teachers is an obvious example, but so is the citing of the canons of one's teachers, poetic or otherwise. There's nothing wrong with this (whenever anyone connects poets to academe, someone out there always seems to consider it an insult to poets — an attitude worth examining, but not right now). Poets do tend to want to position themselves in relation to others in the field — and since one of the functions of the Great Migration to Academe has been that the center of gravity has become geographically dispersed, this affiliation isn't often done by hanging out at the right place for your kind of poet (St. Mark's for the early New York School guys, the little storefront called "The Bureau of Surrealist Research" for Breton's band of Surrealists, what have you). The positioning is accomplished by giving the appropriate kind of shout-out at the start of one's book.

But there's another kind of citation, one also, I think, connected to the residence of poets in academe. I'm thinking, here, not of citation in the form of epigraphs at the start of books, but of significant citation and allusion within poems themselves. I was at a reading the other night where one of my favorite Chicago-based poets, Simone Muench, read from a new book of hers, a book consisting of centos — that is, of poems composed entirely of lines from other poems. I like this kind of thing, and have done a fair bit of it myself: "Citation Suite," for example, is a kind of pseudo-cento, a poem made by combining different pieces of text the way music combines and reshapes key phrases (I was sort of high on Roland Barthes "Death of the Author" at the time, with it's notion that the traditional idea of the author is dead, killed by Surrealism and Structuralism, and replaced by the "scriptor," whose only power is to "mingle texts").

Of course this kind of citation has been going on forever: Wordsworth's Prelude makes plenty of allusions to Milton's Paradise Lost, which in turn is saturated in citation of, and reference to, Biblical literature (and much more). But I think there's been an increase in this sort of thing, and I think it comes in large measure from a way of thinking we find in academe.

Consider Josh Corey's observations about literature in the academy, occasioned by his reading of Elif Batuman's review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (how's that for levels of citation?). Here's what Josh has to say:

Batuman's piece gets to the heart of the tension between the two modes of approaching literature and the literary: a literary scholar comes to value historicization and contextualization above all else, and when reading a novel tends to focus on the ways it was influenced and generated by other novels. Self-expression is ancillary to the task of scholarly writing, and there's also the assumption that literature, and the criticism of literature, is a collective enterprise, an ongoing conversation. Lit begets lit, as crit begets crit.

Creative writing students, on the other hand, value self-expression, originality, and "creativity" itself, displaying what McGurl calls "not a commitment to ignorance, exactly, but … a commitment to innocence."

This seems to imply that scholars who pursue a literary PhD would be attuned to citation, while creative writing types wouldn't be so attuned. But then Josh goes on to describe his own experience as both a "literary scholar" type and a "creative writing" type, mentioning that he has "painstakingly acquired the habits of scholarly writing, which insist that you not write on a given poem or author without familiarizing yourself with "the literature" on that subject." This is interesting, because the kind of hybrid figure he mentions is actually much more common than we tend to think it is. While there are places where creative writing and literary studies live in isolation, there are also plenty of quarters of academe where they cross-breed. Josh is one example of the poet who is also a critic/scholar. David Orr is another. So am I. So, in her range of teaching, is Simone Muench. We're everywhere, and I think it's inevitable that in some of these hybrid cases the contextualizing, citational habits of the scholar and critic will find their way into the work of the poet.

Of course there's more to say about the causes and effects of the Great Migration of the poets into academe. One effect is touched on by David Orr, who notices that poets tend to cite Wallace Stevens over T.S. Eliot by (in his reckoning) "something like 15 to none." Stevens is very much the poet of the isolated intellectual (unlike, say, Yeats, who at times sought a big, national public, and unlike Eliot, who eventually cultivated a role as a kind of public moralist, and unlike Robert Frost, who wanted to be a Wordsworthian "man speaking to men" of common things in a common language). Surely his popularity with academic poets has something to do with the academic poet seeing himself in conversation primarily with fellow academic poets, rather than with a big, middlebrow audience, in the mode of a Tennyson or a Longfellow. I'd like to be able to cite some evidence here, but I'm still at work on the big, tedious, academic study of the changing relation of the poet to art and audience since Romanticism. Ask me about my progress on it after my next sabbatical. Or wait for an announcement in the press — if it's any good, it may get cited in The New York Times

Literary Vampires and the Monstrous Will to Power

It’s probably because of what I’ve been teaching — Frankenstein; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; P.B. Shelley’s Alastor; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — that I’ve been thinking about monsters lately. All those works are haunted by demonic forces, evil spirits, or by straight-up shambling monstrosities. Or maybe it’s television that has me thinking about monstrosity: I still watch True Blood, the vampire series based on the mega-popular novels of Charlaine Harris, although the only thing about the show that still does anything for me is the opening credit sequence, which is a great, sexy bit of southern gothic steaminess.

Anyway. The thing that I’ve been coming back to is this: I think there’s a yet-to-be exploited element of vampire iconography, one that could add an extra dimension to the already rich tradition of that particular kind of monster.

As monsters go, the vampire is pretty glamorous, or has been in much of the literary tradition for the past two centuries. In part, this has to do with the transferring of Byronic traits to the folkloric monster by John Polidori, who famously began to think about a vampiric tale while holed up in Switzerland with the Shelleys and Lord Byron himself. The ghost-story contest they held to while away the time eventually resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and (in a roundabout way) Percy’s long narrative poem Alastor. It also led to Polidori’s The Vampyre, published in 1819. The book was, among other things, a shameless attempt to cash in on Byron’s glamour. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had made Byron a sensation (“I awoke and found myself famous,” he’d said). Polidori, always envious and always looking on the world with an opportunist’s eye, took advantage of the situation, and when his tale appeared in journal form, it bore the subtitle “A Tale by Lord Byron,” and the protagonist was “Lord Ruthven” — the name Lady Caroline Lamb had used for her pseudo-Byron character in Glenarvon (Lamb was a piece of work herself — she coined Byron’s epithet “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” but one really feels the phrase more properly belongs to her).

Of course it was Bram Stoker who gave us the version of vampires we still have today. In Dracula the count is glamorous, vaguely perverse (with hints of bisexuality), sophisticated, and pre-modern. A lot of people read that novel as a kind of bourgeois fantasy, in which the blood-sucking medieval aristocrat is destroyed by a coalition of representatives from all the middle-class professions. Franco Moretti makes a subtler case, saying that the behaviors of Dracula are really more like a Ponzi-scheme version of capitalism (he becomes the master of the vampires he creates, and through them of their progeny, etc.), and that the real conflict isn’t modern bourgeoisie vs. medieval aristocrat, but a matter of the professional classes vs. the capitalists. It’s worth considering.

Lately, though, Stoker’s version of the vampire seems to be losing ground to a slightly earlier version, with its origins in Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla. Le Fanu’s story is about a female vampire is really a way of examining same-sex desire, and it seems to me to be the main precursor of both Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris (or at least the version of Charlaine Harris that makes it into the True Blood television series based on her work). Anne Rice almost always associates her vampires with some kind of alternative to hetero-normative vanilla sexuality, and uses the vampire as a figure of the sexual outsider, with whom she sympathizes (you want to know the how’s and why’s of this sympathy? Have a look at the “Sleeping Beauty” novels she wrote under a pen name. It’s a real window into the particulars of Anne Rice’s erotic imagination). From what I’m told, Charlaine Harris’ novels have a lot to do with female sexual coming of age — but True Blood often takes the vampire as a kind of polymorphously perverse figure, trying to find a place in a world freaked out by such forms of the erotic.

I kind of like what our culture’s done with the vampire figure, mostly because we’re now urged to feel sympathy for the vampires — and, as Mary Shelley knew, the most interesting monsters are the ones for which we care, feel, and empathize. But I can’t help thinking that we’ve let one of the great iconographic traits of the vampire lie fallow. I mean, Stoker used the medievalism and blood-lust; Rice and the producers of True Blood use the connection of blood with the body (and therefore sexuality) and the parallel of blood-lust and lust per se. But what about the notion of vampires not appearing in mirrors? It’s a central part of the poetics of vampirism, but nobody seems to make much of it, even though it has the potential to open a whole new perspective on the nature of monstrosity.

Think about it: in many ways, the classic vampire is not just a Byronic figure, but a Nietzschean one: the vampire see mankind as a herd over which he towers in superiority, like the Nietzschean ubermensch. Furthermore, the classic vampire acts on his own desires and self-interests without regard for any standards of morality but those he creates for himself — he is a figure of appetite and self-justification, a kind of pure will-to-power, who sees the good only as that which is good for himself alone. I think it’s fascinating that such creatures don’t appear in mirrors — because it implies that they are unselfconscious, or incapable of reflection, and are either unwilling or unable to look on themselves as others might see them. This has always seemed to me to be a necessary condition of the will to power: those who exercise it can’t possibly have empathy, or see themselves from the outside, or they wouldn’t be able to instrumentalize others and use them as mere things. There’s a bit of insight, there, inherent in the trappings of vampire iconography, and a kind of criticism of self-interestedness and instrumentalization. But as far as I know, no one has really touched it. And as much as I admire the current version of the vampire myth, as a defense of outsider sexuality, I think we’re at a point in our history where a critique of the hooray-for-me-and-screw-you strain of American politics — the politics of the will to power — is in order. I’d like to see a version of monstrosity that took our political moment into account. Until that comes about, though, I’ll keep watching True Blood and reading Bram Stoker.

La Lotería: Thursday Night Reading!

Live! Free! One Night Only!

Yep. This Thursday I'll be part of a multi-poet extravaganza at the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago. Come and check it out! The format is something I've seen take off in London, and increasingly in the United States: a themed reading, where each poet contributes a new poem as part of an overall design (one poet per song from The Dark Side of The Moon, or what have you). Our theme is La Lotería, a kind of Mexican Tarot deck. Each poet gets one card (mine, "La Bandera," depicts a flag — sort of a touchy subject, really, especially when it's not the flag of your own country).

The event takes place from 6:00pm - 8:30pm at the Center for Book & Paper Arts on the second floor of 1104 South Wabash. Poetry magazine's own Fred Sasaki presides, and Scotland's very own Roddy Lumsden anchors the bill of readers.

The visuals should be great, too (and not just because I may wear my Winnipeg Jets shirt), since the space contains the exhibit "Mano/Mundo/Corazón: Artists Interpret La Lotería."

Here are the poets and their cards:

Roddy Lumsden (La Corona)
Michael Robbins (La Palma)
Patricia Barber (El Paraguas)
Lisa Fishman (El Valiente)
Jackye Pope (Las Jaras)
Kimberly Dixon (La Escalera)
Jacob Saenz (La Sirena)
Erin Teegarden (La Rosa)
Melissa Severin (La Mano)
Danielle Chapman (La Estrella)
Carrie Olivia Adams (El Arbol)
Raúl Dorantes (El Nopal)
Jorge Montiel (El Diablito)
Johanny Vázquez Paz (El Bailarín)
Jorge García de la Fé (El Gallo)
Marcopolo Soto (La Campana)
Verónica Lucuy Alandia (El Alacrán)
Santiago Weksler (El Pescado)
Don Share (La Bota)
Simone Muench (La Calavera)
Anna Wilson (El Corazon)
Eric Bourland (El Mundo)
Judith Goldman (El Soldado)
John Beer (La Araña)
Robert Archambeau (La Bandera)

Check it out! Then stick around and buy me a few drinks. I promise not to moan about the fate of the Winnipeg Jets.

Voilà Ballet Mécanique!

Okay people, I know you. I know all about you. You've probably been wondering where you could check up on the genesis of the internet and the role the silent film star Hedy Lamarr played in making it all happen with stolen Nazi technology (this is, I might add, actually true).

If so, you've only got a few days to get ready there's going to be a performance of Ballet Mécanique: A Spread-Spectrum Ecstasy at the University of Notre Dame (click the poster image above if you want to read the fine print). But if you can't make the show, fret not: it is an adaptation of “Automystifstical Plaice," the most important part of John Matthias' amazing book Working Progress, Working Title,, which you can dial up on Amazon for a mere twelve bucks.

I can't make the performance, but I can tell you about the poem, which in dealing with the intersection of eros, art, and technology takes on the big theme of the relation of power to the world of aesthetics and play. “Automystifstical Plaice,” the 30 page poem that begins Working Progress, Working Title, provides a stunningly complex example of the breakdown of the play/power dichotomy. The poem begins with an evocation of Paris in the twenties, jumbling together lines redolent of that era’s playfulness with lines that remind us of the two world wars — the clashes of powers — that frame the era:

In the beginning
without any mother the girl was born a machine.
In the year of erotic parades.
The Novia poured out the oil the gears were engaged
the études composed and the light bulb
was Amèricaine. Voilà Picabia sweetheart of first
occupation voilà ballet méchanique.
We’ll not eat our bread by the sweat of our brows
in the end: Je viens pour toujours
it is error and grief you’ll be known by
the strength of our steel
the number of our rivets...

We begin with a girl, but this one is “born a machine,” and therefore somehow affiliated with the world of mechanized utility and power. Erotic parades indicate an outbreak of play in the streets of Paris, and the tremendous playfulness of the era’s artistic production gets a nod. It’s important that we’re presented with avant-garde artists like Francis Picabia and Georges Antheil, too: it is the avant-garde, with its disdain for market success or political propaganda, that represents art at its most free and playful. And the very idea of Antheil’s Ballet Méchanique seems to imply power turned to play: it involved using airplane engines (recently developed by the wartime powers as instruments of war) as musical instruments. The optimism of the era and its artists even seems to promise a liberation from the realm of necessity and material utility: “We’ll not eat our bread by the sweat of our brows” almost reverses the injunction to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows placed on Adam and Eve when they’re expelled from Eden. But the signs of malevolent power are everywhere. We’re reminded of Picabia’s exile during the occupation of France, and we’re reminded, too, of how the era entre deux guerres came to an end, with error and grief and the relentless wartime exercise of power by armies built of steel and rivets. The throwing together of all this indicates at the outset of the poem the blurring of the distinction between the spheres of play and power that we’ll see in the pages that follow.

The poem soon unfolds a bizarre, true story that seems at first to show the subordination of play to power. We meet the starlet Hedy Lamarr in her early life in Germany, where she’s an actress in pornographic movies and the mistress of Fritz Mandl, an arms merchant selling his wares to the Third Reich. “That’s Mandl, Fritz, from Vienna, the armaments man, the war profiteer,” we read, and with him is Hedy Lamarr, introduced as “the naked broad in the film.” He is a dark figure of power, while she is the thoroughly objectified woman, Mandl’s plaything, and utterly subordinate to his will: he literally will not let her leave his sight. Mandl’s possessiveness of Lamarr, combined with a contempt for her intellect (sadly typical of the man of power’s contempt for the player) lead to a breakdown of the barrier between play and power, and to a kind of revenge of play upon the world of power.

The poem approaches this breakdown of these barriers by showing us one of the more curious scenes in the history of modernism: the riot that took place during a performance of Antheil’s piano music, a performance that was being filmed for Marcel L’Herbier’s movie L’Inhumaine. L’Inhumaine was intended as both a star-vehicle for the famous singer Georgette LeBlanc and as a showcase for modern art of all kinds, with figures such as Francis Picabia, Fernand Léger, and Darius Milhaud involved in the production, and luminaries such as Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Erik Satie, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce making brief appearances. Although Antheil did not know it at the time, L’Herbier and LeBlanc were banking on the music causing a riot, as it has in earlier performances. As Antheil put it in his autobiography,

…most curiously, this riot is no fake one. It is an actual riot, the same riot through which I played and lived the night of October 4, 1923. When I first viewed this movie a year later, I suddenly remembered Georgette LeBlanc walking up to my piano while the great floodlights in the balcony poured on us both simultaneously: I had thought it odd then. So I naturally asked Margaret Anderson [founder of The Little Review and lover of Georgette LeBlanc] about it, not without a grin of appreciation. She said yes, it been a sort of plot at that, but a plot in which she and Georgette had been sure I would greatly profit. She said that she thought I would be too nervous if I knew in advance that the house floodlights had been previously reinforced and cameras hidden in the balcony in the hope that my piano sonatas would cause the same sort of riot in Paris that they had caused in Germany.

L’Herbier was correct in predicting that Antheil’s performance would provoke a riot, an angry expression of the power of a crowd. But this apparent trumping of play by power is by no means the end of the matter: the expression of crowd-power is harnessed by L’Herbier’s cameras, and becomes a part of his own ludic artwork. Then, in a fine irony, the film itself goes on to provoke riots. As Jacque Catelan, the actor who played the scientist, wrote of it in his memoir of L’Herbier:

A chaque séance, les spectateurs s'insultent, il y a autant de partisans frénétiques que d'adversaires acharnés. C'est dans un véritable vacarme que passent sur l'écran, à toutes les représentations, les images multicolores et syncopées sur lesquelles se termine le film. Des femmes, le chapeau de travers, exigent d'ètre remboursées; des hommes, les traits convulsés, se précipitent sur le trottoir où, parfois, les pugilats continuent.

Which I'd roughly translate as:

At each screening, the spectators insulted each other: there were as many frantic partisans of the film as there were crazed adversaries. The multicolored, syncopated images at the film’s end were shown amid a true uproar. Women, with hats askew, demanded refunds, while men, their faces convulsed with anger, poured out onto the sidewalks, sometimes to fight.

The relation of play and power is no longer one of simple antimonies: it has become dialectic. Play becomes power becomes play, and so on.

Matthias cross-cuts his descriptions of L’Inhumaine and the Antheil riots with a treatment of another scandalous Antheil piece intended to accompany film, the groundbreaking Ballet Méchanique (which involves using airplane engines, synchronized player pianos, and modified automobile parts as instrumentation). Here, too, we see the dialectic of power and play at work:

Ma clicketyclack
of the dactylicanapests jerking the film
through a circle of light the soloist booed from the stage
the piano rolls looping their loops
in twelve pianolas electronic bells and a xylophone siren
another Picabia made from the parts
of a Model-T Ford

This presents a strange music, a music in which the instruments of technological power and the fruits of mass production are transformed by Antheil and Picabia into the pure play of music: Picabia’s constructions are a kind of détournement of the great symbol of modern America’s industrial power. Later, the speaker asks us if we understand the mathematical principles behind Antheil’s complex, automated synchronizations of his mechanical instruments: “You do comprehend these recursions are different/from those you expect” says the speaker, “the power plant cycles like no minuet?” Here, our attention is drawn to the way Antheil has repurposed mathematical formulae more frequently used for the generation of power, converting them to musical play.

It’s not just that these players seize the materials of power, though: power and play morph into one another throughout the poem. Consider the following passage (“Lescot” here is Claire Lescot, the leading character of L’Inhumaine, and an important character throughout “Automystifstical Plaice”):

So Model-T begat Picabia who as machinist made the shape that named a choreography. And then Antheil’s recital drove the riot L’Herbier required for Lescot before she visits Léger’s laboratory where her lover there among the angles and geometric shapes, the silver desks and rods and knobs and dials and flashing beams of light, transfigures her.

Firstly, there’s the business about Picabia and the Model-T: previously, we’d seen him as turning the symbol of technological power into an instrument of play. Here, though, we see things from a different angle: the kind of play Picabia and Antheil (and L’Herbier, and a host of others) are up to is enabled only by the mechanized power of Henry Ford and the powerful industrial society for which he stands. Play transforms power, but also depends on it.

It all gets more complicated, too. In drawing our attention to a scene in the Léger-designed laboratory of L’Inhumaine, Matthias calls up one of the central plot events of a film that is, itself, a meditation on the relation of art and play to power. In the film, the protagonist Claire Lescot is a famous singer courted by many powerful men, including the Maharaja of Nopur. She is aloof, and spurns them all, causing one of them, a scientist, to commit suicide. Her fans are appalled by her inhuman coldness, and riot during a concert she gives (this is, of course, the scene for which L’Herbier engaged the services of Antheil). Shaken by this, she goes to the tomb of the scientist and confesses her love for him. It turns out that he has only feigned his death, but no happy reunion is possible just yet: the jealous Maharaja kills Claire. Fortunately, the scientist is able to restore her to life. The events of the film involve the triumph of a singer — that is, a figure of play — over the Maharaja, a jealous figure of power. All of this is facilitated by technology.

Matthias ties the story of Hedy Lamarr and Fritz Mandl (another tale of play and power) into all this. Since Mandl wouldn’t let Lamarr out of his sight — even when meeting with high-level Nazi officials and discussing new military technology — she was privy to secret information. As Matthias puts it, “she had been a silent party to analyses of radio control and interception by the politicians and engineers,” and

she’d listened first to all those conversations among guests who’d come on business with the Hertzenberger Industries. Like Krupp and Basil Zaharov, Mandl had the reputation of a man who’d start a war if that would move the goods. Goebbels kissed her hand from time to time and Göring held her chair. No one understood she could understand the technicalities.

When Hedy Lamarr finally escapes from Mandl and Germany, she ends up in Los Angeles, where she meets another European émigré, George Antheil. Because he’d learned the mathematical and mechanical technicalities of signal synchronization to stage his Ballet Méchanique, he was able to collaborate with her on adapting Nazi war technology for new purposes. The fruits of their collaboration included what eventually became the standard remote control system for American naval torpedoes, as well as the signal technology behind cell phones and the midi technology that allows for contemporary digital music. The work of men of power is changed in the hands of figures of play, and is transformed into new forms of play and power. The very distinction between the realms of play and power breaks down.

****

Here, if you're interested, are Matthias' performance notes for the upcoming show. They're also good to have on hand if you're reading the book:

In November of 2000 I happened to read the obituary of Hedy Lamarr, the famous screen siren of the Golden Age at MGM. I remember seeing her in Tortilla Flats when I was very young, and a little later in De Mille’s Samson and Delilah. She was in fact a remarkable woman. Having created a sensation in 1933 with a nude swimming scene and, for its period, a very convincing episode of lovemaking with her co-star, she made the Czech movie Ecstasy a famous episode in the history of cinematic candor. In that same year, however, she married Friedrich Mandl, the Viennese arms manufacturer who became friends with Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering during the rise of the Nazi regime. Eventually, he was a major producer, on the scale of Krupp and Hertzenberger, of armaments during the war. Mandl was extremely jealous and quite horrified at the famous nudity and lovemaking in Ecstasy. He bought up all the copies of the film he could lay hands on and more or less imprisoned Lamarr in his castle. Before she escaped in 1937 disguised as one of her maids, she had sat through many technical discussions between Mandl, Nazi officials, and other industrialists. Lamarr was a smart and mathematically-literate woman, and she understood everything that was said. By the time she escaped, first to Paris and then to the United States, she intended to put her knowledge to use.

I learned from the obituary that once Lamarr was settled in Hollywood and had reignited her acting career with the help of Louis Mayer, she asked around about making contact with someone who understood synchronization. She was put in touch with George Antheil, the avant-garde composer and friend of Pound and Joyce, who was now also in Hollywood writing music for the movies. Antheil was mainly known, and is still mainly known, for his score for the movie Ballet Méchanique, which eventually became a stand-alone concert piece for percussion and sixteen synchronized player pianos. Lamarr asked him if he could help her design a radio-directed torpedo according to the principals that we now call spread-spectrum technology. It turned out that he could, although he had to work almost entirely with the number 88 since all of his previous experience with synchronization had to do with that number of piano keys. In fact the two collaborators did eventually design such a scheme, got it patented, and tried to convince the War Department that the contraption would actually work. The patent gathered dust until Sylvania began developing transistor technology in the 1950s. The patent in fact is the prototype of designs used for cell phones, wireless Internet, and today’s so called smart weapons. Only at the end of her life did Hedy Lamarr obtain any credit at all for one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century.

I began at once to write a poem that deals with the Lamarr-Antheil collaboration in the context of many other things happening in the lives both of the two principal characters and the lives around them. Of great importance in following the text is the association of scenes from a number of films from the period, especially Ballet Méchanique itself, which is almost entirely abstract or cubist, and L’Inhumaine, about an “inhuman” singer whose cold and calculating life leads to her being shouted down by a large audience in the famous Théatre des Champs Elyseés in Paris. The connection with Antheil in the second film has to do with a performance of several piano pieces at the Theatre des Champs Elyseés that did indeed start a riot that was filmed, and in fact anticipated, by the director of L’Inhumaine, Marcel L’Herbier. The actress Georgette Leblanc was superimposed on Antheil in the film so that it looks like the audience is directing their ire at her character, Clare Lescot, rather than at Antheil. But the riot itself appears to be entirely authentic because it was. In fact we see people like Pound, Joyce, Duchamp and others who attended the Antheil concert shouting down the rioters on behalf of the person who appears to be Claire Lescot in the film, but who was actually George Antheil.

There are many other historical characters and references in the poem. Some years after having published it on the Internet, in a magazine, and in my book called Working Progress/Working Title, I had the thought that it might make an interesting theatre piece if we could add a lot of documentary material in sound and image. Chris Jara has taken on this task with great enthusiasm and skill. Hedy Lamarr does not speak in the poem, but she is much spoken about. The main voices are Claire Lescot, who steps out of L’Inhmaine as the kind of mechanical figure she was portrayed to be in the film, but who in the course of the text morphs into a fully mature contemporary robot inhabiting a robotics lab at MIT. Her voice is read by Joyelle McSweeney. General background and commentary is filled in several times by the voice of an over-enthusiastic 1940s radio-journalist type. One might think of Walter Winchell, if anyone remembers that name. Steve Fredman reads that part, as well as the brief intrusion of Salvador Dali’s voice in the course of a dialogue in California with Cecil De Mille about surrealism and the Un Chien Andalou. I will read the text of various links and connections, as well as one voice in the two dialogue sections with Joyelle-Claire Lescot. The title of this, by the way, is “Automystifstical Plaice,” and Plaice is spelled with an i. A few other references to keep in mind:

Auteuil, often referenced with regard to Antheil and his circle: A French race course.

Boski: George Antheil’s wife

Aribert Mog: the co-star with Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy

Picabia: The artist whose painting of Le Ballet Méchanique appears behind me.

Daumier’s Washer Woman: Looped and rhymed in the Ballet Méchanique film.

Café du Dôme: Popular Parisian hangout during the pre-WW II period.

Un Chien Andalou: Surrealist film by Dalí and Luis Buñuel.

MIDI: A computerized device used by contemporary composers.

RUR: Russell’s Universal Robots, a play by Karel Çapec, in which the word Robot first entered literature.

The Plainsman: a De Mille film with Gary Cooper.

Neils Barricelli: a Princeton mathematician and thinker.

If you make it to the show, drop me a line and tell me about it. I'm sad not to be there. I mean, anything having to do with Hedy Lamarr should be a site of pilgrimage.

Anywhere Out of the World: Locating Romanticism

It's the end of August, and I'm already back to teaching. Since I've got a seminar on Romanticism this fall, I've been trying to think through just what that term has meant.

Definition's a tricky business. On the one hand, one doesn't want to fall into the trap of believing in trans-historically valid ideal types, or eternal forms. That is, you just don't want to treat Romanticism as a simply definable essence of some kind that pops up here and there in history, perhaps locked in battle with another trans-historical absolute called Classicism (I do, though, see Romanticism as a structure of feeling that didn't end when Queen Victoria hopped on the throne, and hasn't gone away yet — it comes out of conditions that haven't entirely disappeared). On the other hand, it's just as dubious to go over into some boneheaded nominalism, and refuse to believe that any word other than a proper noun has any meaning whatsoever. Abstractions may well repress certain elements of the whole truth, but they also express important things that we can't get at any other way. Besides, abstractions are like rationalizations: just try getting through a week without using one.

My usual move, when I want to define something, is to root around a bit in the history of the term, looking at how it's been used over a period of time (Raymond Williams is my guide, here, and Keywords my holy text). In the case of the term Romanticism, I'm not quite up to tracing the whole history, but a look at how it's been defined by some of the major critical thinkers over the last century or so is a decent enough start. It's what I did in an essay about Nick Cave and Romanticism I just finished drafting, and from which the rest of these remarks are adapted.

Carl Schmitt argued that Romanticism was all about the individual's "subjective occasionalism," a kind of fetishizing of the moment of individual spontaneity — in a literary context one might think of Jack Kerouac, hopped up on Benzedrine, and clattering away on his scroll-fed typewriter, or shouting "Go, man, go!" at Ginsberg's Six Gallery reading of Howl as the late-blooming apotheosis of sort of Romantism. The Encyclopédie Larousse tells us that it's really all a matter of form, of artists who "freed themselves from the classical rules of composition and style" — one thinks of Paganini cutting loose with defiantly flashy and unruly solos. M.H. Abrams says it's all a matter of emphasizing the visionary imagination, with the mind seen as a light-casting lamp, not a mirror reflecting the world as it is. Morse Peckham said it was all a matter of self-assertion, and so did Bertrand Russell ("Titantic cosmic self-assertion," said Russell, thinking of Lord Byron as the first great rebel without a cause). Irving Babbitt went a step further, saying Romanticism was an "anarchy of the imagination," such as you might find in Rimbaud (not an example he uses). But Karl Mannheim went the other way, saying Romanticism was fundamentally conservative; dead-set in opposition to the ever-rising "bourgeois-capitalist mode of experiencing things" — if you've had a look at Wordsworth's depiction of Bartholomew Fair as a Dantean circle of hell (it's in The Prelude), you've seen this kind of Romanticism.

Since Romanticism can appear in so many aspects, it's no wonder, really, that Arthur O. Lovejoy shook his head in despair and said we should give the term the chuck, or at least speak of "Romanticisms" (a move that doesn't really solve the problem, any more than saying there are "types of poetry" solves the problem of defining poetry). I was almost willing to join Lovejoy, though, until the great Franco-Brazilian sociologist Michael Löwy set me straight. What holds all these loose strands we want to call "Romantic" together, for Löwy, is their opposition to capitalist modernity – their sense of not fitting at a comfortable angle vis-à-vis industrialism, the quantification and rationalization of all things, technocracy, and the general disenchantment of the world. Anarchists? Backward-looking reactionaries? Imaginative visionaries? Stylistic malcontents? Individualist outsiders? Come on in, people — Löwy's bigtop is a commodious place.

The bigtop's inhabitants all have one thing in common, though: the modern world has left them homeless — sometimes literally, in the form of the poète maudit kicked out of his garret by a greedy landlord— but usually in a more metaphorical way. It makes sense. Think about the state of things when the first generations of Romantic writers came of age: the arts, long the handmaidens of church and state, had lost that affiliation in the breakdown of the old social order, and had yet to find a new one in the gaudy commercial world that would take its place. Displaced from their old social roles, Romantic writers would leap into invented worlds, like Blake did. Or they'd dream of a transformed future world, of revolution and Utopia, like P.B. Shelley. Or they'd look to what they imagined as a lost, better world: like childhood, or village life deep in the provinces — Wordsworth's great themes. Sometimes they yearned for the fuller, more organic social life in the middle ages, the period of the romances that gave the Romantic movement its name. If they were particularly bright and observant, like the nineteen year old Mary Shelley, holed up in Switzerland with her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and their egos, the Romantics would dream of monstrous outsiders whose great minds and open hearts meant nothing to the torch-and-pitchfork bearing peasants who drove them to endless wanderings. The world did not fit, felt these dislocated artists and intellectuals, and wherever they looked, it was to turn away from the modern bourgeois world of getting and spending that seemed to have no place for them. Perhaps Baudelaire got at the situation best, when he called for a voyage going "anywhere out of the world."

In Which I Get My Hate On

The other day I received an email in which the offending writer referred to me as "insistently upbeat and chipper." I think it was meant as a compliment, but I was utterly aghast. I mean, it goes against my self-image. When I was young and pretentious, I used to think I glowered and scowled like some kind of Byronic wanderer-upon-the-earth, in quest of Truths beyond the ken of normal men. Then I sort of caught on to my own jive, and came to see myself as a more of a garden-variety lumpy grouch. Am I now to relinquish even that delusion? Never! Fight on, I say!

But how? The last time I can remember making a whole swath of people think of me as a negative jerk was an incident almost a year ago, on Facebook. There was some kind of meme going around, in which one was meant to name something that one hated, but the most people loved. An answer sprang immediately to mind: dogs. I fucking hate dogs. I find them needy, filthy, and vaguely dangerous – like adjuncts (I kid! I kid! — but only about adjuncts. As I may have mentioned, I fucking hate dogs). As one might imagine, the response was swift and brutal, with the united forces of all of Facebook's dog lovers crashing down upon me, baying for blood.

I thought I'd played the game well — some people had put in responses like "paying taxes" and "paper cuts," neither of which seems likely to be beloved by the majority (except perhaps in certain Japanese fetishistic subcultures). But you've got to watch out for these dog-lovers: their sense of acceptable objects for critique ends when Schnookums' big wet eyes and butthole-exposing bobtail enter the picture.

So anyway. I thought I'd try to do some damage to this incipient sense of an upbeat Archambeau by listing things, other than dogs, that I just can't stand. If some of these are things you admire, more power to you: I speak not with the Universal Voice of Wisdom, merely with the curmudgeonly voice of the portly academic.

• Unitarianism, the appletini of religions.


• Profs who call themselves "doctor" more than six months after receiving the degree.


• Diplomas on display. You are not a kid. Your office is not a refrigerator door.


• Hyper-correct grammaristos, including those who use "one" where everyone else says "you."


• Pictures of oneself giving a reading from one's own book.


• Suits of any kind on people of any gender in any non-wedding, non-funeral context. (This rule does not apply to Michael Caine).


• Did I mention dogs?


• Crazy bitches.


• iChat conversations, because I never know how to end the damn things without making up some kind of household emergency such as a cat in the chimney or a pretend bee-sting.


• Grapefruit.

I think that's about it. One must not go overboard in one's bitching.

The Aesthetically Poor and How They Got There

One of the more common arguments one hears, regarding the relative lack of popularity of one or another poet, is that said poet's work is "difficult." Such arguments are often followed by homiletics regarding the virtue or importance of difficulty. I should know: I've made them myself more times than I can remember.

I suppose it's because of this that I feel like posting a few paragraphs from the big-ass social history of aesthetic autonomy (with reference to poetry) that I've been plugging away on for a couple of years. Here's a passage where I'm talking about Arthur Henry Hallam's review of one of Tennyson's first books. Tennyson would go on to drop many of his relatively obscure symbolist tendencies and become the most popular English poet of his generation (or of any subsequent generation), but at the time Hallam wanted to defend obscurity. The attitude to the audience is, shall we say, interesting — and a kind of aesthetic mirror image of the free-marketeering, self-made-man ethos of the Victorian middle class.

Hey, I just study this stuff...

**

E.D.H. Johnson has argued, with regard to the Victorian poets, that “artists of their generation were the first to face the problem of communicating with a modern reading public little sensitive to the life of the imagination.” Arthur Henry Hallam, in his short life, was nevertheless among the first English poets to see the problem clearly. What to make of the relative unpopularity of highly skilled poets like the young Tennyson of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical? What could be done about the obscurity of those trafficking in difficult symbolism and indecisive negative capability, especially in a world where literacy of a basic sort was growing, and beginning to displace more elite forms of reading in the marketplace? Hallam phrases the question a little differently, claiming (in the manner of the Wordsworth of the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads) a special sensitivity for the poets: “how should they be popular,” Hallam asks, “whose senses told them a richer and ampler tale than most men could understand, and who constantly expressed, because they constantly felt, sentiments of exquisite pleasure or pain, which most men were not permitted to experience?”. His answer begins with a gesture of conciliation toward the advocates of a socially engaged art: “Undoubtably the true poet addresses himself, in all his conceptions, to the common nature of us all,” says Hallam, for “art is a lofty tree, and may shoot up far beyond our grasp, but its roots are in daily life and experience.” In the end, though, the responsibility of bridging the gap between the difficult poet and the bewildered public lies with the reader, not the poet. Apprehending the wholeness and harmony of the organic form of aesthetic works is, quite simply, hard work. Readers have the potential to grasp refined aesthetic pleasures, if only, says Hallam (sounding as Victorian as a Victorian should) they would, through diligent work, make themselves worthy of such pleasures:

…since the emotions of the poet, during composition, follow a regular law of association, it follows that to accompany their progress up to the harmonious prospect of the whole, and to perceive the proper dependence of every step on that which it preceded, it is absolutely necessary to start from the same point, i.e., clearly to apprehend that leading sentiment in the poet’s mind, by their conformity to which the host of suggestions are arranged. Now this requisite exertion is not willingly made by the large majority of readers.

The aesthetically poor are poor, it seems, because they are lazy.

Twilight of the Comments Streams

The poetry blogosphere has been wearing a black armband lately, as it mourns the demise of the comments stream at Ron Silliman's blog, and remembers the recent loss of another comments stream, over at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog. Much buzz has been generated about the whys and whences of it all. I have no deep insight to offer, but I do think that a recent post at the Pathologos blog offers a clue as to what's afoot.

In the middle of the post, the blogger offers a little confession about his own contribution to what many see as the hostile culture of poetry snarkiness:

i'm embarrassed to admit that on at least 2 occasions i inserted insults into blog posts that i wouldn't have otherwise included because i knew that, as a completely unknown commentator, i'm more likely to be taken seriously (or at least engaged with) the more insulting i am.

This is interesting, in that it indicates where we might lay the blame for the current state of affairs. No, not on the now-reformed blogger at Pathologos, nor even on his eschewal of capital letters — but on the attention-economy of poetry, in which people want to be noticed any way they can.

I think this attention-seeking condition is endemic to the whole American poetry culture now, and at root the issue is the surplus of supply (of poems, of opinions) compared to the demand. It is with poets as it is with aspiring Hollywood starlets: there are a multitude of them on the scene, hoping to be noticed, and few stunts are too low for someone to stoop down to them. I haven't seen any poets doing the "exposing underwear while getting out of a limo" trick, but I'm sure it can't be too far off — I just pray it isn't Silliman who goes there.

It's not that I want to impose a moratorium on poetry, or on the discourse about poetry — far from it. I just wish people didn't yearn, so much, for the few rays of limelight that do penetrate the fog.

I suppose, in the end, what we have is a failure to adjust our expectations to the new conditions under which we write poetry, and write about poetry. When the dissemination of poems and commentary was limited by the technology of print, relatively few people were able to disseminate their work, and they could imagine that the audience for what they had to say was larger than the number of other publishing writers. Now everyone with a laptop can get their work out there, but getting it noticed amid the crowd is an issue.

Everyone is famous, now, to fifteen people. We can get upset about this and hurl insults in an attempt to get noticed. Or we can roll with it. Accepting it may not be easy for the ego that yearns for recognition, but there really is no going back. And, I might add, we'd be foolish to want to go back. I am (I hate to say it) old enough to remember the curious silence that surrounded most poetry in America before the internet took off. What we have now is better in just about every way, if only we'd let go of the fantasy of recognition.

*

UPDATE: Bobby Baird has some good things to say on this topic.

There is No Such Thing as Poetry, or: Lightbulbs of Quietude

"How many poets does it take to screw in a light bulb?" asked a well-respected New York poet in a recent Facebook update. "There are no light bulbs, only kinds of light bulbs" replied the much-beloved editor of a prominent, and therefore often-maligned, literary journal [update: the editor in question, Don Share, has informed me I may name him by name]. I nearly sneezed my fourth coffee of the day out of my over-caffinated nostrils in mirth. To laugh at the editor's response, though, you'd have to know one of the most-repeated phrases of that éminence grise of poetry bloggers, Ron Silliman. "There is no such thing as poetry," Silliman often intones, "only kinds of poetry."

I've always had a mixed reaction to Silliman's mantra. On the one hand, I think I get what he's trying to say, and I agree with it. I suppose he means that there's no such thing as normal poetry, no entity that is the natural state of the art, from which other kinds of poetry are deviations. In his view, it is with poetry as it is with language. Just as there's no such thing as a version of English that has no accent, there's no kind of poetry that is simply "poetry" in an unqualified state. Those people who blithely say "I don't have an accent" do, in fact, have accents — it's just that their accents are the dominant ones in their countries, so they think of their speach as normal, natural, pure, and uninflected by class or region. Speakers of the dominant accent have the privilege of thinking of themselves as normal, and of others as deviants, but this is simply the ignorance and insensitivity that so often comes with power. And those people who might think of themselves as poets, pure and simple, are actually writers of a particular kind of poetry, members of some kind of school of poetry, every bit as much as are the writers of less dominant kinds of poetry. It's just that the dominant group doesn't have to give itself an -ism (imagism, surrealism, dadaism, postmodernism, what have you)

What Silliman objects to is that some people go around thinking that their poetry has no accent. I'm with him on this.

It's at this point that Ron, in a gesture both helpful and, I think, spiteful, provides a label for this kind of poetry — his infamous "School of Quietude." I like the idea of a label, just as I like the idea of people with the dominant accent realizing that they have accents. But labels always seem to cause trouble, since there are always people who feel that the level of generalization is too high (this is a problem with accent labels, too, since few people speak in exactly the same accent). People used to carp about being called language poets (I remember Steve Evans making some remarks about how poets outside the mainstream seemed to either have to accept that label or be ignored). And not long ago, when I wrote about "Cambridge Poetry," I set off a small-time internet shit-storm, in which a number of poets objected to the category as too general. Ron's term is particularly bad, though, because it comes laden with a negative judgement from the start, implying that those poets who write this kind of poetry are somehow complicit with the bad guys, quiescent in the face of situations of moral urgency. Also, it has even less buy-in from those whom it is meant to label than terms like "language poetry" and "Cambridge poetry" have had. After all, unlike the "School of Quietude," both "Cambridge poetry" and "language poetry" have at times been used by some of the poets they designate. To make things worse, I've seen Silliman create versions of literary history that essentially project his model of the current American poetic situation (the School of Quietude on one side, the Post-Avant on the other) back in time, claiming a history that extends from Whitman and Dickinson to the Post-Avant, over against a history that extends from Longfellow to the School of Quietude. I don't even know where to begin discussing how messed up this is — it betrays a kind of ignorance of the complex ways literary history and influence work, and it betrays a weird kind of will-to-power, a wish to grab the currently respected names from the past and label them "mine, not yours."

But my real problem with Silliman's phrase "there is no such thing as poetry, only kinds of poetry" doesn't come from the whole lamentable "School of Quietude" thing. It comes from the blatant logical fallacy of the statement itself. To say "there is no such thing as poetry, only kinds of poetry" is analogous to saying "There is no box, only compartments inside a box." That is: the second part of the statement asserts the existence of the category (poetry, or boxes) that the first part denies. To say that there are "kinds of poetry" is to posit the overall category of "poetry" as something that exists. I actually think Ron does believe there is such a thing of poetry — he just means no one writes "poetry" without writing a kind of poetry. Again, the analogy with language might help: it's not that there is no such thing as a "Romance language," it's just that it's an overall category into which particular languages like French and Spanish and Italian fit. No one goes around speaking "the Romance language," but this doesn't mean the term is empty or represents nothing. The analogy could be extended, of course — there's really no one who simply speaks "Spanish" pure and simple, only people who speak the Spanish of Barcelona or Uruguay or East L.A. or whatever — which doesn't mean that there's no such thing as "Spanish." It's an overarching category that exists but that manifests only in particular versions.

I'd like to continue, but the light bulb here in my secret backyard writing dojo seems to have burnt out. I'm going to cruise around to the corner shop to see if they have any Lightbulbs of Quietude. Last time they were out, and I had to use a 300 watt Avant-Bulb. My eyes are still hurting.

Mad Men's Meditations in an Emergency: Don Draper Reads Frank O'Hara

The most important thing to remember about Don Draper, the lead character in the AMC series Mad Men, is that he's awesome. He's better at his job than anyone else in the industry, and he knows it. When he sets his sights on a woman, she comes to him. He drinks hard and dresses sharp. If he was in espionage rather than advertising, he'd damn near be James Bond. He's not quite 007, though, in that he's capable, in rare moments, of doubt and anxiety. But even the nature of his doubts betray his superiority to the common run of men: he wonders What It All Means, not just with a sigh, but with a passion that could at any moment translate into action. In some respects, the writers of the series have pulled off an amazing feat in that they've take the prototypical man in the grey flannel suit — a Manhattan office jockey — and turned him into a glamourous, Byronic figure. He's cloaked in mystique, and driven by inner passions, by yearning for self-understanding, and by a sense of outsiderness. He's capable of breaking the norms of decency while nevertheless maintaining our sympathy, even admiration. He's got alpha written all over him.

In the season two opener, though, which I recently re-watched as part of my ramp-up to tonight's fourth season opener, he's feeling uneasy. Frank O'Hara's poem plays into this. O'Hara first enters Don's consciousness when he's sitting alone at a bar having lunch, his grey suit immaculate as always. Being the ever-glib ad-man, Don strikes up a conversation with the next guy over, a tweedy, long-haired intellectual looking guy, a bit younger than Don. He could be an academic, or a theater guy, or someone connected with the arts. It doesn't matter: the important thing is that there's a reversal. In his ordinary office context, Don represents creativity, and we usually see him in this light, compared to his shadowy foils from Accounts, hail-fellow-well-met backslappers and hand-shakers all. But here, Don's the square, the suit. He represents the hip side of the office, but in this downtown bar he represents The Man. The point, already established for us by the clothing and hair differences is soon made clear to Don in conversation. "Is it good?" Don asks the arty, slightly younger guy, as he eyes up the book in his hand — Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency. Arty guy looks back, with the aloofness arty types reserve for those who visibly make more money than they do. "I don't think you'd like it," he says. Don tries to salvage the conversation by saying that reading while having lunch makes you feel like you're getting something done. "That's what it's all about, isn't it," says Mr. Downtown book-guy, with an ironic, even slightly sneering, air, "getting things done." Ah, the liberal arts graduate, and his compensatory condescension — it's like looking in a mirror, isn't it? But not for Don. It bothers Don. It's an attack on his sense of himself as creative genius, a role he plays so very well in his own dojo up on Madison Ave. It makes him feel like a mere utilitarian, and he treasures the sense of himself as belonging to the part of the ad agency that's above mere business, about which he is, in his way, as snobbish as the O'Hara reader at the bar.

Later, we see Don with his own copy of O'Hara's book, in his study at home. There's some defiance in this — he's not going to be told there are things too subtle for him to appreciate, or that his tassled loafers are unfit for the slopes of Parnassus. But along with this defiance, there's some insecurity. It's perfect, in this context, that the poem he reads is O'Hara's "Mayakovsky." In a wonderful voice-over rendition, we hear the whole poem

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

The key words here are "interesting" and "modern," because Don isn't feeling much like either of those terms. The arty guy made him feel uninteresting. What's more, one of the themes of the episode has been youth, a quality Don — like everyone except the very young who, as Don says, know so little they don't even know they're young — feels is slipping away. He's been asked to hire new, younger creative talent, to appeal to the growing baby-boom market of the early sixties, and he's wondering if his talent, his particular mojo, is still relevant. And now he's wondering if he's even all that creative, if the downtown hipsters see him as a washed-up square. He needs to find some way to stay fresh, and not just on a career level: his habitual ways of finding fulfillment (chasing tail, mostly) haven't been doing much for him lately. Things seem as grey as his suit, really. What is to be done?


One of the best things about the writing in Mad Man is how it tends to show, quite subtly, that whatever's been eating at Don at a deep, not fully cognized level finds its way into his work. The show can be self-reflective about this — in a later episode, for example, one of the young guys Don hires is watching people in a focus group talk about their dogs. "They're really just talking about themselves!" he says, as each owner, without knowing it, projects his own aspirations and worries into his description of his pet. "Is this the first one of these you've seen?" asks Don. It's kind of a reference to the way the show itself works, with Don's best ad campaigns being projections of his inchoate desires.

So: in a couple of scenes where Don is trying to get his creative team to come up with an a campaign for Mohawk Airlines we see his worries about aging, and his need to reinvent himself, come to the fore. How to make a regional airline appealing? One of the writers, Peggy Olson, pushed to be creative by Don, comes up with the slogan "Mohawk Airlines: where are you going," accompanied by an image of a guy in a suit getting on a plane, a sexy flight attendant in a short skirt there to welcome him ever-so-sexily aboard the plane. At first Don seems resigned to accepting it, but he's not happy about it, calling it "banal." Later, he revisits the ad, and circles a small figure in the background, the man's daughter, excited to see him. He says that this is where the heart of the campaign lies. He can't quite make things come into more focus than that, but Peggy sees what he means, and gives him the new slogan: "Daddy, what did you bring me?" Don tells her to run with it.

Of course what's really happened isn't just that Don has, once again, proved himself awesome at his job, though there's some of this, and a speech to drive the point home. "You, there, feeling something — that's the product," he tells Peggy, "the people in accounts can't understand that. They can't do what we do, and they despise us for it," or words to that effect. He's reaffirmed his sense of himself as creative, as the imaginative guy, not the suit. One could make much of this and claim that it's a window into the paradox of commercial creativity, where the advertising "creative" wants the money of a businessman, and the freedom of the artist, and has to defend himself on all fronts — against the suits who envy him, and against the arty types who think he's a suit. All this is real, but there's more, too: Don has redefined his relationship to youth. Up to now, he's been seeking happiness the way a young guy does (the aforementioned chasing of tail). But with this ad, he sees a new role for himself — not as lover, ("where are you going?") but as father ("Daddy, what did you bring me?"). His mentoring of Peggy Olson — pushing her to new levels of creativity, rather than trying to come up with better ideas on his own — mirrors this paternal role.

At the end of the episode, Don goes back to his wife and children. This is the traditional suburban pastoral, the family place where he doesn't have to think of himself as defending his status against culture snobs and the suits. It's also a place where he affirms his new way relating to youth -- not by chasing after young tail, but by protecting and caring for his own children. He's arrived at a slightly different sense of his own awesomeness. He is, perhaps, himself again.